Dazed and Confused

I'm not quite sure how to start this blog. So rather than try and formulate an intro, I'm just going to stick a bunch of excerpts from the Magus up here that surprised me.

"It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being" (112)

"The human mind is more a universe than the universe itself" (134)

"That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile" (150)

"Why everything is, including you, including me, and all the gods, is a matter of hazard. Nothing else. Pure hazard" (190)

"He wanted to be blind. It made it more likely that one day he would see" (312)

"All that is past possesses our present" (317)

"War is psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death" (420)

"That experience made me fully realize what humor is. It is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is the smile. Only a totally predetermined universe could be without it" (445)

"Psychiatry is getting more and more interested in the other side of the coin -- why sane people are sane, why they won't accept delusions and fantasies as real" (484)

"Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives" (559)

"An answer is always a form of death" (636)

"The basic principle of life is hazard" (639)

"Freedom was making some abrupt choice and acting on it" (655)

"cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet" (668) -> "Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love tomorrow"

Honestly, I could put the entire novel up on this post. I'm so unsure of what to think of it still. People in class keep saying how they had such a strong reaction to the book. And I can't blame them; it is a dense and thought-provoking work! But I seem to be stuck in a fog. The novel shocked and frustrated me, but mostly it has left me in a sort of daze as I try to figure it out. The weird thing is: the more I think about it and the more we talk about it in class, the less sure I feel about any of it.

The main question that has been bouncing around in my mind is this: What if we are just characters in someone's play/dream? Does that make our experience any less valid?