Cioran on cessation

“In this our life”—to be in life: suddenly I am struck by the strangeness of such an expression, as if it applied to no one.
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Haunted, obsessed by abdication, as far back as I can remember. But abdication of what? If I once longed to be “someone,” it was only for the satisfaction of someday being able to say, like Charles V at Yuste: “I am no longer anything.”
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With the passage of time, I am convinced that my first years were a paradise. But I am undoubtedly mistaken. If there was ever a paradise, I must look for it earlier than all my years.
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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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I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, and I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.
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Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.
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There was a time when time did not yet exist…. The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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The monk-errant, the wandering friar—so far, the supreme achievement. To reach the point of no longer having anything to renounce! Such must be the dream of any disabused mind.
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What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.
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The amount of emptiness I have accumulated, while keeping my individual status — the miracle of not having exploded under the weight of so much nonexistence!
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Sarvakarmaphalatyâga . . . Years ago, having written this spellbinding word in capital letters on a sheet of paper, I had tacked it to the wall of my room so I could stare at it throughout the day. It remained there for months, until I finally took it down because I realized I was becoming more and more attached to its magic and less and less to its content. Yet what it signifies: detachment from the fruit of action, is of such importance that anyone who had truly possessed himself of it would have nothing more to accomplish, since he would have reached the one valid end, the real truth that annihilates all the others and exposes their emptiness, being empty itself, moreover—but this emptiness is conscious of itself. Imagine a greater awareness, a further step toward awakening, and he who takes it will be no more than a ghost, a phantom.
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All great conversions are born from the sudden revelation of life's meaninglessness. Nothing could be more moving or more impressive than this sudden apprehension of the void of existence.
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The day I read the list of nearly all the Sanskrit words that designate the absolute, I realized that I had taken the wrong path, the wrong country, the wrong idiom.
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Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.
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“Meditate but one hour upon the selfs nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man.” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sea to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over- the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.
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At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.”
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A middle-aged woman, passing me on the street, took it into her head to announce, without looking at me, “Today I see nothing but walking corpses wherever I look.” Then, still without looking at me, she added, “I’m crazy, aren’t I, Monsieur?”
“Not all that crazy,” I replied, with a glance of complicity.
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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!
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To trace back to the sovereign zero, out of which emerges that subaltern zero that constitutes ourselves. . . .
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.
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I should like to forget everything and waken to a light before time.
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No use counting on the windfall of being alone — always escorted by oneself!
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The merest subservience, even to the desire to die, unmasks our loyalty to the impostures of the self.
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The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing.
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The road to ecstasy and the experience of the void presupposes a will to make the soul a tabula rasa, a striving towards psychogical blankness. Once it has totally rejected the world, the soul is ripe for a long-term and fecund emptiness.
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It would be hard to find a more self-denying mystic than Eckhart, who totally managed to repress his animal instincts. His rejection of nature let him to detachment from wordly things, a precondition for attachment to God. Aware of the painful dissonance between life and eternity, he gave up the former without the least hesitation.
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Nietzsche says somewhere: "You have been searching for the heaviest load, and you have found yourself!"
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I think of Man, and see only shadows; I think of shadows and see only myself.
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According to Eckhart, God hates nothing more than time and our commitment to it. In their longing for eternity, God and Eckhart have only contempt for "the smell and taste of time".
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Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?
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To recover our first absence, let us follow our cosmogonies in reverse and, since the modesty of dying fails us, let us annihilate at least every trace in ourselves of the here and now, down to the last memory of what we were. May some god grant us the power to resign from everything...
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Those who cannot benefit from their possibilities of nonexistence are strangers to themselves: puppets, objects “furnished” with a self, numbed by a neutral time that is neither duration nor eternity. To exist is to profit by our share of unreality, to be quickened by each contact with the void that is within. To this void the puppet remains insensible, abandons it, permits it to decay, to die out …
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Ceasing to live in terms of a self ...  I no longer belonged to myself.
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We last only as long as our fictions.
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*A victim of crucial preoccupations, I had taken to my bed in the middle of the afternoon, an ideal position from which to ponder a nirvana without remainder, without the slightest trace of an ego, that obstacle to deliverance, to the state of non-thought. A sentiment of blessed extinction initially, then a blessed extinction without sentiment. I believed myself on the threshold of the final stage; it was only its parody, only the swerve into torpor, into the abyss of ... a nap.

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No longer to be tempted save by what lies beyond . . . extremes.
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To know, in vulgar terms, is to get over something; to know, in absolute terms, is to get over everything. Illumination represents one further step: the certainty that henceforth we will never again be taken in, a last glance at illusion.
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For an instant, I think I experienced what absorption into Brahma might signify for an adept of the Vedanta. How much I longed for that instant to be extensible—infinitely !
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The advantages of a state of eternal potentiality seem to me so considerable that when I begin listing them, I can’t get over the fact that the transition to Being could ever have occurred.
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Not one moment when I am not external to the universe! … No sooner have I lamented over myself, pitying my wretched condition, than I realize that the terms in which I described my misfortune were precisely those which define the first characteristic of the “supreme being.”

Think of Rilke, that expatriate de luxe, and of the number of solitudes he had to accumulate in order to liquidate his connections, in order to establish a foothold in the invisible. It is not easy to be nowhere, when no external condition obliges you to do so. Even the mystic attains his askesis only at the cost of monstrous efforts. To extricate oneself from the world—what a labor of abolition!
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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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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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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.
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If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest.
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When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: “What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?” he did not answer. He smiled. There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s why. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit It is Iteration, supreme impasse….
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself …
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.
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I am distinct from all my sensations. I fail to understand how. I even fail to understand whose they are. Moreover, who is this I initiating the three propositions?
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I ponder C., for whom drinking coffee was the sole reason to exist. One day when I was eloquently vaunting Buddhism to him, he replied, “Well, yes, nirvana, all right, but not without a coffee”. We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.
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I was about to go out when, in order to tie my scarf, I glanced at myself in the mirror. Suddenly an unspeakable terror: who is that? Impossible to recognize myself. Though I had no trouble identifying my overcoat, my necktie, my hat, I couldn’t make out who I was, for I was not myself— that was not me. This lasted a certain number of seconds: twenty, thirty, forty? When I managed to come to my senses, the terror persisted. I had to wait for it to consent to disappear.
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How could I resign myself even for a moment to what is not eternal? Yet this happens to me — at this very moment, for example.
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The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
[Easier to come to think of it; perhaps. But such obstinacy, is very hard to be rid of, no matter what time, even if one wishes to be rid of oneself].
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What a pity that “nothingness” has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
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