Rios: Chris Rios, ...he's just an EMH
Picard: What happened to you?
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Don't try and get in my head.
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"We personalize the All in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really mysterious is the mystery of suffering.
Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive at the possession of self-consciousness. For to possess consciousness of oneself, to possess personality, is to know oneself and to feel oneself distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I feel that I am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being is to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond which I no longer am...."
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"He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not live, is that logical and frozen
ens realissimum, the
primum movens, that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world. But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality...."
How do you convince yourself you are "real" ?