I've been reading a history of pagan witchcraft. Basically it argues that modern witchcraft (or Wicca) is the 20th C invention of Gerald Gardner (1884-1964) who published purportedly ancient spells and rituals in his 'Book of Shadows'. Prominent among the magical implements employed in these is the 'athame', or ritual knife. The origins of this are traced to the use of the word 'atharme' in CAS's 'Master of the Crabs'(1934). There are various suggestions for the earlier roots (see for example [www.summerlands.com]), but can anyone here add any knowledge?

The word now has wide currency in paganism, one of the fastest growing 'new religions'. No doubt CAS would be amused.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 25 Aug 05 | 02:31PM by Mikey_C.

Mikey_C Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've been reading a history of pagan witchcraft.
> Basically it argues that modern witchcraft (or
> Wicca) is the 20th C invention of Gerald Gardner
> (1884-1964) who published purportedly ancient
> spells and rituals in his 'Book of Shadows'.
> Prominent among the magical implements employed in
> these is the 'athame', or ritual knife. The
> origins of this are traced to the use of the word
> 'atharme' in CAS's 'Master of the Crabs'(1934).
> There are various suggestions for the earlier
> roots (see for example ), but can anyone here add
> any knowledge?

this seems pretty comprehensive

Athame

among a lot else it says

Quote:

Gardner's direct source may have been the mention of "arthame" in the popular book on the "black arts" by Grillot de Givry (1870-1929) (English title: Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy, tr. 1931).

cas and moc get a name-check, but they link to worldofschmitt.com for the story.

Quote:

Quote:
Gardner's direct source may have been the mention of "arthame" in the popular book on the "black arts" by Grillot de Givry (1870-1929) (English title: Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy, tr. 1931).

Yes, and I believe that CAS also owned the Grillot de Givry book (I imagine that Scott Connors can confirm or disconfirm this), thus, it was CAS's likely source, as well. For this reason, among others, I do not believe for a picosecond that CAS was Gardner's primary source for this word.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Quote:Quote:
> Gardner's direct source may have been the mention
> of "arthame" in the popular book on the "black
> arts" by Grillot de Givry (1870-1929) (English
> title: Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy, tr. 1931).
>
> Yes, and I believe that CAS also owned the Grillot
> de Givry book (I imagine that Scott Connors can
> confirm or disconfirm this), thus, it was CAS's
> likely source, as well. For this reason, among
> others, I do not believe for a picosecond that CAS
> was Gardner's primary source for this word.

I don't have my copy of SELECTED LETTERS OF CAS handy, but I was asked about this by a friend some time ago and thus had reason to look it up. As far as I remember, there was a letter to Donald Wandrei, where Smith mentions the De Givry book and says something to the effect that it arrived recently.

Yrs
Martin

> > Yes, and I believe that CAS also owned the
> Grillot
> > de Givry book (I imagine that Scott Connors
> can
> > confirm or disconfirm this), thus, it was
> CAS's
> > likely source, as well.

i'm kicking myself.

Quote:

Love-Spells: Grillot de Givry, in his Witchcraft Magic and Alchemy, quotes these formulae from an eighteenth-century manuscript...

the black book of cas

> I don't have my copy of SELECTED LETTERS OF CAS
> handy, but I was asked about this by a friend some
> time ago and thus had reason to look it up. As far
> as I remember, there was a letter to Donald
> Wandrei, where Smith mentions the De Givry book
> and says something to the effect that it arrived
> recently.

Quote:

Grillot de Givry's Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy would interest you greatly, since it contains more than 350 illustrations, many of which are taken from rare prints and cuts; but the book is rather expensive, costing at least 5 or 6 dollars.

letter June 13th, 1937



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 28 Aug 05 | 05:02AM by zoroasterisk.

Thanks a lot, folks.

It seemed very unlikely to me too that CAS would have been Gardner's source, and this explains all.

Hi,

My question below is not directly about the subject in this thread, but it is related. I didn't want to start a new thread.

I believe Smith is one of few writers who may possibly help open up the mind of sensitve souls to the paranormal. And since this site is full of individuals who love and read much Smith, and probably spend much deep thought in realms and physical states far removed from the mundane, I am curious if anyone of you have had a direct confrontation with the paranormal. Met with a ghost, or demon, or any other situation where the boundaries of normal life have caved in and revealed other dimensions (be it actual experience or only imagined tricks of the mind). If you feel embarrassed or reluctant about telling, perhaps you can write under another pseudonym.

