With ignorance as condition - death

Nanamoli Thera:

There are certain aspects of truth that one can only discover in oneself; if one is told of them, one will certainly, and in the very nature of existence itself, reject them absolutely. But perhaps they can be shared by those who have discovered them individually for themselves, and perhaps those who have not discovered them can be aided indirectly to discover them for themselves. The use of the word "truth" here is in the sense is desirability of discovery).
*
In a syllogism (1. All man are mortal, 2. Socrates is a man, 3. Therefore Socrates is mortal), the generalization (all man a mortal) must have been arrived at by induction. No inductive process is ever absolutely certain. There is always the leap, the assumption, of gereralizing and therefore one of the premises of a syllogism must have an element of uncertainty. So it cannot prove anything with certainty.

A syllogism is therefore a signpoint pointing where to look for direct experience, but it inherently never give information that is 100% certain. But a syllogism (on metaphysical subjects) can point to what can, inherently, never be experienced; then it is an anomaly.
*
All the questions asked about death are wrongly put.
***
So long as one assumes death as an absolute fact, one must have, as an assumed absolute value based on it, the decision either to kill or to be killed in the last extreme (and this includes attitudes to suicide¹ and to "natural death"). This alternative ultimately divides all people (who make that assumption about death) into two types. With a proper understanding of death, the decision (dialectic) must collapse on the laying bare of the assumption. Freud has remarked that death is inconceivable to the Unconscious, a statement which, thought open to usual criticism of F's mechanistic assumptions about consciousness, does point to very important factual dialectic in assumptions about death.
***
Three forms of agnosticism (1) I am certain (know) that this is impossible for anyone else to know. (2) I am uncertain (do not know at present) whether this which I don't know now, can be known by me or by anyone at some time. (3) I am certain (know) that this which I do not know, can be known sometime.

These three cover agnosticism about death.

Three main attitudes to death (my death): (i) I believe (know) that I shall survive my death. (ii) I believe (know) that I shall not survive my death. (iii) one of the three forms of agnosticism.

It is impossible for ordinary, normal thought to confront the idea of (my) death except in one of these attitudes. All of these attitudes are wrong through the assumption (explicit and implicit) that they are necessitate. Consequently it is impossible for normal thought to confront (my) death with a correct attitude.
***
Wandering in the deserted places there are found many traces from which we deduce the movements of heroes and gods and so we weave history. Yet were our vision to become a little clearer we might discover that all these tracks are merely made by ourselves during our own ealier wanderings.
***
Cioran:

Once you have thought a lot about death, you start to wonder if it wasn't all a huge lie. Having risen above death, the truths below appear as illusions.
*
Have you looked at yourself in the mirror when nothing stood between you and death? Have you questioned your eyes? And by looking in to them, have you then understood that you cannot die? Your pupils dilated by conquered terror are more impenetrable than the Sphinx. From their glassy immobility a certitude, strangely tonic in its brief mysterious form is born: you cannot die. It comes from the silence of our gaze meeting itself, the Egyptian calmness of a dream facing the reality of death. Each time the fear of death grubs you, look in the mirror. Your eyes know everything. For in them, there are specks of nothingness, which assure you that nothing more can happen.
***
Upasena

On one occasion the Venerable Sāriputta and the Venerable Upasena were dwelling at Rājagaha in the Cool Grove, in the Snake’s Hood Grotto. Now on that occasion a viper had fallen on the Venerable Upasena’s body. Then the Venerable Upasena addressed the bhikkhus thus: “Come, friends, lift this body of mine on to the bed and carry it outside before it is scattered right here like a handful of chaff.” When this was said, the Venerable Sāriputta said to the Venerable Upasena:

“We do not see any alteration in the Venerable Upasena’s body nor any change in his faculties; yet the Venerable Upasena says: ‘Come, friends, lift this body of mine on to the bed and carry it outside before it is scattered right here like a handful of chaff.’”

“Friend Sāriputta, for one who thinks, ‘I am the eye’ or ‘The eye is mine’; ‘I am the ear’ or ‘The ear is mine’ … ‘I am the mind’ or ‘The mind is mine,’ there might be alteration of the body or a change of the faculties. But, friend Sāriputta, it does not occur to me, ‘I am the eye’ or ‘The eye is mine’; ‘I am the ear’ or ‘The ear is mine’ … ‘I am the mind’ or ‘The mind is mine,’ so why should there be any alteration in my body or any change in my faculties?”

“It must be because I-making, mine-making, and the underlying tendency to conceit have been thoroughly uprooted in the Venerable Upasena for a long time that it does not occur to him, ‘I am the eye’ or ‘The eye is mine’; ‘I am the ear’ or ‘The ear is mine’ … ‘I am the mind’ or ‘The mind is mine.’” Then those bhikkhus lifted the Venerable Upasena’s body on to the bed and carried it outside. Then the Venerable Upasena’s body was scattered right there just like a handful of chaff.
SN 35: 69

***

¹ Q: It is because I have grown in intelligence that I would not tolerate my suffering again. What is wrong with suicide?
M: Nothing wrong, if it solves the problem. What, if it does not? Suffering caused by extraneous factors — some painful and incurable disease, or unbearable calamity — may provide some justification, but where wisdom and compassion are lacking, suicide cannot help. A foolish death means foolishness reborn. Besides there is the question of karma to consider. Endurance is usually the wisest course.
Q: Must one endure suffering, however acute and hopeless?
M: Endurance is one thing and helpless agony is another. Endurance is meaningful and fruitful, while agony is useless.

Cioran & self

Cioran - Self

What sacrifice would I not make in order to be free of this wretched self, which at this very moment occupies, within the All, a place no god has dared aspire to!

*

Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

*

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

*

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man.
And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.

*
Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.

*
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

*
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

*
The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.

*
We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

*
The stoic’s maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront?
Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

*
Moral disintegration when we spend time in a place that is too beautiful: the self dissolves upon contact with paradise. No doubt it was to avoid this danger that the first man made the choice he did.

*

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious.
Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

*

When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

*
Even in God’s company, discontent was brewing, as the revolt of the angels testifies—the first on record.
Apparently on every level of creation, no one is forgiven his superiority. We might even conceive of an envious flower.

*

“… the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this eitraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse.
Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.

*

The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!

