The Onion Feb 23, 2026 With the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever, North Carolina resident Jonathan Moore has been chosen to assume the duties of everyday Americans should the very thinkable happen. Become an Onion member while it’s still optional: https://membership.theonion.com/?camp…

Published: February 23, 2026 (TheOnion.com)

THE HEAVENS—Admitting He felt torn between His true feelings and His fear of the unknown, the Lord God Almighty announced Monday that He no longer loved humanity but was too afraid to leave. “Any affection I ever had for the human race is long gone, but I’m just terrified at the thought of walking away and being alone,” said Our Heavenly Father, adding while He has felt “stuck” for millennia in the company of the species He adored long ago, He still worries He would have no real identity without them and starting over at His age was terrifying. “Sometimes I imagine myself ending it, striking out on my own, and discovering who I really am as God. But then reality comes crashing down. I’ve been with humanity since the sixth day of creation. What am I supposed to do, start over with bonobos?” At press time, The Almighty acknowledged that He would face little resistance if He left, as humanity has also been growing increasingly distant for some time now.

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things, as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) French Priest

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things, as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) French Priest

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

• Google AI Overview

Confabulation is a memory disorder where a person unintentionally creates false, distorted, or fabricated memories to fill in gaps in their memory. Often described as “honest lying,” the individual sincerely believes these fabricated stories are true. It is commonly linked to brain injuries, Alzheimer’s, or Korsakoff syndrome. Merriam-Webster +5

Key Aspects of Confabulation

• No Intent to Deceive: Unlike lying, the person truly believes they are recalling accurate information.
• Memory Gaps: It is a compensatory mechanism used by the brain to fill in missing information.
• Types:
  • Provoked: Occurs when a person is prompted or asked questions about memories they cannot recall.
  • Spontaneous: Occurs without prompts, often when a person shares detailed, fantastical stories.
• Context: While it can involve small, daily details, it can also manifest as elaborate, bizarre, or false accounts of past events. Merriam-Webster +4

Causes and Related Conditions

Confabulation is associated with neurological damage and various conditions, including: 

• Korsakoff syndrome (often due to alcohol-related memory loss)
• Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia
• Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
• Aneurysms or strokes affecting memory centers Cambridge Dictionary +4

Difference Between Lying and Confabulation

• Lying: The speaker knows the information is false and intends to deceive.
• Confabulation: The speaker believes the information is true and does not intend to deceive. National Institutes of Health (.gov) +3

The Interview

By David Marchese

• Published Feb. 7, 2026 Updated Feb. 9, 2026 (NYTimes.com)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with my own thoughts and feelings about identity. Why am I, David, the person I am? How changeable is that? Where do those thoughts and feelings come from anyway, and what purposes do they ultimately serve? I suppose it’s no coincidence then that I’ve also always been so curious about the subject of human consciousness. That’s the area of science and philosophy — of human thinking generally! — that burrows most deeply into similar questions and, to varying degrees of satisfaction, offers a plethora of possible answers.

The best-selling author Michael Pollan has been thinking about these things, too. Throughout his work — which includes classic books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006), about why we eat the way we do, and “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), about the science and uses of psychedelic drugs — Pollan has waded into ideas about the inner workings of the mind. Now, with his forthcoming book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” which will arrive this month, he has jumped into the deep end. The book is both a highly personal and expansive multidisciplinary survey of questions around human consciousness — what it is, what causes it, what it’s for and what the possible answers might mean for how we choose to live. And as Pollan explained, with the rise of artificial intelligence as well as the relentless political pressure on our attention (that is, our minds), those questions, already profound, are becoming only more urgent.

“How often do you do psychedelics?”The best-selling author Michael Pollan grapples with big questions about A.I., consciousness and the distractions polluting our minds.

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I want to get some basics: How do you define consciousness? The simplest way to define consciousness is as subjective experience. Another one-word definition is “awareness.” Thomas Nagel, the N.Y.U. philosopher, wrote a piece back in the ’70s called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” His idea is: If we can imagine it is like anything to be a bat, then a bat is conscious, because that means it has some sort of subjective experience. Why did he choose bats? Well, they’re very different than we are. Instead of using eyesight, they use echolocation. They bounce signals off of objects to move through space. We can vaguely imagine going through the world with echolocation. Whereas my toaster, I can’t do that. I don’t have a sense of what it’s like to be my toaster.

