Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/606

Let me make as assumption. Every human is born with the same er, the same soul or self which is capable of understanding All. But the second nervous system, the sociostatic nervous system gives us our warp, our “identity,” and in the collaboration of the irreconcilables our capacity to enter the pool of knowledge which exists in all of us, is different for everyone.

So, everyone apprehends Reality in his own way, through the filter of his own S. And therefore no matter how deeply we dip into our er, our collective wisdom, the “particular” insights we return to the world with, are colored by our S. So, we can never know All, never that is until all men reach God which is the point of infinity.

Therefore, we cannot “know” the murderer driver around the corner, although we can come very close to knowing him, and so, total knowledge of the totality impossible for us—at least while we live—we can only guess and gamble, exercise our free-will. Free-will is the manly substitute-attribute of Man who has not reached God. So we have Choice which is indispensable if we are to reach God. To postulate a rational world is to postulate a totally determined world. To postulate God is to postulate free-will. This is one of the most fascinating of the philosophical opposites.

And I find that as I believe in free-will, so I am terrified. I was much more comfortable with determinism for it gave the solace that one could not make a mistake—that, so to speak, if one had not fucked-up the way one did, one would have fucked-up worse.