*

I shall no longer read the sages—they have done me too much harm. I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish. I have done just the opposite, I have put on the mask of reason, and the mask has ended by replacing my face and usurping all the rest.

*

The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition.
Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.

*

When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self hatred actually strengthens self attachment.

*

In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.

*

Two friends, both actresses in a country of eastern Europe. One decamps to the West, becoming rich and famous there; the other remains where she is, poor and obscure. Half a century later, the second woman takes a trip and pays a visit to her fortunate colleague. “She used to be a head taller than me, and now she’s a shrunken old woman, and paralyzed into the bargain.” Other details follow, and in conclusion: “I’m not afraid of death; I’m afraid of death in life.” Nothing like recourse to philosophical reflection to camouflage a belated revenge.

*

Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, it is apparent that what he dreads most is being survived by his friends.

*
As memory weakens, the praise that has been lavished upon us fades, too, to the advantage of the censure. And this is just: the praise has rarely been deserved, whereas the censure sheds a certain light on what we did not know about ourselves.

*
We hate ourselves because we cannot forget ourselves, because we cannot think of anything else. It is inevitable that we should be exasperated by this excessive preference and that we should struggle to triumph over it. Yet hating ourselves is the least effective stratagem by which to manage it.

*

Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity — the luck and misfortune of a conscious organism.

*

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.
*
...so tenacious is the old Adam in us, the bustling canaille, unfit for self-effacement.
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I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.
*
At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
*
Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.
*
X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.
Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.
*
The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man. And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.
*
Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.
*
“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”
*
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
*
Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
*
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly—when we talk about other people.
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What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do.
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“I was the Prophet,” Mohammed informs us, “when Adam was still between the water and the clay.” … When we have not had the pride to found a religion—or at least to destroy one—how do we dare show ourselves in the light of day?
*
We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.
*
X, whom I have always treated as badly as I could, does not resent me because he resents no one. He forgives every insult, he even forgets them. How I envy him! To be like him, I should have to live through several existences and exhaust all my possibilities of transmigration.
*
We have spent a little over an hour together. He has used the time to show off, and by dint of trying to say interesting things about himself, has succeeded. If he had merely swaggered in moderation, I should have found him a bore and left in a few minutes. By exaggerating, by playing the peacock to perfection, he has come close enough to wit to show some. The desire to appear subtle does not destroy subtlety. A mental defective, if he could feel the longing to astonish, would manage to deceive us—would even catch up with intelligence.
*
X, who is older than the patriarchs, after inveighing, during a long tête-à-tête, against this one and that, tells me: “The great weakness of my life is that I’ve never hated anyone.” Our hatred does not diminish with the years: in fact, it mounts. That of an old man like X attains incredible proportions: now insensitive to his former affections, he puts all his faculties at the service of his rancors which, miraculously reinvigorated, will survive the crumbling of his memory and even of his reason.
… The danger of frequenting the old is that when we find them so far from detachment and so incapable of espousing it, we arrogate to ourselves all the advantages they are supposed to have and do not. And it is inevitable that our real or imaginary advance upon them in matters of weariness or disgust should incite to presumption.
*
Anyone who gives himself up to writing believes—without realizing the fact—that his work will survive the years, the ages, time itself. … If he felt, while he was at work on it, that it was perishable, he would leave off where he was, he could never finish. Activity and credulity are correlative terms.
*
We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon—this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.
*
Tertullian tells us that in order to be cured, epileptics would go “and greedily suck the blood of criminals slaughtered in the arena.” If I were to heed my instinct, this would be the one type of medication, no matter what the disease, which I would adopt.
*
Two enemies—the same man divided.
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“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.
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“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.
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“An enemy is as useful as a Buddha.” Exactly, for our enemy watches over us, keeps us from letting ourselves go. By indicating, by divulging our least weakness, he leads us straight to our salvation, moves heaven and earth to keep us from being unworthy of his image of us. Hence our gratitude to him should be boundless.
*
Self-pity is not so sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker’s attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
*
The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.
*
When someone tells us of an unfavorable opinion about ourselves, instead of being distressed, we should think of all the “evil” we have spoken of others, and realize that it is only justice that as much should be said of ourselves. Ironically, no one is more vulnerable, more susceptible, and less likely to acknowledge his own defects than the backbiter. Merely tell him about the slightest reservation someone has made in his regard, and he will lose countenance, lose his temper, and drown in his own bile.
*
Moral disintegration when we spend time in a place that is too beautiful: the self dissolves upon contact with paradise. No doubt it was to avoid this danger that the first man made the choice he did.
*
Gogol, in hopes of a “regeneration,” journeys to Nazareth and discovers he is as bored there as “in a Russian railroad station”—this is what happens to us all when we look outside ourselves for what can exist only inside.
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Kill yourself because you are what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!
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The certainty of being only an accident has accompanied me on all occasions, propitious or injurious, and if it has saved me from the temptation to believe myself necessary, it has not on the other hand entirely cured me of a certain vainglory inherent in the loss of illusions.

