My post on Controlled Folly is pretty popular, so I will expand upon that idea by citing some more quotes.

From The Eagle’s Gift:

p 209 “…basis of stalking, the first attention..”

p 211 “The Eagle is real and final, all else is folly.”

A Separate Reality:

p 77 “But we must know first that our acts are useless and yet we must proceed as if we didn’t know it. That’s the sorcerer’s controlled folly.”

p 78 gives an example of controlled folly that is too long to rewrite here.

p 80 “…but now it doesn’t matter to me that nothing matters. My will controls the folly of my life.”

p 81 “Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly. …When a man learns to see, he realizes that he can no longer think about the things he looks at, and if he cannot think about what he looks at everything becomes unimportant.”

p 83 “My laughter, as well as everything I do, is real but it is also controlled folly because it is useless, it changes nothing and yet I still do it.”

p 85 shows a long paragraph “A man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him.”

I’ve gotten some comments and feedback that controlled folly sounds like manipulation, but as you can see here, it seems to be more of a kind of detachment from our acts. We still try our best, regardless. Will matters in that is the functioning of intent, but not so for everything we do. Folly changes nothing, but intent, especially from a man of knowledge, has the real power to change events.