A big question of consciousness is what the philosopher David Chalmers has referred to as the “hard problem.” Can you tell people what that is? Basically how you get from matter to mind, how you cross that huge gulf from neurons to subjective experience — a gulf no one has managed to cross. Related questions are: Why don’t all these things we do go on automatically? Why do we have to be aware of anything? We could be completely automated and perhaps get along just fine. Your brain is monitoring your body and making fine adjustments in the blood gasses, in the heart rate, in digestion. There’s a lot going on that we don’t have to think about. So why do we have to think about any of it? Some interesting theories have been proposed. One is that some of the issues that we deal with have to be decided in a conscious way. When you have two competing needs — you’re hungry and you’re tired — which should take precedence? So consciousness opens up this space of decision-making. The other argument is that we live in a very complex social world where I have to predict what you’re going to say; I have to imagine my way into your head. You can’t automate human social interaction. It has too many elements. So consciousness is very helpful in navigating that world.

It seems likely to me that regardless of the source of consciousness, it’s probably a result of evolutionary processes — that consciousness evolved to make information available to certain parts of the brain, or to help us recognize patterns, or perceive threats, or maintain homeostasis. But are any non-evolutionary arguments for consciousness plausible to you? Oh, yeah. One is panpsychism.

Which could sound bonkers. It can sound bonkers. Panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche or consciousness, and somehow this consciousness is combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of superconsciousness. It sounds crazy. There are some very serious people who believe in it. You have to expand your sense of the plausible when you’re looking at consciousness. But we’ve done that before. How long ago was it that we discovered electromagnetism? This crazy idea that there are all these waves passing through us that can carry information. That’s just as mind-blowing, right?

I could happily talk about consciousness all day, but often when I do talk about it with people, I can tell that they view thinking about consciousness as almost akin to navel gazing. Like, it’s an interesting thing to think about, but really what difference does it make? What is your response to that? I’ve thought a lot about what good is it to think about consciousness, and I came to think that it’s more important than ever. Scientists are now learning that more and more animals and creatures — going all the way down possibly to insects — are conscious. So that’s one interesting issue: We’re sharing consciousness with more creatures. And then the big threat is artificial intelligence and the effort to create a conscious A.I., which is going to be an enormous challenge to this question of what does it mean to be human. Is consciousness something that a machine can possess? Are we more like intelligent machines or conscious, feeling animals? Who are we? So I think we’re approaching this kind of Copernican moment of redefinition.

What do you think we should do with the increasing awareness that more animals might be conscious than we previously thought? I guess the argument would be that we should have a greater amount of respect for them, but we know human beings are conscious and we exploit the hell out of other humans all the time. That’s a great question. There’s this whole conversation, very active here where I live in Silicon Valley, that if A.I. is conscious, then we’re going to have to give it moral consideration. Well, really? Have we given moral consideration to one another? Have we given moral consideration to the chickens and the cattle that we eat? The answer is no. It doesn’t automatically follow. So we’re going to have to sort out the ethics. Maybe it’s around the ability to suffer. Maybe that’s where you draw the line. I don’t know. I’m not an ethicist, but it’s not as easy as: You’re conscious, therefore you have all these rights. A.I. is really going to complicate this. Who we grant personhood to is a very subjective human decision. We give it to corporations, oddly enough, which are not conscious, but there are all sorts of creatures we don’t give it to. I don’t think we’re entirely rational or consistent in our granting of moral consideration.

You are skeptical that A.I. can achieve consciousness. Why? I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human.

Despite how it may seem, the internet is not actually the whole of the world. But to a computer, it’s all you got.

Learning to Live With A.I.

Read more from the New York Times Magazine’s special issue.

•  New Opportunities for People: It might take your job, but A.I. will create new (human) careers.
•  Widespread Use: The hosts of The Times’s “Hard Fork” podcast on how everyone seems to be using A.I. — for everything.
•  Scholarship Tool: The winners of the A.I. race might soon transform the stories that historians tell about the past.
•  Never Saying Goodbye: After a man’s terminal diagnosis, his family decides to make a virtual avatar that lives on after his death.

How would we know if an A.I. is conscious or not? How do I know you’re conscious?

I promise I am! Your promise is what’s called reportability in philosophy. You can ask something if it’s conscious, and with humans, we kind of know.