*

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.
*
X, whom I do not particularly appreciate, was telling a story so stupid that I wakened with a start: those we don’t like rarely shine in our dreams.
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Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the head with a stick.
*
The man of the Rubicon, after Pharsalus, had forgiven too many. Such magnanimity seemed offensive to those of his friends who had betrayed him and whom he had humiliated by treating them without rancor. They felt diminished, flouted, and punished him for his clemency or for his disdain: he had refused to stoop to resentment! Had he behaved as a tyrant, they would have spared him. But they could not forgive him, since he had not deigned to frighten them enough.
*
We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.
*
When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.
*
To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself, to hunt it down, to exorcise it. Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.
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Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.
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Any and every nation, at a certain moment of its career, considers itself chosen. It is at this moment that it gives the best and the worst of itself.
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We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.
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So long as a nation keeps the awareness of its superiority, it is fierce and respected; once it loses that awareness, a nation becomes humanized, and no longer counts.
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Themistocles, by a unanimously approved decree, had the interpreter of Xerxes’ ambassadors put to death “for having dared use the Greek language to express the orders of a barbarian.”
A people commits such an act only at the peak of its career. It is decadent, it is dying, when it no longer believes in its language, when it stops believing that its language is the supreme form of expression, the language.
*
A nineteenth-century philosopher maintained, In his innocence, that la Rochefoucauld was right for the past, but that he would be invalidated by the fixture. The Idea of progress dishonors the intellect.
*
In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man.
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If humanity has such love for saviors, those fanatics who so shamelessly believe in themselves, it is because humanity supposes they believe in it.
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The appetite for destruction is so deeply anchored within us that no one manages to extirpate it. It belongs to our constitution, for the very basis of our being is demoniac.
The sage is a pacified, withdrawn destroyer. The others are destroyers in practice.
*
I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn’t such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.
*
A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days, according to one modern Vedantist school. No Western moralist, not even the grimmest, would have dared venture an observation on human nature so startling, so revealing.
*
The virtues have no face. Impersonal, abstract, conventional, they wear out faster than the vices, which, more powerfully charged with vitality, define themselves and become accentuated with age.
*
It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did—without a word—what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?
*
When man forgets he is mortal, he feels inclined to do great things, and sometimes succeeds. This oblivion, fruit of excess, is at the same time the cause of his woes. “Mortal, think as a mortal.” Antiquity invented a tragic modesty.
*
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
*
“… the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this eitraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.
*
I shall never understand how we can live knowing that we are not—to say the least!—eternal.
*
Unconsciousness is the secret, the “vital principle” of life…. It is the sole recourse against the self, against the disease of being individualized, against the debilitating effect of the state of consciousness, a state so formidable, so demanding, that it must be reserved for athletes alone.
*
Any success, in any realm, involves an inner impoverishment It makes us forget what we are, it deprives us of the torment of our limits.
*
The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!
*
The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.
*
I was shaking with rage: my honor was at stake. The hours passed, dawn was approaching. Was I going to ruin my night because of a trifle? Try as I would to minimize the incident, the reasons I invented to calm myself remained ineffectual. That anyone would dare do such a thing to me! I was on the point of opening the window and screaming like a madman, when the image of our planet spinning like a top suddenly seized my mind. My anger subsided at once.
*
When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self hatred actually strengthens self attachment.
*

About Freedom and Subjection:

Alexandru Dragomir:

The first thing that we come up against when we want to talk about freedom is that in fact we do not know what it is. Is it a given? Are we ‘free by nature’? And if so, what exactly does this mean? Or, factually speaking, does being free mean not having a programme, not having an ‘agenda’?

We know very well, however, the meaning of subjection, since we are, so to speak, born into it and live in it. From earliest childhood we live in a perpetual totalitarian regime: we are told what to do about everything important. The first 7 years, from the playpen to the beginning of school, are the years of primary subjection. We submit strictly to the programme made for us by parents at home, teachers at kindergarten, etc. From 7 years of age until we finish university, we sit at desks while teachers talk to us from above, in terms of both physical and symbolic space. God talks to Moses, who listens ‘piously’ and submits. And pupils ‘sit at their desks’. Finally, after finishing university, there is the choice of a job, which is a sort of ‘choice of whom to be subject to’. It follows, from this outline, that we are subject until we retire: we are unfree.

Three conclusions may be drawn from this:

1. All our lives we are subject and this seems so natural that we no longer realize how much submission there is in us.

2. Things being as they are, we do not think of freedom in itself, but in relation to subjection, which means, in fact, that we do not think of freedom, but of liberation. All our efforts are for liberation, not freedom.

3. Freedom is not a fundamental metaphysical given, but rather a sentiment, the ‘sentiment of freedom’, one which you obtain after liberation, and which is based on the confusion between freedom and liberation.

However it would be a mistake to understand from the phases of subjection that they are something negative, and that in better or ideal world they would no longer exist. These phases are a normal part of human life, and in the economy of life on earth there is no other way to proceed. It is good, all the same, to be aware of this, and to know that subjection is completely justified both on the individual and on the social level. It is also good to be aware that alongside this unwilled subjection, there is also subjection that is willed, assumed: joining a political party, becoming a free-mason, conversion to a religious faith, recognizing the laws, listening to an master.

But in all these cases, it is not so much a matter of subjection as of a spiritual submission, a submission that comes from within and that we have freely chosen.

From what I have said so far, one thing is clear: there is a confusion between freedom and liberation. We believe that once we have liberated ourselves we are, ipso facto, also free. However in fact we remain in the negative of liberation, in the obtaining of a state which has appeared by the negation of subjection, without knowing, positively, what it means to be free. Is freedom a miraculously innate property, on which the constraints of subjection later settle like bricks on a foundation? What is certain is that we bear within ourselves the sentiment of freedom, fi rmly tied to liberation, and that in thinking all the time within the subjection in which we live, we associate liberation with the sentiment of freedom.

How then can we make freedom something other than a sentiment associated with liberation? How can we make it a state in which we can install ourselves and from which something permanent will emerge? For the majority of people, freedom is liberation, followed generally by idleness and ‘I do as I please’. Can freedom become a good, as long as, living in a world, people live in subjection and aspire, at the most, to liberation?

Banksters

Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... And when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate (within a few weeks of making this statement, on July 2, 1881, President Garfield was assassinated).
*
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance. (President James Madison)
*
I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money...And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people. (Reginald McKenna, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders, January 24, 1924
*
If you want to be the slaves of banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the banks create money (attributed to Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England, 1920)
*
As Jefferson later put it: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

*
Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King warned in 1935: “Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation’s laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.”

*
Meyer Rothschild made his pronouncement from his flagship bank in Frankfort: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes its laws.”
*
Never was a great historic event followed by a more feeble sequel. A nation arises to claim for itself liberty and sovereignty. It gains both of these by immense sacrifice of blood and treasure. Then, when victory is gained and secure, it hands the nation’s credit - that is to say a national treasure - over to private individuals, to do as they please with.” (Alexander Del Mar
*
“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.” (Abraham Lincoln,
*“The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man great enough to wear his boots. And Israel went anew to grab the riches of the world. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use it to systematically corrupt modern civilization. The Jews will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become the inheritance of Israel.” (Otto von Bismarck, from the recollections of Conrad von Bauditz Siem (1837-1931), Count Cherep-Spiridovich, The Secret World Government or The Hidden Hand, p.180)
*
Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt… Mr. Chairman, when the Federal Reserve act was passed, the people of the United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here… and that this country was to supply financial power to an international superstate — a superstate controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.” – Congressman Louis T. McFadden, from a speech delivered to the House of Representatives on June 10, 1932
*There is something so consummately ridiculous in the idea of a nation’s getting money by paying interest to itself upon its own stock, that the mind of every rational man naturally rejects it. It is, really, something little short of madness to suppose that a nation can increase its wealth; increase its means of paying others; that it can do this by paying interest to itself. When time is taken to reflect, no rational man will attempt to maintain a proposition so shockingly absurd. (William Cobbett,
*
For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centred around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century. (Tragedy and Hope: a History of the World in our Time, 1966, Carroll Quigley,
*
Quigley wrote: “Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money on debt-terms requiring tribute both in principal and interest.”
*

