People to read often to combat the stupidity I have swallowed whole

William James. over and over.

HD Thoreau

Richard Feynman

Friedrich Nietzsche

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

"To me, the vow was so important and had been important for so long that breaking it would mean breaking a part of my self-concept, my view of myself as a faithful and loyal friend."

Bingo.

"It's a secret. Here it is. Always tell the truth, and, more importantly, never lie. Even to yourself. What the heck does this have to do with anything? Well, once I realized that I was defending my ego by constantly telling myself a thousand subtle lies, I was able to stop. When I did, all this stuff started boiling up out of my unconscious and out onto my website. It must have been in there all along. It just wouldn't come out and play. Maybe it was embarrassed about all the lying.

PS I strongly suspect that Richard Feynman accidentally stumbled across this same technique. It's a source of creativity like you wouldn't believe! It's a wellspring of amazing ideas which seem to arise fully formed, without you doing the work to assemble them.

This sort of extreme creativity seems to be an inbuilt human feature, but unfortunately a "normal life" is filled with millions of tiny dishonesties which acts as a "plug" that halts the creative flow almost entirely. If you stop lying to yourself totally; stop distorting reality in your efforts to have a positive self image, then you damage your own psychological defenses. Those defenses block the Monsters from the ID. They keep your personal horrors at bay. But they do far more than that: they also cut you off from the prime creative source, your subconscious, and block your flow of ideas almost entirely. If you choose the path of safety and never look deep within, then you may retain the ability to do really well on exams, and to be an expert puzzle-solver. But you'll never come up with major new ideas.

Shatter your mental plug and you're on your way to an amazing life. However, if you do remove your psychological defenses, you force yourself onto a path that leads to both genius or insanity. Do you REALLY want to see yourself as you really are? No fuzzy lens at all? Some people would rather not go there. And that's one reason why insanity is so close to genius. Removing your defense mechanisms is far more serious than taking a powerful drug that gives you honest vision. The effects of drugs eventually wear off!"

- Bill Beaty