But if an A.I. says: “Michael, I’m conscious. I promise,” how do we know? We don’t, and that is exactly why people are falling deep into these relationships with A.I. We can’t say it’s not conscious when it tells us it is. But we can test it in various ways. It all goes back to this idea of the Turing test — that the test of machine intelligence would be when they can fool us.

If the Turing test is the criteria for machine consciousness, then that test has already been passed. Exactly, it has fooled many, many people. Whether it can fool an expert, too, I don’t know, but probably. So we’re in a very weird place where the machines we’re living with are telling us they’re conscious. We can’t dispute it, but we can look at how they’re made and draw the kind of conclusions I’ve drawn. But is that going to persuade everybody? No. We want them to be conscious in some way. Or some of us do. It’s easier to have a relationship with a chatbot than another human. Going back to that friction point, they offer no friction. They just suck up to us and convince us how brilliant we are, and we fall for it.

Listen to the Conversation With Michael Pollan

The best-selling author grapples with big questions about A.I., consciousness and the distractions polluting our minds.

What do you think religion has to offer to questions about consciousness? Buddhism has been thinking about consciousness for a very long time. It has been raising these questions about the self and giving people tools to transcend the self, which in itself is a desire that is surprising. We cling to this ego so firmly; at the same time, we do a lot of things to get away from it, whether it’s extreme sports or psychedelics or meditation.

Or watching a movie or having sex or any number of things. Some of the highest experiences of life are these moments where we transcend the self, and that’s curious.

What do you think that’s about? Why, if we cling to the self, are we also so hungry to lose ourselves? The self isolates us, the ego builds walls around it, it’s constantly evaluating, it ruminates. There’s a lot of crappy stuff about the self.

Yeah, it’s constantly yammering away. Yes, there is that voice in our head, and it embodies critical voices, very often inherited from parents or other people. I mean, the ego is very useful. It gets a lot done. It got my book done. It gets your podcast done. So we shouldn’t be too critical of it. On the other hand, when we transcend the self, we connect to things larger than ourselves. And this is one of the beautiful things about psychedelics — when they work, there is this sense of dissolution of self. The walls come down, and you feel part of nature. You feel love. I had an experience I describe in the book of self-dissolution where I merged with this piece of music, this Bach cello suite, and it was such a profound experience because the subject-object split went away and I was identical to this music. The interesting thing, though, is that consciousness doesn’t go away when the ego goes away. We protect our ego because we’re afraid if we lose it, we’re dead. But we’re not. It’s just one voice. There’s a lot else going on, as you learn when you meditate and use psychedelics.

How often do you do psychedelics? Not very often at all. It’s hard to find time. It’s a big day with a lot of preparation and everything. If I can do it once a year, I’m happy. What I’m talking about is ideally a guided experience. You can let yourself go when someone’s watching your body. So when I can put myself in that situation — which isn’t easy to do, and it’s expensive — I find that very valuable. I’m still learning things.

What are you learning? Oh, every psychedelic experience is different. You never go back to the same place. That’s why I think it’s a great thing to do on or around your birthday, to sort of take stock of your reality and what the issues are. I had an experience not too long ago that kind of rocked me.

What was it? It was a guided trip on — it doesn’t matter what it was on. I had these powerful emotions that had no name. They were like these giant blimps crashing into me, crashing into each other, and I was straining and so frustrated that I didn’t know what they were, and the answer never came clear during the experience. Oddly enough, the answer to what they were came two weeks later when I happened to be at a meditation retreat. The links between psychedelics and meditation are very fruitful and interesting. I was doing a walking meditation after a couple days of complete silence, 12-hour-a-day meditating, and there were the blimps. In sans serif letters, right on the blimp, was the word “fear.” I quickly realized what it was. It was fear of losing something very close to you. So the combination of two experiences ended up being very productive. But on its own, the psychedelic experience raised more questions than gave answers.

Questions of consciousness, which are really questions about what makes us us, are some of the most important questions that can be asked. But at the same time, they can lead into other questions like: Is there some David — some stable “I” — that exists or not? Or what is the relationship between free will and consciousness? Sometimes thinking about those questions can be destabilizing. Is that just me? Do you have similar apprehensions? It can be destabilizing, absolutely. One of the reasons people are happy to be less conscious and fill their attention with distractions and drugs is because the mind can be a scary place to visit. We often want to be less aware of what’s going on. There are reasons people avoid going down these rabbit holes. It takes a willingness to risk something.