The Paranormal is bollocks.

But fo feel free to disagree. :-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 8 Oct 05 | 03:45PM by Boyd.

"Bollocks" until the day you meet with it.

Besides, if you were so cocksure it is bollocks, I don't think you would even think it worth bothering commenting my message. But a trace of doubt, conscious or unconscious, a trace of fascination, draws you into the discussion. That's what I think.

But I really didn't intend with my message to get into arguementation about the actuality or baloney of the paranormal. That has been done so many times before. I just want to hear about intense strange experiences, whether they be imagined or real.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 8 Oct 05 | 05:21PM by Ludde.

Boyd Wrote:

> The Paranormal is bollocks.

No, bollocks are the Paranormal. Have you never heard of crystal balls?

It would have been better to start a new heading for this, and I doubt CAS would have liked the term "paranormal." Far too white-coats-and-laboratories for an old romantic like him.

Once, when I was a child, I was sitting on the sofa in front of the fireplace, while my father read the evening paper in his accustomed chair. The dog was sleeping curled up on the footrest. It was a placid, perfect moment. For some reason, I was at that very instant thinking about telekinesis, and was trying to move things with my mind. My father had a huge library of over 30,000 volumes, into which I delved at leisure throughout childhood, reading about sundry and obscure adult topics, including sex, medicine, and magic, and so it was perhaps natural that I was acquainted with various aspects of the occult in a way far beyond what would be typical for one of my age.

I recall that at that time, I had the strange notion that telekenesis might in fact be possible, --but that, as a power unlimited by traditional notions of space and time or distance, the objects we are moving with our minds might be moving so far off across the universe that we might not see them moving, so that we are therefore unaware of our own powers when we use them! I was thinking of these and other sundry matters, trying harder and harder to move things with my mind, when suddenly it happened: my father and I heard a knock, as of something hitting the front door. My father opened the door, and we found a stone lying there on the front steps; there was no one in evidence outside who could have been repsonisble for throwing the stone.

We lived in a semi-rural location, and far enough back from the road so that it is doubtful that passing traffic would have kicked up the stone, especially at that precise moment. The matter of the stone remained a mystery for my father, and only recently did I acquaint him with my own side of the story, --an idea which my father, as a firm disbeliever in all forms of superstition, quickly dismissed with a smile; this despite his own mother having been a true psychic, and known throughout our family for her strange feats of prognostication.

Not quite believing in what had happened myself, I quickly put it from my mind, and I wish I hadn't. Perhaps I could have trained myself to retain this ability into adulthood. Certainly this incident fits in with various other accounts of poltergeist-type activities which have been reported, which are somehow connected with childhood in some way. I find it interesting, too, that the stone should have moved only behind the door, ie out of my line of sight: as if the universe, while the condescending to bend its laws just for a split second, still had to maintain this wall of mystery.

GDC

Gavin Callaghan,

That is very interesting. It is difficult to comment on such experiences or to analyze since it's impossible to see the full circumstances. However I can share a few thoughts about telekinesis.


I had a dream some 15 years ago. Many people dream of flying, and I have done so several times, but this one particular dream was something out of the extraordinary;

