The life that really matters is the internal one lived inside your head. This includes, for example, the sort of stuff you think about on the train to work, or the ideas that come your way whenever you have a spare moment. Your inner life is populated by what you think about when practical questions of food, toilet, roof, sex and girlfriend have been dealt with. Your internal world is a much richer, deeper, magical and altogether much more exciting and satisfying place then the external world of people and their banal conversations, their instant-coffee niceties, and their pay-as-you-go pieties (misanthrope? what me? always!).
Do you know how to tell whether the internal life you are living is extraordinary? Let me tell you how: you can tell if your internal life is extraordinary if you continue to assimilate new ideas as you journey through life. If on this journey you are not afraid to jettison old ideas for new one's. If you are constantly surprised by life (by the good and the bad). If the world appears to you as a mystery itching to be understood and solved. If you have a voracious appetite for new experiences. IF YOU ARE NEVER BORED.
If you are never bored then your inner life is indeed extraordinary. If you are never bored and spend a lot of time thinking - then you can count yourself amongst the most fortunate people on the earth. Forget the rich! Forget the famous! Forget the gorgeous and the plastic fantastic! For if you are never bored then; and only then, can you say, that your entire subject of study, nay your entire occupation and raison d'etre, is life itself. There is one final essential item that will guarantee a deep inner and extraordinary life, and that is if you discover the doctrine of 'Transcendental Idealism' - and get it. And by get it I mean understand it truly. For there are many charlatans who think they get it, but they don't really get it. Some of these include university professors at philosophy faculties in prestigious institutions. I'm certainly not a university professor and nor do I hold a chair in philosophy, but nonetheless I certainly do get it, and you should count yourself lucky, for you have a wonderful teacher to teach you; what is perhaps, the hardest thing to wrap your mind around in all philosophy: Transcendental Idealism.
Transcendental Idealism is not some higher state of mind attainable through the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs and magic mushrooms! Oh no! Baby I don't do drugs. Not in the conventional sense anyway (not unless I'm on Freak Street in Kathmandu and wanna go all Eastern and Karma Sutra). Transcendental Idealism (as I shall show you later) is the greatest gift that Philosophy has bestowed upon mankind. It may even be one of the crowning achievements of the human mind. Once you understand it fully (but be warned that it does take time, patience and hard mental graft to fully assimilate the ideas mainly because they are so counter intuitive to the human brain) you will suddenly appear into the world, as if from a dark cave into the light (like Mohammed and his vision of the Arch Angel Gabriel), and once you emerge into the light - your entire life having been spent in darkness before, you will view the world as if for the first time; as if a cataract has been removed from your eyes.
Transcendental Idealism was not developed by one person. Rather it is the combined effort of some of the greatest thinkers that have ever lived from the Greeks to German Enlightenment thinkers (though it is arguable that one man did make the biggest contribution to it). Xenophane, Plato, Berkeley, Hume, Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer are the luminous drugs you take to get you there. And when you get there? Boy! Will the wool be pulled from your eyes and the world - the reality you think you live in - the world you think you inhabit, will wash away in the sand and what will remain will be a truth that will haunt you and energise you and inspire you and never fail to surprise you, till your last dying breath. I mean it. Watch this space. Unreality or rather Uberreality is about to bite you up the ass.
