OH! So this is a Prison?!!!!

I’ve never spoken to someone telepathically like Ishmael does to the student, but I have spoken to someone with their knowledge of almost every intention and emotion that I had at that moment. I think that having a relationship based on telepathy can be an advantage and a drawback at the same time. On one side, honesty is taken to the extreme, but this can also lead to saying, or thinking the wrong thing. I believe that Ishmael’s bond with his student is a strong one because they are transparent to each other. There are no secrets.

I think Ishmael forces his pupil to think out of the box, as if not belonging to modern society, because only from the outside can he see the big picture. For instance, on page 25 Ishmael explains how some have tried to see the box that is holding them captive, but fail because they can’t see the big picture. The quotation goes as follows: “They made an ingenious and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.” The citizens of the Earth are held prisoners to one another. There is also a quotation on page 25 that reads: “You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.” The reason people don’t free themselves is because their nature is to go with the flow to save energy. The student says something on page 35 that can be applied to not only the imprisonment of the destruction of the world, but also day-to-day occurrences like pier-pressure. “I think so. Even if you weren’t personally captivated by the story, you were a captive all the same, because the people around you made you a captive. You were like an animal being swept along the middle of a stampede.”

In conclusion, I have it in my understanding that Ishmael has used his telepathic abilities to penetrate his pupil to a point where he is able to think as a non-human, as an outsider, you could even say as a gorilla. The student has been able to question his whole civilization’s ego which has survived for so many eras that it is barely noticeable. The general self-centered way of thinking that has become the standard “astonished” (pg. 62) the apprentice. I also have the impression that the truth is hard to absorb when you have always lived a lie.