The circumstances around the dream was in the early winter before Christmas, and I had gone on a trip to Norway. By sudden impulse I decided to go to Lofoten in the north where the sun doesn't come up, from a desire to see the Aurora lights. I actually became scared on the slow moving night-train from Trondheim, because vicious winds shook the leaning wagon, and cold seeped into my sleeping-compartment. This last part of my trip wasn't planned, and I didn't know where I would end up or if I would find a place to stay. And I really wasn't dressed for it, with jacket and loafers. I was going north, leaving the sun behind. Looking outside I saw only snow and a dark, utterly desolate landscape. It felt like being carried away from the world into cold empty space; I feared the absence of the sun and started to panic. However, once at my destination there was light a few hours around noon, and it was strangely beautiful, with crystal clear green waters and jagged mountains rising steeply out of the sea.
The first night I slept in a cabin on a rather hard bed. But this was the singularly best sleep of my life, very deep and completely without interruption. And it wasn't because I was particularly tired; up here was so peaceful, far away from the combustion of the world, and I could just fall away from it all.
The second night I had the dream. It started with me just beginning to aquire faith that I could defy gravity. I used a symbolic motion with the hands, gently pushing down towards the floor, to steer the mind in the right direction and set it in tangible contact with gravity. Once I had conquered the first difficult threshold of disbelief I floated up between floor and ceiling, and didn't need the hands for support anymore, but stayed up by careful concentration of my mindforce and maintainence of belief. It was all vivid and clear.
Later in the dream I showed it to a friend, floating only a few inches above the floor and quickly landing again. This way, if his mind was not ready for it, it could lie to itself, telling him that I only did a small "jump". Still, he was dumbfounded, and seemed very confused and disturbed.
Next and last I was in a parkland, my brother sitting down on the grass some 50 meters away. I lifted high, flew in an arc towards him, and landed a few meters from him. After that I don't remember his reaction; I had the dream written down, but the last part is gone.

The most extraordinary thing was after the dream, the next day and a half, when I walked about Lofoten; I KNEW then that levitation is a physical reality. It was not just a feeling and philosofic musing. It was knowledge, as clear as any other fact my mind harbours, like for example that my feet walk on the ground, that I have hands, and I use my teeth to chew. But I was just not enlightened enough to be able to practice it. It was a state of an elated future, possibly already existent in variant distant star systems with evolved paraphysic phenomena and perhaps accompanied by vital differences in physical and chemical composition from our own neighborhood.
On the second day this "insight" gradually wore off, being smothered by the coarseness of our manifested world and minds creeping over me. After that I was unable to believe in it anymore, although at the same time conscious this was because of my mind's inability to grasp it.

No matter what people say, I maintain that I had a touch with the paranormal at that time.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 1 Feb 06 | 06:39AM by Ludde.

Ludde,
Have you ever read the Lovecraftian story by Robert Lowndes entitled "Leaper's In?" A revised version of this story has been issued in a pamphlet by one of the Lovecraftian small-presses, and it concerns much the same idea you are describing. Lowndes actually wrote this story as a sort of response to Lovecraft, with whom Lowndes began a short correspondence toward the end of Lovecraft's life. Their main topic of conversation in their letters was Lovecraft's idea of "forbidden books", ---Lowndes taking particular exception to Lovecraft's seemingly inflexible notion that the reading of books on magic would somehow result in the inevitable madness of the reader or the doom of all mankind.

In the end, Lowndes decided to write a story in which there would be a positive result from the human accessing of such "forbidden knowledge", and the result was "Leaper's In". In atmosphere it's much like a Lovecraft tale, with a bit of Charles Fort and John Carradine thrown in, except that it ends, not with the doom of mankind, but rather the human ability to conquer gravity, people simply floating up into the sky and disappearing.

The same notion is apparently utilized in the film "It's All About Love", a science-fiction film by one of the Scandinavian "Dogme 25" directors, starring Sean Penn and Joaquin Phoenix. I still have not seen it. I read an article about this film nearly a decade ago, but it never seems to have been theatrically released that I know of. Apparently one of the film's subplots involves gravity failing and people flying off into space. There is a website for this film, which shows a few clips from it.

Best of all is the story "The Night Creature", from the children's horror anthology "Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures", which I read as a child. The story involves something very much as you say: a scientist discovers how to fly simply by changing something in the human brain. But it turns out that there are large, black, squid-like shadow creatures that fly among the clouds at night, which make flying perilous.

Your description of the sunless far north is interesting. I too have felt this panic of blackness, a sort of vertigo of the abyss, in which the difference between "falling" and "flying" soon becomes lost. Sometimes, watching the stars at night, I sometimes feel the need to hold onto the ground for fear of flying off into space. Supposedly, so the theologians tell us, Christ was translated into "heaven" by ascending, and Vladimir Nabokov, in his "Pale Fire", has a hilarious passage in which he describes, in inanely ridiculous terms, the delight of the soul, upon being freed from the body after death, liberated to roam the endless dimensions of space. But such freedom, in a way, could actually be a nightmare, with the prospect of being lost in infinity, --our own supposed security here in our familiar rooms simply veiling the fact that we are just as lost on earth as we would be anywhere out in space.

