Free On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Page A

which he served manfully, full-time. It’s one of the reasons his remarks inspire the highest flights of fancy. But on the other hand, he is seen by our modern spirit as signally impractical.
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    The other thing you said that gave me pause was how the Devil invades mind. On more than one occasion you have suggested that scientific thinking undercuts metaphoric, intuitive thinking, and I wonder if that is what you see as the invasion of mind by the Devil. Scientific method, logic, linear thinking is opposed to the leaps of intuition in metaphor.
    Often. It seems to me our minds work on two disparate systems. One is based on the senses. Metaphor, for example, is almost impossible without being somewhat attuned to nature, to its often subtle shifts of mood. That depends so much on one’s senses. But then there is another faculty of mind that can be as cold as the polar cap. Indeed, it is a readiness to repel the senses, distrust them, even calumniate them as powers of distortion. This readiness to free oneself from the senses may be exercised most by the Devil.
    Almost everything I dislike in the modern world is super-rational: the corporation, the notion that we can improve upon nature, to tinker with it egregiously, dramatically, extravagantly. Nuclear bombs, as one example, came out of reason. It’s not that scientists, filled with an acute sense of their own senses, brought their creative intimations to the atom bomb. On the contrary, it was an abstraction away from the senses, a pure flight of mind that came to the conclusion that it was possible to make the bomb—and then, that it had to be done, not only to defeat Japan but for the furtherance of science itself.
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    This may be related. I’d like to talk about Thomas’s Gospel, where it’s made clear that human beings have the obligation to bring forth what is within.
    You had better say what this particular Gospel is.
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    Thomas’s Gospel is, of course, not in the Bible but is a suppressed apocrypha, discussed most recently by Elaine Pagels. In her book, Thomas’s Gospel states that as human beings, we all have the obligation to “bring forth what is within.” And if we do, it will save us. If you keep in what is in, repress it, whatever it is—it will destroy you.
    I used to believe that entirely. I now think it to be generally true but risky. Because what does it mean to bring forth what is within? I work on the notion that there’s godliness within us and diabolism as well. So to bring forth what is within you, it is necessary, very often, to send out the worst elements of yourself. Because if they stay within, they can poison you. That is much more complex than saying, “Get it out! Act it out. Be free, man! Liberate yourself.” Because very often what comes out is so bad that it injures others, sometimes dreadfully. You could say that every crime of violence is a way of getting the ugliness in oneself out, acting it out, doing it. You could even advance the argument that there are people who will contain what is ugly within them—and that’s their honor. It’s a complex matter—often there are people who will sacrifice themselves in order not to injure others. For example, if you act out something dreadful in yourself—if, for example, the need to get falling-in-the-gutter drunk thereby intensifies the miseries of everyone in your family—it is doing nothing good for others. Or excessive gambling. Or beating children. Or entering sexual relations with them. To the degree that certain ugly emotions are acted out, others are injured terribly by your freedom to do so. I could argue that it is often a Devil’s urge you are expressing.
    You have to ask yourself at a given moment, “Who is speaking within me?”
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    How do you answer