Recipe for the born-again - type I

Ultimately, the greatest solace for the one betrayed lies in grasping the insight that other people, how these others have appeared to one, the roles that others play in one's life, the disgust and the happiness that one sees in others, the degree of expectancy, love, comradeship one has with others, the mutual trust and understanding that one thinks one shares with others, and the whole order of power relations between one and the others, exist because one has put them there. It lies in the insight that one has built one's own world and colored it with one's own brushes. And that one can, as easily, take these colors away if one wanted to and thereby see this world and the others in it as totally devoid of any meaning or significance. This requires selective memory, suppression, transitional stupefication of the senses, wearing a thick skin, abstraction from the influences of the immediate sorroundings, distantiality and other psychological ingenuities. The end result is the ultimate victory over the others, reducing all the sufferings, the resentments, the frustrations of misunderstandings and misplaced levels of faith and trust to a nought. One then laughs in magnanimity at the world. There is a unique comfort in this solitary insight denoting a great triumph over the world. It calls for a Herculean strength and clarity of one's soul. And after one has grasped this insight, one must multiple this strength a hundred times by enacting the power of this insight and embodying it as the new light which guides the path of a new life; in short, one has to die first in order to be reborn.