I had a dream, once, which expressed just this same sense of vertigo. I dreamt that I was lying on my back beside a gigantic tower, which was so tall it reached up into space, just past the warp at the edge of the sky. Due to some optical quirk, I was somehow able to see what was happening within the tower, the actions within somehow being reflected upon the inner lens of the sky. And so I lay there, watching as rival armies fought back and forth across the landscape of rolling green countryside which was somehow encapsulated within the huge expanse of the tower. It was my "mother's tower", I knew somehow. Suddenly, however, as I watched the armies fight, I was overcome by a feeling of vertigo, and I suddenly woke up as I seemed to rise up toward the camera-obscura image of the tower's interior which was projected against the sky.

Many years later, when I discovered the Elder and Younger Eddas of Iceland, I found an exact description of this very tower of which I dreamed, --my idea, in my dream, that it was "my mother's tower", somehow related possibly to genetic memory, and the fact that my mother is from Denmark.

Perhaps your strange dream up north was somehow facilitated by the "lightless" or "sunless" atmosphere of which you spoke. Certainly, I am well aware of the liquid nature of light. Like water, light seeps in everywhere, gets in everything, and it must be clarifying to exist for a time in a relatively "light-free" atmosphere, though of course some photons always manage to sneak in around the edges.
Absence of light in a place creates a different feeling, and light is more solid than most people realize or think. It has weight, as well as heat. I am working on a weird-detective story, which will never be published, in which my detective lives in an apartment equipped with "light-dams", rather like the fjords, --but constructed to catch light.

One thing I've never understood about light, especially in relation to Einstein's theory of relativity, is the problem of the warping of space and time, Einstein's theory apparently stating that the closer an object gets to the speed of light, the more it will experience a slowing down of time. For example, a twin travelling at the speed of light will return younger than the twin left behind. Since light, however, is itself an "object", --i.e. a photon--, wouldn't light itself, as well as all other atomic particles which move at the speed of light, such as electrons, exist in a different time dimension than the rest of us? Doesn't this mean that light "observes" the rest of the universe from the same "point of view" as that experienced by the travelling twin in the "twin paradox", and that light itself is "time travelling", as it were? And wouldn't this then explain the rather odd behavior of photons and electrons as noted in labs: i.e. their ability to be in two places at once, and their ability to exist "simultaneously" as both a solid and a wave? In which case the key to time travel might be right here in front of us, in the form of that same photon/spatial-warp which illuminates the entire universe, thus allowing us to "see".

The idea that light is a "constant" seems fishy to me, too. Certainly it seems to be a constant, but undoubtedly under different conditions, such as in the very early moments of the universe, its speed, and therefore its properties, were inherently different. It may even be, that if in the future the universe expands and cools, as some scientists theorize, the properties of physics will be so altered, that the speed of light will change again. If the laws of physics fail at one point, they fail at all points. And if a time warp existed in the past, or if one will exist in the future, or if one "existed" even before the universe began, it should therefore be possible, through accessing the properties of this warp, to enter it again.

I had more to write, but for some reason my computer has just acted up and erased a whole paragraph of my very best speculations. Another example of the "conspiracy of secrecy" on the part of the universe? I think so!

GDC




Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 1 Feb 06 | 07:07PM by Gavin Callaghan.

I have not read "Leaper's In?" or "The Night Creature", but I will look them up. All I have read related to this subject is Jack Vance's story "Telek", in which people of a far future are able to fly simply because they believe they can.

Must see if I can find that film "It's All About Love".

I believe CAS wrote something related to this subject in "The Light From Beyond", in which gravity laws are different from our own.

You present many interesting thoughts and wonderings. That about light as an "object" and existing in a parallel dimension is something I will meditate on.