The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. (Aristotle,
*
“Money is the God of our time and Rothschild is its prophet.” (Heine

*
Professor Soddy (Fellow of the Royal Society, researcher into World War I) has estimated that the bankers actually created 2,000,000,000, no less, of this bank credit, and lent it out to us at 5 per cent. That means 100,000,000 a year upon nothing. (The Financiers and the Nation, Rt. Hon. Thomas Johnston
*
Alas, modern political economies are enforced frauds. The majority refuse to see this. They have the ability to back it up with violence and disinformation. (Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, Kitco, November 20, 2014).
*
Free markets are a function of supply and demand whereas capital markets are a function of credit and debt. The bankers’ ponzi-scheme—which began with the distortion of free markets in 1694 when the Bank of England began issuing debt-based paper banknotes alongside the Royal Mint’s gold and silver coins—is coming to an end. The bankers’ wildly successful and long-running scheme, dependent on the uneasy equilibrium between credit and debt, has now been irrevocably destabilized. Aggregate levels of debt are now so high that credit—no matter how cheap and available—cannot restore the balance. By purposeful misdirection, the Fed keeps its real mandate hidden. The purpose of the Federal Reserve is not full employment, price stability or even the prevention of economic crises. The real purpose of the Fed is to oversee the bankers’ diabolical and lucrative franchise of debt-based money that has promoted the unconscionable indebting of America and turned its once-free citizens into debt slaves of the few. (Darryl Robert Schoon, Kitco, 15 April, 2014)

Banksters 2

The entire world as it is daily reported to us is just a gigantic con. The news is a con; government is a con; the markets are a con; modern art, etc. is a con. Money is a con. Money —in all its forms patently our most frequently deliberated subject; our nagging obsession, is just a con. Money, invented merely to save people, for example, from having to exchange a sack of potatoes for a visit to the dentist, has attained an unequalled and contrived importance in itself. Money has reduced us to its slaves when we should be its masters.

Gerhard Menuhin
*
The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbours, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved. Lysander Spooner
*
Quote from the book Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told
Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world. Give a man control of the banking system and he can own the world.
*
Is it not a miracle that a wooden bench has been transformed into a temple? And yet such a miracle has been seen by people a thousand times, and they did not bat an eyelid, during a whole century. Since this was an extraordinary miracle that the benches on which sat the greasy usurers to trade in their moneys, have now been converted into temples, which stand magnificently at every corner of contemporary big towns with their heathen colonnades, and crowds go there with a faith which they are already not given by heavenly gods, in order to bring assiduously their deposits of all their possessions to the god of money, who, they imagine, lives in the steel safes of the bankers, and who is preordained, thanks to his divine mission to increase the wealth to a metaphysical infinity. Gerhard Menuhin

Money II
A riddle might run: what did tribune Tiberius Gracchus of the Roman Empire (133 B.C.), Julius Caesar (48 B.C.), Jesus Christ (7–2 B.C. to 30–33 A.D.), Adolf Hitler, and Presidents McKinley, Garfield, Lincoln, Jackson and Kennedy have in common? Answer: They all opposed the hegemony of usury, and paid the ultimate price for their temerity (Jackson survived). In an era of anti-national movements and of political blocs, the power of monetary emission can no longer be returned to the states; Communism will win.
*
Talleyrand’s venomous words:

“The Financier supports the state in the same way as the rope supports the man who is hanged!”
*
Thus, the United States in 1917 went to war against Germany in sincere indignation because the newspapers had told them that Prussian “militarism” was rioting in devilish atrocities as it attempted to conquer the world. Of course, these transparent lies were published in the daily rags because the ruling lords of Mammon knew that American intervention in Europe would fatten their coffers. Thus, whereas the Americans thought that they were fighting for such high-minded slogans as “liberty” and “justice,” they were actually fighting to stuff the money bags of the big bankers. These “free citizens” are, in fact, mere marionettes; their freedom is imaginary, and a brief glance at American work-methods and leisure-time entertainments is enough to prove conclusively that l’homme machine is not merely imminent: it is already the American reality.
Klages
*
The banking system was just a sophisticated system of slavery that was marketed so well that everyone was fighting to the death to become the noble alpha slave. Devon Stack
*
... the looting expedition known as the Reformation... M Jones
*
Cato the Elder says, "He who pilfers private property sits in prison in chains; and the public thieves go about in purple and gold."
*
The main theological issue was "Is usury necessary?" Howell claims that Bernardino "was preaching doctrine which, if practiced, would soon bring all commerce to an end."51 In saying this he is echoing the Jews, who claimed that "the custom of entering into agreements with Jewish usurers was spreading throughout Italy because of the vast needs of the people."52 The Mendicants, on the other hand, far from admitting that usury was neces-sary to society ("as necessary as its bakers") claimed that the taking of interest was intrinsically evil. In his ,De bona mortis, St. Ambrose said unequivocally that "if someone takes usury, he commits robbery, he shall not live."53 Gratian, one of the most influential writers of the Middle Ages, agreed, quoting the line verbatim.54 St. Raymond of Penaforte claimed that "usury differs little if not at all from rob-bery."ss If usury is intrinsically evil, how then could the pope (or the prince with the pope's permission) grant licenses to Jews to exact usury? The answer, according to the Mendicants, is that he couldn't. "Usury was an evil that no reason could transform into a good; a peccatum in se and not a peccatum secundum quid .... If Barren Metal the pope does not have permission to sin, he cannot grant it to others."56
*
If paper money is based on debt (and in the final analysis, paper money is debt), the devil gets it all back in the end. As the portrayal of the Judensau makes clear, the devil in this instance works closely with the Jew, who is a notorious usurer. The Jew achieved his power through money-lending. Once Napoleon emancipated the Jews, there was no check on the havoc which usury could wreak in the Christian state. The Rothschilds were aware of the predatory nature of their moneylending. "Our late father taught us," Mayer wrote, "that if a high placed person enters into a [financial] relationship with a Jew, he belongs to the Jew.'' M Jones
*
Fournier-Veneuil claimed that:

