“I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.” - TM, [“Philosophical Gadfly,” 1:09:55].
The world is a novel in which you are a character.
And people have asked me, then… is the goal to make the novel about yourself? I don’t think so. The goal is to become the author of the novel. Then you can write any damn ending you want for your character or any other. And this ‘becoming the author’ is this psychedelic detachment. And suddenly you go from being a chessman on the board to the chessmaster looking at the board. It’s empowering [“The World and its Double,” 1:16:30].