Lovecraft and Smith were certainly right about the horror of empty space; with its absence of light (there is always light in space, like the pin-point glimmerings from distant stars, but I mean the warm bright light of a near sun), absence of physical forces that our bodies are used to, dimensions of up and down, and sights of familar surroundings (functioning as "veil" or theatre facade) and its security to our mental health.
Several years ago when I had a crisis I sat up in bed one night sensing that something was wrong; the immediate reality around me seemed distant as if I was loosing my grip on it. It made me worried. All of a sudden, straight ahead of me, reality split open for an instant. It was like a heavy double portal that opened just slightly, and through the crack I saw a bottomless grey emptiness, without dimensions of up and down. The ABYSS. And it poured in through the crack and hit me with the force of a sledgehammer. It was the most PAINFUL and HORRIBLE thing I have ever experienced. It can not be imagined by the senses (it has been repressed in my mind and I can only remember it as an abstract idea). Hell is not a place of fire, it is EMPTINESS. Fortunately I was quickly able to push the portals shut (my mind had probably formed this image of the portals as way of protection).



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 2 Feb 06 | 04:56AM by Ludde.

"Howard and I, under such circumstances, always talk metaphysics and the beginnings and end of the universe…." ---George Kirk, bookseller, (CANNON, "Lovecraft Remembered", 234)

Right after reading your message, I went home and coincidentally read the following passage in a translation of Rudolph Steiner, "Many a one will experience, when sitting silent in his room, his heart sad and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn, that the door will open…." (SEDDON, "Rudolph Steiner, Western Esoteric Masters Series", 93)

Afterward, Steiner goes on to discuss something which he calls "the abyss". But of course this word can mean anything to anyone.

What YOU say about "the abyss" reminds me of Rimbaud's prose poem "Childhood", which ends with the cryptic line: "But why should the appearance of an aperture gleam white in the corner of the vault?", which I take to mean: why should reality open?, --open the way the portal in "Donnie Darko" opens, simply by Donnie stabbing a knife into a looking glass. (What strange and difficult lives we Paranormal Investigators lead; multiple abysses flooding up beneath our floorboards, ruining the property values of our homes, blowing drafts through the attic wallboards; while portals to other universes frost with cold the interior of our dormer windows.)

I've never had a waking experience such as you describe, though I think many of us wish something of the sort WOULD happen. For myself, during my own periods of mental crises in the past, I was more apt to aimlessly watch Greek-language television programs over and over, than to witness a splintering of creation, --although I have, like most everyone else, come face to face with the "abyss" in my sleep. There's a medical term for this phenomenon, which I forget, --the sudden sensation of falling into blackness, which jolts one awake with a start, just a few moments after falling asleep, --the whole phenomenon being an error in the activation of our dreams, caused, no doubt, by the inadvertent running of our consciousness "program" after sleep.

Certainly, there is nothing mysterious about dreams themselves. Dreams are screen-savers, and nothing more. Naturally, this is to be expected, given the fact that the brain is simply an audio-visual device, very much like a television screen or computer monitor. It logically follows, then, that we would expect the brain to operate just like any other audio-visual system, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of dreams, whose nightly function is directly analogous to those screen-savers which prevent the burning out of the pixels of computer monitor which would otherwise occur during long periods of inactivity and disuse. Surely everyone has noticed the numerous similarities between dreams and screensavers: the colorful but nonsensical imagery, the repetitive actions, the looping narratives, the random and yet somehow predictable sequences, the bizarre symbolism, --not to mention the similar processes by which both dreams and screen-savers are automatically activated after a set period of mental or binary disuse, ---as well as their mutual ability to immediately vanish from view upon activation or re-awakening, dreams leaving no more trace upon the active mind upon waking than do the colorful characters of a screensaver, which somehow somehow vanish upon the application of stimuli to reveal the suddenly staid perameters of a computer spreadsheet.

As to "the abyss", --it is of course difficult to speak about, without more clarification in our definitions. By "the abyss" do we mean simply the abyss of space, i.e. "existence", --or do we mean, in fact, the antithesis of that, i.e. "non-existence"? (The fact that we are so easily able to confuse existence with non-existence in this matter, --a "case of mistaken identity", as it were--, --as if the two could be confused as easily as suspects in a police line-up, like partners in the perpetration of the same crime--, should at once give us pause. ) This idea that non-existence and existence are opposites, however, at least in Western culture, is still taken for a proven fact by most people. Ian Curtis, in the Joy Division song "Heart and Soul", speaks darkly of "An abyss that laughs at creation…", but which is more horrible, the abyss or the laugh? Or IS the abyss the laugh itself?