The Jew Rothschild and his co-religionists ... see in the kingdom of the heavens no more than ... money devoted to usury ... itis a singular race of men; I am not intolerant, but Napoleon, in calling together the grand Sanhedrin did not create a [new] Frenchman. They are still Jews and nothing but Jews. I do not hold it against them that they retain their faith; but I reproach them for profiting from all quarrels, for charging them up; they are everywhere. They were in Poland on the corpses of our brothers; they are [currently] suppying Ibraham [Pasha], and they are dancing at this very moment on the tomb of Achilles.

*
George Dairnvaell: They have enriched themselves from our impoverishment and from our disas-ters ... they have stayed with us the way a leech stays on a man's vein ... [like) the vampires of commerce and the scourges of nations . . . The Rothschilds have only ever gained from our disasters; when France has won, the Rothschilds have lost. This house is our evil genius.' 

*

Cioran & God

There are certain moments when, remote as we are from any faith, we can conceive of only God as our interlocutor. To address ourselves elsewhere seems an impossibility, a madness. Solitude, in its extreme reaches, requires a form of conversation, also extreme.
*
At the lowest point of ourselves, when we touch bottom and feel the abyss, we are suddenly raised up—defense-reaction or absurd pride—by the sense of being superior to God. The grandiose and impure aspect of the temptation to be done with it all.
*
The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.
*
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
*
The mystics and their “collected works.” When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn’t read….
*
I never tire of reading about the hermits, preferably about those said to be “weary of seeking God.” I am dazzled by the failures of the Desert.
*
The desire to pray has nothing to do with faith. It emanates from a special despondency, and lasts as long, even while the gods and their very memory may vanish away forever.
*
Tsimtsum. This silly-sounding word designates a major concept of the Cabbala. For the world to exist, God, who was everything and everywhere, consented to shrink, to leave a vacant space not inhabited by Himself: it is in this “hole” that the world occurred.
Thus we occupy the wasteland He conceded to us out of pity or whim. For us to exist, He contracted, He limited His sovereignty. We are the product of His voluntary reduction, of His effacement, of His partial absence. In His madness He has actually amputated Himself for us. If only He had had the good sense and the good taste to remain whole!
*
According to the Cabbala, God created souls at the beginning, and they were all before him in the form they would later take in their incarnation. Each soul, when its time has come, receives the order to join the body destined for it, but each to no avail implores its Creator to spare it this bondage and this corruption.
The more I think of what could not have failed to happen when my own soul’s turn came, the more I realize that if there was one soul which more than the rest must have resisted incarnation, it was mine.
*
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
*
In a Gnostic work of the second century of our era, we read: “The prayer of a melancholy man will never have the strength to rise unto God.” … Since man prays only in despondency, we may deduce that no prayer has ever reached its destination.
*
No easy matter, to speak of God when one is neither, a believer nor an atheist: and it is undoubtedly the drama we all share, theologians included—no longer capable of being either one or the other.
*
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again.
*
Try as I will, I cannot manage to scorn all those centuries during which men busied themselves with nothing more than perfecting a definition of God.
*
On a poster which, at a church door, announces The Art of the Fugue, someone has scrawled in huge letters: God is dead. This apropos of the composer who testifies that God, in the event of his decease, can revive precisely while we are listening to certain cantatas, certain fugues!
*
At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
*
This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.
*
Thracians and Bogomils—I cannot forget that I have haunted the same whereabouts as they, nor that the former wept over the newborn and the latter, in order to justify God, held Satan responsible for the infamy of Creation.
*
If it is true that God dislikes taking sides, I should feel no awkwardness in His presence, so pleased would I be to imitate Him, to be like Him, in everything, “without opinion.”
*
Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.
*
Suddenly feeling that you know as much as God about anything and everything and quite as suddenly seeing this sensation vanish …
*
Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not.
*
Saint Seraphim of Sarov, in his fifteen years of complete seclusion, opened his cell door to no one, not even to the bishop who occasionally visited the hermitage. “Silence,” he would say, “brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.”
What the saint should have added is that silence is never deeper than in the impossibility of prayer….
*
As long as God had him in tow, man advanced slowly, so slowly he did not even realize it. Now that he no longer lives in anyone’s shadow, he is in a rush, and deplores it—he would give anything to regain the old cadence.
*
Appealing, that Hindu notion of entrusting our salvation to someone else, to a chosen “saint,” and permitting him to pray in our place, to do anything in order to save us. Selling our soul to God….
*
Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter.
Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself is only an infirmity of God.
*
The ancient gods ridiculed men, envied them, hunted them down on occasion, harried them. The God of the Gospels was less mocking and less jealous, and mortal men did not even enjoy, in their miseries, the consolation of being able to accuse Him. Which accounts for the absence or the impossibility of a Christian Aeschylus. A good God has killed tragedy. Zeus deserved differently of literature.
*
Some of the Provincial Letters were rewritten as many as seventeen times. Astounding that Pascal could have expended so much time and energy whose interest seems minimal to us now. Every polemic dates—every polemic with men. In the Pensées, the debate was with God. This still concerns us somewhat.
*
Even in God’s company, discontent was brewing, as the revolt of the angels testifies—the first on record. Apparently on every level of creation, no one is forgiven his superiority. We might even conceive of an envious flower.
*
If the pride of theologians “stinks” even more than that’of the philosophers, it is because one does not concern oneself with God with impunity: one reaches the point of arrogating to oneself certain of His attributes—the worst, of course.
*
Ultimately, it is entirely a matter of indifference whether we are something, even if we are God. On this, with a little pressure, almost everyone might be brought to agree. But how does it happen then that everyone aspires to further life, to additional being, and that there is no one who strives to sink, to descend toward the ideal default?
*
“A single thought addressed to God is worth more than the universe” (Katherina Emmerich). — How right she is, poor saint…
*

