About This Book
IRREALITY is a philosophical inquiry into the most universal and least examined moment of human existence: the threshold between the last breath and the first silence. Drawing on Sartre’s phenomenology of imagination, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, the Tibetan Bardo Thödol, the Kabbalistic doctrine of the klipot, and Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious in The Red Book, it asks a question every tradition has circled but few have answered directly: what kind of thing is the husk we leave behind?
The book proceeds through four parts. The Architecture of the Husk establishes what remains when the animating principle departs — and shows that the structure of the irreal applies not only to the dead, but to every former self we shed in the course of becoming. The Mechanics of Return examines the bardo states and the revenant’s fear of dissolution. The Ring That Has No End sits with Nietzsche’s greatest weight: would you live this exact life again, and again, and again? The Path Through offers what the author calls the sovereign departure — not escape, not denial, but the recognition that the husk was a classroom, a laboratory, a theater, a garden, and that the work that was done is enough.
This is not a self-help book. It will not promise comfort. It will, if read carefully, change the way you sit with the deathbed of someone you love — and the way you sit with the inevitable shedding of who you have been so that who you are becoming may emerge.
“The image has wrapped within it a certain void — the act of imagining denies the real existentiality of the object directly in front of the observer.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination“The soul does not move into a new body. The entire knot of causes recurs. You come again — not to a new life or a better life — but to this identical and selfsame life.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power“I have returned, I am here again. I have come to you again.”
— Carl Jung, The Red Book