I apologize if this seems like a woo-woo question, but do you think the absence of something like a stable “self” also means the absence of something like a soul? Do you believe in a soul? Well, if a soul is something that is indestructible and survives our death, no. But I can’t say anything about the afterlife with confidence. Consciousness has become our secular substitute for the soul; we talk about consciousness the way people in the 16th or 17th century talked about souls. Some people’s interest in it is the fact that it floats free of these mortal bodies and maybe gets folded into a collective consciousness after we’re gone. So I think there is a hidden religiosity or spirituality in the whole conversation around consciousness. Somebody asked me recently, Do you think as people get older, they are more interested in consciousness? And I would say yes, and probably for that reason.

Sign up for The Interview  Hosts David Marchese and Lulu Garcia-Navarro talk to the world’s most fascinating people. Get it sent to your inbox.

It does seem that many of us have consistencies to ourselves that are a little hard to explain in the absence of something like a stable identity or a soul. In the new book, you mention a period in your teenage years when you were reading Hermann Hesse, writing bad poetry and thinking about the big questions. I don’t know if you still write bad poetry, but the other two things don’t seem that far away from what you’re now doing in your 70s. So what might explain what seem like intrinsic core qualities that are constant for you through time if not a stable self-identity or a soul? Even though I talk a lot about this idea that maybe the self is an illusion, it still has a conventional reality. The fact that I’m using myself to talk to yourself makes this very easy. If neither of us had selves right now, it would be a very loosey-goosey conversation. I can’t even imagine what it would be like. Matthieu Ricard said: It’s like a river has a name, and that conventional name is very useful, but there’s nothing consistent there. It’s just water passing.

I brought something like this up earlier, but I want to ask another version of it. This morning I was reading the news and thinking, Gosh, right now, is talking to Michael Pollan about consciousness a kind of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” conversation? I decided the answer is no, but do you ever have those doubts? I did at various points when I was starting on this book and the world was starting to fall apart. Like, is this how I should be using my energy? But I think that consciousness is at stake in a lot of what’s going on. One of the things Trump has done is occupy a significant chunk of our attention every single day. Our consciousness is being polluted, and protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. Consciousness is a very precious realm. It’s the realm of our privacy and our freedom to think. So I think we need some kind of consciousness hygiene, particularly at this moment, where this one politician has figured out ways to command our attention. Consciousness is more relevant now than it even was 10 or 20 years ago, as something to think about, protect and nurture.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, or Amazon Music

Director of photography (video): Aaron Katter

David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 15, 2026, Page 11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Michael Pollan

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

Morning Sun, c. 1952 Art: Edward Hopper

• Google AI Overview

Kokopelli (often misspelled/referred to as Koko Pele) is a revered, ancient deity and symbol of fertility, joy, and music in the Southwestern US, with roots in Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo cultures dating back 3,000+ years. Depicted as a humpbacked, dancing flute player, he represents agricultural abundance and prosperity, appearing in petroglyphs and rock art throughout the region. Facebook +4

Key Details About Kokopelli:

• Cultural Significance: Revered by the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, and other Southwestern tribes as a trickster god, healer, and storyteller.
• Symbolism: Associated with childbirth, agriculture, and the spirit of music, often depicted with antennas, feathers, and a backpack filled with songs or gifts.
• Origins: Inspired by petroglyphs and pottery, with figures dating from 600-1600 AD.
• Modern Icon: Highly stylized in modern Southwest art, jewelry, and logos. A 32-foot-tall statue exists in Camp Verde, Arizona.
• Misconceptions: Contrary to some modern myths, he is not associated with abduction or negative behavior; he is a positive, sacred figure in Native American tradition. Facebook +6

While some might mistakenly use “Koko Pele” or “Koko-Pelé” as a pun (for instance, in Hawaii with the fire goddess Pele), the true figure is a foundational, revered symbol of the American Southwest, specifically the indigenous traditions. Georgetown Domains +3

The Gutenberg Bible is published.