If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?
*
The world is an accident of God, accidens Dei. How right the formula of Albertus Magnus seems!
*
There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
*
To frequent the Desert Fathers and yet to be moved by the latest news! In the first centuries of our era, I would have belonged among those eremites of whom it is said that after a certain time they were “wearied with seeking God.”
*
To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.
*
The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.
*
I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.
*
“You speak of God frequently. It is a word I no longer use,” an ex-nun writes me. Not everyone has the good fortune to be disgusted by it!
*
According to the kabbala, God permits His splendor to diminish so that, men and angels can endure it — which comes down to saying that the Creation coincides with an impoverishment of the divine lumen, an effort toward darkness to which the Creator has assented. The hypothesis of God’s deliberate obscuration has the merit of making us accessible to our own shadows, responsible for our irreceptivity to a certain light.
*
To be like God and not like the gods, that is the goal of the true mystics, who aim too high to condescend to polytheism.
*
... nothingness is ultimately merely a purer version of God, which is why the mystics have plunged into it with such frenzy, as have, moreover the unbelievers with a certain religious capital.
*
The mystics aspire not to subside into God but to exceed Him, swept on as they are by something remote, by a delirium of the ultimate, which we encounter among all those who have been visited and submerged by trance states.
*
In Vedic mythology, anyone raising himself by knowledge upsets the comfort of Heaven. The gods, ever watchful, live in terror of being outclassed. Did the Boss of Genesis behave any differently? Did he not spy on man because he feared him? Because he saw him as a rival? Under these conditions, one understands the great mystics, desire to flee God, His limits and His woes, in order to seek boundlessness in the Godhead.
*
Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else — which is an estimable advantage. I have always envied those who believed in Him, though to believe oneself God seems easier to me than believing in God.
*
My habitation? I shall never know. True, one has no better knowledge of where God resides, for what is the sense of the expression “to reside in oneself” for those of us who lack any basis, both in and outside ourselves?
*
“God has created nothing more odious to Himself than this world, and from the day He created it. He has not glanced at it again, so much does He loathe it.” The Moslem mystic who wrote that, I don’t know who it was, I shall never know this friend’s name.
*
Does fury come from God or from the Devil? From both; otherwise, how explain that our rage dreams of galaxies to pulverize and that it is inconsolable at having nothing but this wretched planet within reach?
*
Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?
*
According to Jewish tradition, the Torah — God’s work — preceded the world by two thousand years. Never has a people esteemed itself so highly. To attribute such priority to its sacred book, to believe it predates the Fiat Lux! Thus is created a destiny.
*
Music exists only so long as hearing it lasts, just as God exists only so long as ecstasy lasts. The supreme art and the Supreme Being have this in common, that they depend entirely on ourselves.
*
Remaining consistent: to this end, according to the Zohar, God created man and recommended frequentation of the Tree of Life. Man, however, preferred the other tree, located in the “region of variations.” His fall? A craving for change, fruit of curiosity, that source of all misfortunes. Thus what was only a whim in the first among us was to become law for us all.
*
God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not — insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.
*
The Zohar puts us in a quandary: if it is telling the truth, the poor man presents himself before God with only his soul, while the others have nothing to offer but their bodies. Given the impossibility of making a choice, best to keep on waiting.
*
“And God saw that the light was good”: such is the opinion of mortals, with the exception of the sleepless, for whom it is an aggression, a new inferno more pitiless than the night’s.
*
P. Tz.: a genius if ever there was one. Oral frenzy, out of a horror or an impossibility of writing. Scattered through the Balkans, thousands and thousands of quips, lost forever. How to give a notion of his verve, his passion, his madness? “You’re a mixture of God and Quixote.” I told him once. At the time he was flattered, but the next morning, very early, he came to tell me, “I don’t like that business about Don Quixote.”
*
Read somewhere the statement “God speaks only of Himself.” On this specific pointy the Almighty has more than one rival.
*
I have never met one deranged mind that lacked curiosity about God. Are we to conclude from this that there exists a link between the search for the absolute and the disaggregation of the brain?
*
How many missed opportunities to compromise myself with God!
*
Writing and worship do not go together: like it or not, to speak of God is to regard Him from on high. Writing is the creature’s revenge, and his answer to a botched Creation.
*
Defeat being the order of the day, it is natural that God should thereby benefit. Thanks to the snobs who pity or abuse Him, He enjoys a certain vogue. But how long will He still be interesting?
*
Leukemia is the garden where God blooms.
*
Many times I have sought refuge in that lumber room which is Heaven, many times I have yielded to the need to suffocate in God!
*
Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.
*
I have dispatched God out of a need for meditation, I have rid myself of a last nuisance.
*
“You must do some work, gain your livelihood, muster your strength.”
“My strength? I’ve wasted my strength, used it all up erasing whatever traces of God I could find within myself… and now I’ll be unemployed forever!”
*
What is the use of getting rid of God in order to fall back on yourself? What good this substitution of one carrion for another?
*
The tenacity I have deployed to combat the magic of suicide would have easily sufficed to achieve my salvation, to pulverize myself within God.
*
What a pity that to reach God we must pass through faith!
*
It is not God, it is Grief which enjoys the advantages of ubiquity.
*
In the past, with love or hatred, we ventured into God, Who, from the inexhaustible Nothing He once was, is now — to the great despair of mystics and atheists — no more than a problem.
*
Even when we believe we have dislodged God from our soul, He still lingers: we realize that He finds it tedious there, but we no longer have sufficient faith to entertain Him …
*
the converts, the nouveaux riches of the Absolute.
*
Without Bach, Theology would be devoid of an object, Creation would be fictive, and Nothingness peremptory.
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
*

“When I shave,” this half-mad man once told me, “who if not God keeps me from cutting my own throat?” — Faith, in other words, would be no more than an artifice of the instinct of self-preservation. Biology everywhere.
*
Some souls God Himself could not save were He to kneel and pray for them.
*
After certain fits of eternity and of fever, we wonder why we have not deigned to be God.
*
To stockpile fatalities, to flounder between catechisms and orgies, to wallow in the distraction, and — besotted nomad — to model oneself on God, that stateless exile …
*
As is only fair, I itemized the arguments favorable to God; His inexistence seemed to me to emerge intact. He has the genius of calling Himself into question by all His works; His defenders render Him odious; His worshipers, suspect. If you fear loving Him, you need merely open your Aquinas …

And I think of that Central European theology professor questioning one of his students about the proofs of the existence of God: she goes through the historical argument, the ontological, etc. But she is careful to add: “All the same I don’t believe in Him.” The professor is annoyed, takes up the proofs again, one by one; she shrugs and persists in her incredulity. Then the master draws himself up to his full height, scarlet with faith: “Young lady, I give you my word of honor that He exists!”