Visualizing such an abyss, however, in terms of such a dichotomy between existence vs. non-existence, presents problems. If space, i.e. "existence", consists mostly of empty space, then what can non-existence be like? Can non-existence even be said to exist as such, or is that a contradiction? This then naturally leads us to the question of "existence" itself; for how can we define non-existence, unless we can define its opposite?

But existence itself does not lend itself toward a clear definition. As beings who are ourselves nourished within the womb of existence, (or, at least we think we are), it is unthinkable to us that existence should not exist. Indeed, perhaps our familiarity, --our familial tie, so to speak, with existence--, blinds us to the fact of how alien existence it is, how unnatural, --so that, in fact, it might be more "natural" for nothing to exist at all. Non-existence is unthinkable to us, but only because we ourselves think, and because space itself, because of its breadth and dimensions, provides an arena for thought.

Imre Madach, the Hungarian poet, treats of something relating to this idea in his Miltonic play, "The Tragedy of Man" (1860), a sort of Hungarian adaption of "Paradise Lost", in which Satan is depicted as the embodiment of that very same "abyss" which God overcame in order to bring about his "creation". Madach writes:

"LUCIFER (pointing to the Angelic Choir): 'That wretched legion gives Thee praise enough. And rightly, too--- to praise Thee is its duty! Thy Light conceived those Shadows there. But I have been since the beginning here on high!'

THE LORD: 'O, arrogant! Hadst thou not sprung from matter, where would thy kingdom be, and where thy power?'

LUCIFER: And I could answer with that very question.

THE LORD: From the beginning I had planned what is, and in Me lived, and hath been fulfilled.

LUCIFER: Yet didst Thou see no gap in that fulfillment, that barred the way against what was to be, and, ne'ertheless, Thou couldn't not but create? The name that barrier bore was Lucifer, the Spirit that eternally denies." (22-23)

Here, in other words, Satan is identified with "the abyss", that almost neurosynaptic "gap" between existence and non-existence, which God had to overcome before he could make "creation". But no one can equal, not even Clark Ashton Smith or Lovecraft, the language William Blake uses in "The First Book of Urizen" to describe the creation of existence, an act which Blake assumes, contra Lovecraft, to be inextricable from the creation of mankind and mind, and the supposed "problems" which spring therefrom:

"Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!
Self-clos'd, all repelling: what Demon
Hath form'd this abominable void
This soul shuddering vaccuum--Some said
'It is Urizen,' But unknown, abstracted
Brooding secret, the dark power hid.

Times on times he divided, & measured
Space by space in his nine fold darkness
Unseen, unknown! Changes appeard
In his desolate mountains rifted furious
By the black winds of perturbation

For he strove in battles dire
In unseen conflictions with shapes
Bred from his forsaken wilderness,
Of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element
Combustion, blast, vapour and cloud.

Dark revolving in silent activity:
Unseen in tormenting passions;
An activity unknown and horrible;
A self-contemplating shadow,
In enormous labours occupied….
(…)
[Urizen is speaking]: I have sought for a joy without pain,
For a solid without fluctuation…
…First I fought with the fire; consum'd
Inwards, into a deep world within:
A void immense, wild dark & deep,
Where nothing was, Nature's wide womb
And self balanc'd stretched o'er the void
I alone, even I! The winds merciless
Bound; but condensing, in torrents
They fall & fall; strong I repell'd
The vast waves, & arose on waters
A wide world of sold obstruction." (Erdman, 69-71)


Interestingly, the common assumption which seems to be underlying all of these Western investigations of existence is that reality is a "problem" which needs to be solved, a difficulty, a mystery, which again suggests the idea of the "unnaturalness" of existence, against which, I suppose, is opposed the idea of a natural state of "non-existence", if such a thing could be described as a "state". As Alan Watts said, if an eye is functioning, you do not see it; you do not see your eye, or smell your nose. Only when you have a mote in your eye, are you aware of the eye, and so too, in a way, is self-awareness a "problem" of the mind, ---this problem thus being projected by mankind upon existence, in order to create a "problem", where in fact there is none.

But this raises the fundamental question, regarding existence, and that is: is reality "real"? Eastern religions would say not, but this then begs the question as to the meaning of the word "real", which is, of course, colored by the fact of our own realness, or presumption of realness.