Goethe: "It is not given to us to grasp the truth directly. We perceive it only in reflections, in examples, in symbols, in appearances." This applies to more domains than we can imagine. Autists don't get this. "Why read novels—made-up stories—when you can study the Real World?"

Belief in "efficiency" is a disease.

Or, to use Hegel's terms: everything in life is "mediated"; when something becomes "immediately" accessible, it ceases to exist.

This is why, for example, Protestantism eventually turns into (de facto) atheism. God, or the illusion thereof, can only exist as long as he is "mediated"; when he becomes directly accessible to you, the illusion is shattered, and he turns into a copy of your self.

Or, in Watts' Zen phrasing: "To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead. A world which values getting somewhere as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere, & yet the more this is possible the less is anywhere worth getting to."

Or, to repeat the usual Hitchcockian-Lacanian formula: desire depends on the existence of a "MacGuffin," which often looks like an obstacle, but is actually the very "object-cause of desire."

Without some kind of "Vermittlung" or "mediation" – the proverbial "third wheel", so to speak – there is no knowledge, no religion, no desire or eros, no nothing.

Which brings us back to this: https://twitter.com/Souchousama/status/1265664770725855233

And this (the serpent/Satan and the iceberg being the Third Element): https://twitter.com/Souchousama/status/1261748601916710912

broke: monism
joke: dualism
woke: triadism

Not because triadism is a good or better description of reality – there is no good description of reality, the Tao cannot be named – but because humans are programmed to think, and act, in threes.

To use a Feuerbachian turn of phrase, we associate God with the number 3 not because God is a trinity but because the number 3 is divine – which is to say, human.

The subject, his or her goal, and the "obstacle."