… An argument in itself worth all the theological Summae.

What are we to say about Immortality? To seek to elucidate it, or simply to approach it, is either aberration or fraud. Treatises nonetheless reveal its impossible fascination. If we are to believe them, we have only to entrust ourselves to a few deductions hostile to Time… And there we are, furnished with eternity, indemnified against the dust, exempt from agony.

It is not these trifles which have made me doubt my fragility. How much, on the other hand, I’ve been troubled by the meditations of an old friend, a somewhat unhinged itinerant musician! Like all lunatics, he is beset with the problems he puts to himself: he has “solved” any number. That day, after he had made his rounds of the cafe terraces, he came to question me about… immortality. “It’s unthinkable,” I told him, at once seduced and repelled by his timeless eyes, his wrinkles, his rags. A certainty inspired him: “You’re mistaken not to believe in it; if you don’t believe in it, you won’t survive. I’m sure that death will have no power over me. Moreover, whatever you say, everything has a soul. There! did you see the birds flying about in the streets, then suddenly rising above the houses to look at Paris? There’s a soul there, such things cannot die!”
*
Too bad that God has not kept a monopoly of “me” and that He should have entitled us to speak in our own name. It would have been so simple to spare us the scourge of “I”!
*
History is the obstacle to ultimate revelation, the shackle we can strike off only if we have perceived the nullity of every event except the one that this very perception represents, and thanks to which we attain at moments to “the real truth,” i.e., to the victory over all truths. It is then that we understand Mommsen’s words: “A historian must be like God, he must love everyone and everything, even the devil.” In other words, cease to prefer, occupy yourself with absence, with the obligation to be nothing ever again. We may imagine the delivered as a historian suddenly stricken with intemporality.
*
I would not want to live in a world drained of all religious feeling. I am not thinking of faith but of that inner vibration which, independent of any belief in particular, projects you into, and sometimes above God . . .
*
That day, we happened to be discussing “theology” at table. The housemaid, an illiterate peasant woman, was listening where she stood. “I only believe in God when I have a toothache,” she said. After a whole life, her remark is the only one I remember.
*
According to a Gnostic Revelation, we fall short of the Most High when we call Him infinite, for He is, it is said, much, more than that.
I should like to know the name of this author who has so remarkably seen the nature of God’s extravagant singularity.
*
Are you a reactionary? —If you say so, but in the same sense that God is . . .
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even with God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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How explain that everything we want to do and, still more, everything we do, seems to us crucial? The folly which made God emerge from His aboriginal sloth is to be recognized in the least of our gestures—and that is our great excuse.
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As long as we lived amid elegant terrors, we accommodated ourselves quite well to God. When others—more sordid because more profound—took us in charge, we required another system of references, another boss. The Devil was the ideal figure. Everything in him agrees with the nature of the events of which he is the agent, the regulating principle: his attributes coincide with those of time.
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“Henceforth, time will no longer exist,” announces that impromptu metaphysician who is the Angel of the Apocalypse, and thereby announces the end of the Devil, the end of history. Thus the mystics are right to seek God in themselves, or elsewhere, anywhere but in this world of which they make a tabula rasa, without for all that stooping to rebellion. They leap outside the age: a madness to which the rest of us, captives of duration, are rarely susceptible. If only we were as worthy of the Devil as they are of God!
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To keep one’s secret is the most fruitful of activities. It torments, erodes, threatens you. Even when confession is addressed to God, it is an outrage against ourselves, against the mainspring of our being. The apprehensions, shames, fears from which both religious and profane therapeutics would deliver us constitute a patrimony we should not allow ourselves to be dispossessed of, at any cost.
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More than one contemporary novelist reminds me of a mystic who has transcended God. Having reached this point—that is, nowhere— the mystic can no longer pray, since he has passed beyond the object of his prayers. But why do the novelists who have transcended the novel persist in writing them?
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The novelist, whose art consists of auscultation and apocrypha, transforms our reticence into gossip columns. Even as a misanthrope he has a passion for what is human: he wallows in it. What a pathetic figure he cuts beside the mystics with their madness, their “inhumanity!” And then, after all, God is of a different class. We can conceive of bothering about Him. But I cannot comprehend our attachment to beings. I dream of the depths of the Ungrund, the reality anterior to the corruptions of time, and whose solitude, superior to God, will forever separate me from myself and from my kind, from the language of love, from the prolixity that results from our curiosity about other people.
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But what can we say of an Angelus Silesius, whose distichs readily contradict one another and possess only one theme in common: God—presented in so many aspects that it is difficult to identify the true one? The Cherubic Wanderer, a series of irreconcilable remarks, a splendor of confusion, expresses only the strictly subjective states of its author: to try to detect its unity, its system, is to spoil its capacities for seduction. Angelus Si-lesius is preoccupied less with God than with his own god.
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It is a mistake to suppose that mysticism derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vitality. A Luis of Leon, a John of the Cross crowned an age of great enterprises and were necessarily contemporaries of the Conquest.
Far from being defectives, they fought for their faith, attacked God head on, appropriated heaven for themselves.
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Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond. And if, nonetheless, the obsession of another world were to pursue us, it would be permissible to construct, to project one for the occasion, if only to satisfy our thirst for the invisible. What matters are our sensations, their intensity and their virtues, as our capacity to fling ourselves into a madness that is not sacred. In the unknown, we can go as far as the saints, without making use of their means. It will be enough for us to constrain reason to a long silence. Handed over to ourselves, nothing will keep us from acceding to the delicious suspension of all our faculties. A man who has glimpsed these states knows that our movements there lose their habitual direction: we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we? A question without object: we no longer take place …
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To attack God, to seek to dethrone Him, to supplant Him, is an exploit in bad taste, the performance of an envious man who takes a vain satisfaction in coming to grips with a unique and uncertain Enemy. Whatever form it takes, atheism presumes a lack of manners, as does, for converse reasons, apologetics; for is it not an indelicacy as well as a hypocritical charity, an impiety to do battle in order to sustain God, to assure Him, whatever the cost, a—longevity? The love or the hate we bear Him reveals not so much the quality of our anxieties as the grossness of our cynicism.