On February 23, 1455 (or so), Johannes Gutenberg published an edition of the Vulgate Bible in what is now Mainz, Germany. Now known as the Gutenberg Bible, it was one of the earliest books produced in Europe using moveable type. Gutenberg published it using an updated printing press (though contrary to public belief, he didn’t actually invent the printing press, see below), and his innovations sparked what is now known as the “Gutenberg Revolution,” which would soon make printed books widely accessible throughout the West.   Previously, manuscripts had to be printed and copied laboriously, by hand, making them rare objects for the wealthy and important; once Gutenberg’s technology spread, knowledge suddenly became available to all who could read it.  Gutenberg published between 160 and 180 bibles in 1455; less than 50 of these survive, in whole or in part, today. Three of these are at the Morgan Library in New York City; you can enjoy a video tour of them here.

(LitHub.com)

(Image from idriesshahfoundation.org)

“To copy a virtue in another is more copying than it is virtue. Try to learn what that virtue is based upon.”

~ Idries Shaw

Idries Shah, also known as Idris Shah, Indries Shah, né Sayed Idries el-Hashimi and by the pen name Arkon Daraul, was an Afghan author, thinker and teacher in the Sufi tradition. Shah wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies. Wikipedia

Born: June 16, 1924, Shimla, India

Died: November 23, 1996

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture, our parents, our peers, our heroes. There are those rare moments — for Virginia Woolf, it happened in the garden; for Thich Nhat Hanh, at the library; for Fernando Pessoa, at the writing desk — when something jolts you awake and you glimpse that meaning out of the corner of your eye. You shudder with the thrill and terror of having touched the beating heart of reality, then fall back asleep into your daily life. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to keep awake the part of you that knows, and has always known, the truth about what it means to be alive.

In Practical Mysticism (public library | public domain) — her century-old field guide to mystical experience without religion, the product of “ordinary contemplation” springing from the very essence of human nature, available to all — the English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) explores how we arrive at that revelation of reality, that elusive knowledge of the deepest truth at the heart of which is self-knowledge.

Evelyn Underhill

It always begins with a moment, sudden and bracing, when “the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things” is revealed, leaving you “face to face with that dreadful revelation of disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle.” Underhill writes:

Your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on… persists. Again and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the world. This game which you have played so long has formed and conditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions, leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly asked to play another, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a different sort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refuses to respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drastic remodelling of character which the mystics call “Purgation,” the second stage in the training of the human consciousness for participation in Reality.

The great tragedy of consciousness is the unreality of the self — those ripples on the surface of the soul, insentient to its oceanic fathomlessness. We encounter each other as surfaces, yet yearn to meet as souls. (There is a reason we search for soul-mates and not self-mates.) A generation before Virginia Woolf contemplated how to hear the soul through the chatter of the self and a decade before Hermann Hesse gave us his timeless prescription for discovering the soul beneath the self, Underhill chronicles what happens in those moments, always disorienting, of touching the naked flesh of life under the costume of self:

It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will, your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have become accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain valueless things, certain specific positions… Habit has you in its chains. You are not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, which knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with the Real, awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony between the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of the buried spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours of meditation — pushing out, as it were, towards the light — and the various changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of the surface-self. Between these two no peace is possible: they conflict at every turn… The uneasy swaying of attention between two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the life which your innermost inhabitant wants to live–these disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between their attractions and their claims; and will have no peace until these claims have been met, and the apparent opposition between them resolved.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.

Because it takes years for the tension to build up beyond the point of tolerance, the crescendo of this conflict often expresses as a mid-life crisis. Underhill describes the moment it all breaks down in order to break open:

The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession of the conscious field, has grown strong, and cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, from a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of “fixed ideas.” It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end.

In a testament to the power of breakdowns as a clarifying force for authenticity, she adds:

A conflict of some kind — a severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices — is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to the form which the new adjustments must take… Its chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and self-control… By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect freedom — for these are two aspects of one thing — will become possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at last arrive at the point which they call the summit of the spirit; where the various forces of your character — brute energy, keen intellect, desirous heart — long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.

Through this process of “simplifying of your tangled character,” through “its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal,” you arrive at yourself — “the agent of all your contacts with Reality.” To have found yourself, Underhill writes in the remainder of her wholly revelatory Practical Mysticism, is to have dived beneath “all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You.” Only then may you discover “your inmost sanctuary” and in it “a being not wholly practical… so foreign to your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with it” — a being you recognize as the truest you, so that you may (to borrow a line from one of the greatest poems ever written) “love again the stranger who was your self.”