The Illicit Happiness of Other People

By Manu Joseph

• What men find most endearing in other men are their tragic flaws. That is why alcoholics never run out of friends.
  

• She is only a subject of their compassion, which is a cowardly form of self-congratulation.
  

In this world, it is very hard to escape happiness. That’s how it is.’

• Thousands of years ago in the history of man, a great darkness has fallen. The war between good and evil has ended. And it has ended with the complete triumph of evil and a total, irrevocable extermination of good. Evil is cunning, it quickly splits itself into two – into apparent good and evil, so that mankind is under the delusion that the great conflict is still raging, and it will not go in search of the truth.
  

• Unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think.
  

• ‘Strong people write bad stories.’
  

• He decayed in a state of gentle happiness.
  

Any philosophy that can be transmitted to another person is a delusion. If two people believe in the same idea of truth, it is a delusion.’

• But then the fate of shy people is that all their fears usually come true.
  

• You see reality, you will not want to be a part of the syndicate of life. The purpose of the syndicate is to sustain itself, to exist forever in the minds of its organisms. Therefore, from the beginning of conscience, it has eliminated any neurological network that has the potential to see nature in its true form. It has done this through a process of natural selection, through trial and error, by rewarding species that are delusional and by terminating those that are awakened. What is left of this process is what you see around you – beings that are programmed to survive and multiply but cannot think too deeply, which includes almost all of humanity.’
  

Subtlety is not always a mask of mediocrity.

• That the very purpose of nature, the evolutions it has managed through the vast ages, is to prevent a particular kind of neurological condition. It is as if the system of life is a devious force that does not want any organism to look too deep.
  

• ‘He believed that the aspiration of nature is to achieve a type of brain. And that this ultimate brain is supposed to receive a set of information, which would fulfil the very purpose of nature.’
  

• He is convinced that nature creates a huge quantity of life so that, through trial and error, through the extinction and the evolution of billions of lumps of flesh over a vast period of time, it will finally attain its goal – a particular kind of neurological system.
  

• If the world is the myth of the senses, there is something pointless about all arts. Whom will you read, what will you write, what music will you listen to, what can move you, what can you adore when nothing is true?
  

• When you do not experience but accept a phenomenon, it is philosophy, which is a form of religion. But when you experience it, it is different. An experience is a plain fact, experience is truth.’
  

• This is a world that is locked in the Folly of Two.’
  

• Rationalists think all god-men are frauds. That is the problem with rationalists. They are not rational enough. The world cannot be conned so easily by frauds. Great god-men are great because they really believe they are holy.
  

When you begin to see the world more clearly, what you first contradict are the very ideas that were once dear to you.

• Because to fool a person, it appears, you have to first fool yourself. That is at the heart of all human influences.
  

• Man keeps losing his job, never survives in an office for more than a few months. He thinks the world is against him, he thinks he is too good for the world. Wife begins to believe that too. He has transferred his delusion to her. They go through life thinking the world is out to harm them, that someone has cursed them, that there is a force working against them.
  

• “Language was created by nature to guard its secrets, not to reveal them. We are trapped in language. Even thought has become language. That is what nature wants.
  

• The fundamental quality of a delusion is that it is contagious. The very purpose of every delusion is to transmit itself to other brains. That is how a delusion survives. On the other hand, Mariamma Chacko, truth can never be transmitted, truth can never travel from one brain to another. Movement is a quality of delusion alone.’
  

A delusion is many times more powerful than a lie. The distinction between a delusion and a lie is the very difference between a successful saint and a fraud.

• The birth of every human is nature’s blind shot at achieving something grander. It constantly fails, but by producing billions of people, nature is improving its chances of attaining a mysterious goal.’
  

• He does not know why he lives, but he lives, and he lives because he does not know why he must die. He will go on this way, doing his little things, enjoying the little victories, adopting morals invented by other people, secretly supporting the ideologies of third-rate men and, at dinner time, quoting the philosophies of the extraordinary whom people like him have never allowed to live in peace.
  

• He is even happy, and somewhat ashamed of his ordinary everyday happiness, as if fathers of dead sons do not have that crass right.
  

• ‘I wonder why fingers are so hard to draw,’ he said. ‘So tough, so tough.’ ‘That’s because you don’t really believe they are important. That’s why you can’t get them right.’
  

The primary choice every man has to make is whether he wants to be himself, or if he wants peace.

• The regular people, they are usually right, aren’t they? They know the ways of the world better because they are the world.
  

• Happiness as an inescapable fate, not a pursuit.