We are responsible for this state of affairs only in part. From Tertullian to Kierkegaard, by accentuating the absurdity of faith, Christianity has created an undercurrent which, now appearing in broad daylight, has overflowed the Church. What believer, in his fits of lucidity, does not consider himself a servant of the Irrational? God was to suffer for it. Hitherto we granted Him our virtues; we dared not lend Him our vices. Humanized, He resembles us now: none of our defects is alien to Him. Never have the broadening of theology and the thirst for anthropomorphism been carried so far. This modernization of Heaven marks its end. How can we venerate an advanced God, an up-to-date God? To His misfortune, He will not soon recover His “infinite transcendence.”

“Beware,” you might argue, “beware what you call a ‘failure of manners’ You are only denouncing atheism the better to sacrifice to it.”

Upon myself I am only too aware of the stigmata of my time: I cannot leave God in peace; along with the snobs, I entertain myself by repeating that He is dead, as if that had any meaning. By such impertinence we hope to despatch our solitudes, and the supreme phantom which inhabits them. In reality, as they increase they merely bring us closer to what haunts them.

When Nothingness invades me and, according to an Oriental formula, I attain to the “vacuity of the void,” it so happens that, crushed by such an extremity, I fall back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot, to contradict myself and, multiplying my frissons, to seek in Him a stimulant. The experience of the Void is the unbeliever’s mystic temptation, his possibility for prayer, his moment of plenitude. At our limits, a God appears, or something that serves his turn.
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Peter of Alcantara managed to sleep no more than one hour a night: was this not a sign of strength? And they were all strong, for they destroyed their bodies only in order to derive a further power from them. We think of them as gentle; no beings were tougher. What is it they propose? The virtues of disequilibrium. Avid for every kind of wound, hypnotized by the unwonted, they have undertaken the conquest of the only fiction worth the trouble; God owes them everything: his glory, his mystery, his eternity. They lend existence to the inconceivable, violate Nothing in order to animate it: how could gentleness accomplish such an exploit?

Contrary to that abstract, false void of the philosophers, the mystics’ nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, discharge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of thought. To deify oneself, to destroy in order to regain oneself, to engulf oneself in one’s own lucidity demands more resource and temerity than all the rest of our actions. Ecstasy—the limit-condition of sensation, fulfillment by the wreck of consciousness—is available only to those who, venturing outside themselves, substitute for the commonplace illusion which grounded their life another and supreme illusion in which everything is resolved, in which everything is transcended. Here the mind is suspended, reflection abolished and, with it, the logic of disarray. If we could, after the example of the mystics, pass beyond the evidence, beyond the impasse which proceeds from it, if we could become that dazzled, divine errantry, if we could, like them, reascend to the true nothingness! With what skill they plagiarize God, pillage Him, strip Him of His attributes with which they arm themselves in order to … remake Him! Nothing can resist the effervescence of their madness, that expansion of their soul forever threatening to fabricate another heaven, another earth. Everything they touch takes on the color of being. Having understood the disadvantage of seeing and of leaving things as they are, they have forced themselves to denature them. An optical defect on which they lavish all their care. No trace of reality, they know, subsists after the passage, after the devastations of clairvoyance. Nothing is, that is their point of departure, that is the evidence which they have managed to conquer, to reject, in order to reach the affirmation: everything is. Until we have followed the path which has led them to so surprising a conclusion, we shall never be on an equal footing with them.
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Other reasons combine to make the mystic a heretic. If he is reluctant to let an external authority regulate his relations with God, he is no readier to admit meddling from on high: it is all he can do to tolerate Jesus.
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The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer. It was appropriately that Jakob Boehme called the Devil “Nature’s cook,” whose art lends a. savor to everything. God himself, positing from the first the necessity of the adversary, acknowledged that He could not do without a struggle, attacking and being attacked.
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As much obsessed by the City he would destroy as by the one he would build, he pays less attention to relations betwen man and God than to those between man and man. Read the famous Epistles carefully: not one moment of detachment or delicacy or distinction; everything is breathless frenzy, plebeian hysteria, hatred of learning and of the solitude which is its condition. Intermediaries everywhere, connections, contacts, clannishness: the Father, the Mother, the Son, angels, saints—not a trace of intellectuality, no coherence of concept, no attempt to understand. Sins, retributions, the bookkeeping of vice and virtue. A religion without inquiry: an anthropomorphic debauch. I blush for the God it offers; disqualifying Him constitutes a duty.
Neither Lao-Tse nor Buddha allude to an identifiable Being; scorning the artifices of faith, they invite us to meditation; to engage our minds, they establish its limit: the Tao, Nirvana. They had a different notion of man.
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To make an essential experiment, to free oneself from appearances, it is not necessary to confront the great problems; anyone can descant on God or acquire a metaphysical shellac. Reading, conversation, leisure suffice. Nothing is more commonplace than the ersatz troubled soul, for everything can be learned, even angst.

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It is said in the Apocalypse that the worst torments await those whose foreheads are not marked by the “seal of God.” All will be spared, except these. Their sufferings will resemble those of a man stung by scorpions, and they will seek death in vain, the death which is nonetheless within them …
Not to be marked by the “seal of God.” How well I understand that, how well I understand that!
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The mystics themselves employ subterfuges, practice every form of evasion, flight tactics : for them death is only an obstacle to be surmounted, a barrier which separates them from God, a last step in duration. In this life, they sometimes manage—thanks to ecstasy, that springboard— to leap beyond time: an instantaneous trajectory by which they achieve only “fits” of beatitude. They must disappear for good if they would attain the object of their desires; hence they love death because it permits them to realize these desires, and they hate death because it delays so long in coming. The soul, according to Theresa of Avila, aspires only to its creator, but “it sees at the same time that it is impossible to possess its creator if it does not die; and since it is impossible for the soul to put itself to death, it dies of the desire to die, until it is actually in danger of death.”

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