a contrivance of horror
“life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
"look at your body—
a painted puppet, a poor toy
of jointed parts ready to collapse,
a diseased and suffering thing
with a head full of false imaginings."
—the dhammapada
as effigies of ourselves, puppets are not equal partners with us in the world. they are actors in a world of their own, one that exists inside of ours and reflects back upon it. what do we see in that reflection? only what we want to see, what we can stand to see. through the act of self-deception, we keep hidden what we do not want to let into our heads, as if we will betray to ourselves a secret too terrible to know. our lives abound with baffling questions that some attempt to answer and the rest of us let pass.
naturally, it must be owned that there are quarrels among cognitive psychologists, philosophers of mind, and neuroscientists about what consciousness is.
for zapffe, the effect was:
"a breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. a species had been armed too heavily—by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but she who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself." 
"consciousness—phenomenal experience—seems in many ways too good to be true. the way we experience the world seems unnecessarily beautiful, unnecessarily rich and strange. . . ."
could there be anything to this optimistic verbiage in which consciousness is not a “breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature” but something that is “unnecessarily beautiful, unnecessarily rich and strange” and “a wonderfully good thing in its own right,” something that makes human existence an unbelievably desirable adventure?
“why,” zapffe asked, “has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?” zapffe’s answer: “most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
from an evolutionary viewpoint, in zapffe’s observation, consciousness was a blunder that required corrections for its effects. it was an adventitious outgrowth that made us into a race of contradictory beings—uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation. because of consciousness, parent of all horrors, we became susceptible to thoughts that were startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never been equitably balanced by those that are collected and reassuring. our minds now began dredging up horrors, flagrantly joyless possibilities, enough of them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of self-soiling consternation should they go untrammeled. this potentiality necessitated that certain defense mechanisms be put to use to keep us balanced on the knife-edge of vitality as a species.
as zapffe concluded, we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth, or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see, which, as the norwegian philosopher saw it, along with every other pessimist, is “the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.”
we know there is suffering, and we do take action against it, which includes downplaying it by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” between taking action against and downplaying suffering, mainly the latter, most of us do not worry that it has overly sullied our existence.
this is the tragedy: consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.
nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. but we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. for us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.
to end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing.
best to immunize your consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. at worst keep your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. hearken well: “none of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town. bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. and be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you.” 
