The more we consider the Buddha’s last exhortation, “Death is inherent in all created things; labor ceaselessly for your salvation,” the more we are troubled by the impossibility of feeling ourselves as an aggregate, a transitory if not fortuitous convergence of elements. We readily conceive ourselves as such in the abstract; in the immediate, we physically gainsay it, as if we were faced with some unassimilable evidence. So long as we have not triumphed over this organic repugnance, we shall continue to suffer that illusion-based scourge which is the craving to exist.
That we unmask things, that we stigmatize them with the name of appearances counts for nothing, for we admit thereby that they harbor being. We cling to anything, if only we don’t have to tear ourselves away from that fascination accountable for our actions and even our nature, from that primal dazzle which keeps us from discerning the nonreality in everything.
I am a “being” by metaphor; if I were one in fact, I should remain so forever, and death, stripped of meaning, would have no hold on me. “Labor ceaselessly for your salvation”—that is, don’t forget that you are a fugitive assemblage, a composite whose ingredients are only waiting to come apart. Salvation, indeed, has a meaning only if we are provisional to the point of mockery; if there were the slightest principle of duration in us, we should have been forever saved or lost: no more quest, no more horizon. If deliverance matters at all, our unreality is a real godsend.
. . .
We should deprive being of all its attributes, make it no longer the support, the site, of all our attachments, the eternal reassuring impasse, a prejudice—the most deeply rooted of all, the one we are most accustomed to. We are accomplices of being, or of what seems so to us, for there is no being, there is only the ersatz of being. If there were a true one, we should still have to release ourselves from it, extirpate it, since everything which is turns to subjection and shackles. Let us ascribe to others the status of shades; we shall separate ourselves from them all the more easily. If we are mad enough to believe they exist, we expose ourselves to nameless miscalculations. Let us have the prudence to acknowledge that everything that happens to us, every event, like every bond, is inessential, and that if there is a knowledge, what it must show us is the advantage of maneuvering among ghosts.
Thought, too, is a prejudice, a shackle. It liberates only at the beginning, when it permits us to break certain moorings; afterwards, all it is capable of is to absorb our energy and to paralyze our impulses toward liberation. That it can help us in no way is sufficiently proved by the happiness we feel when we suspend it. Like desire, to which it is related, thought feeds on its own substance; it likes to manifest, to multiply itself. At best, it can tend toward truth, but what defines thought is bother: We think by a liking for thought, as we desire by a liking for desire. In either case, a fever amid fictions, an over-exertion within nescience. The man who knows has recovered from all the fables engendered by desire and by thought; he leaves the current, no longer consents to the deception. To think is to participate in the inexhaustible illusion which begets and devours itself, greedy to perpetuate and destroy itself; to think is to compete with delirium. In so much fever, the only sensible thing is the pause when we breathe, the moments of suspension when we get the better of our hard breathing: the experience of the void—which is identified with the totality of such pauses, of such intervals in delirium—implies the momentary suppression of desire, for it is desire which plunges us into nescience, which sets us straying, which drives us to project being all around us.
The void allows us to erode the idea of being; but it is not drawn into this erosion itself; it survives an attack which would be self-destructive for any other idea. It is true that the void is not an idea but what helps us rid ourselves of any idea. Each idea represents one more mooring; we must free the mind of them, as we must free ourselves of all beliefs, those obstacles to withdrawal. We shall succeed only by raising ourselves above the operations of thought: as long as thought functions, as long as thought is rife, it keeps us from discerning the depths of the void, perceptible only when the fevers of the mind and of desire diminish.
All our beliefs being intrinsically superficial and governing only appearances, it follows that all are on the same level, at the same degree of unreality. We are constituted to live with them, we are constrained to do so: They form the elements of our ordinary, everyday malediction. This is why, when we happen to expose them and sweep them away, we enter into the unheard-of, into an expansion next to which everything seems pale, episodic, even that very malediction. Our limits retreat, if we have any left. The void—myself without me—is the liquidation of the adventure of the “I”—it is being without any trace of being, a blessed engulfment, an incomparable disaster.
(The danger is to convert the void into a substitute for being, and thereby to thwart its essential function, which is to impede the mechanism of attachment. But if the void itself becomes the object of attachment, would it not have been wiser to abide by being and the cortege of illusions which follows it? In order to throw off our fetters, we must learn to adhere to nothing any longer, if not to the nothing of freedom.)
. . .
Ideally, we should lose—without suffering from the loss—our liking for beings and for things. Every day we should honor someone, creature or object, by renouncing them. Thereby we should arrive, inventorying appearances and dismissing them one after the other, in perpetual withdrawal, the very secret of joy. Everything that we appropriate, our knowledge even more than our material acquisitions, merely feeds our anxiety; on the other hand, what calm, what radiance when that frenzied pursuit of possessions, even spiritual ones, abates! It is already a serious matter to say “me,” more serious still to say “mine,” for that supposes an additional collapse, a reinforcement of our allegiance to the world. It is a consolation, the notion that we possess nothing, that we are nothing; the supreme consolation resides in the victory over this notion as well.
So closely does anxiety adhere to being, that it must tear itself away if it would overcome itself. If it aspires to rest in God, it will succeed in doing so only insofar as He is superior to being or at least insofar as He contains a zone where being is reduced or rarefied: it is here that, no longer having anything to contend with, anxiety is freed and approaches those confines where God, liquidating His last vestiges of being, lets Himself be tempted by the void.
. . .
The sage, as the East has always known, refuses to make plans, never projects. Hence you would be a kind of sage. . . . To tell the truth, you make plans, but it revolts you to carry them out. The more you brood over one, the more you feel, abandoning it, a well-being which can reach the point of ecstasy.
Everyone lives in and on the project, consequence of nescience: a metaphysical confusion on the scale of the species. For the awakened, becoming, and a fortiori every action which is inserted within it, is no more than a lure, a deception begetting disgust or dread.
What matters is not to produce but to understand. And to understand signifies to discern the degree of awakening to which a being has achieved, his capacity to perceive the sum of unreality which enters into each phenomenon.
. . .
Let us abide by the concrete and the void, let us proscribe whatever is located between the two: “culture,” “civilization,” “progress.” Let us brood over the best formula ever devised here on earth: manual labor in a monastery. . . . There is no truth, except in physical expenditure and in contemplation; the rest is accidental, useless, unhealthy. Health consists in exercise and in vacuity, in muscles and meditation; in no case in thought. To meditate is to be absorbed into an idea and to be lost there, whereas to think is to leap from one idea to the next, to delight in quantity, to accumulate trifles, to pursue concept after concept, goal after goal. To meditate and to think are two divergent, even incompatible activities.
To abide by the void—is this not also a form of pursuit? No doubt, but it is to pursue the absence of pursuit, to aim at a goal which sets aside all the others from the start. We live in anxiety because no goal can satisfy us, because over all our desires, and a fortiori over being as such, floats a fatality which necessarily affects those accidents which are individuals. Nothing of what becomes actual escapes forfeiture. The void —a leap outside this fatality—is, like every product of quietism, antitragic in essence. Thanks to the void we might learn to recover ourselves by climbing back toward our origins, toward our eternal virtuality. Does it not put an end to all our desires? And they—what are they, taken together, next to a single moment when we pursue none, when we feel none! Happiness is not in desire but in the absence of desire, more precisely in our enthusiasm for that absence—in which we would like to wallow, to sink, to vanish, to exclaim. . . .
. . .
When the void itself seems too heavy for us or too impure, we hurl ourselves toward a nakedness beyond any conceivable form of space, while the last moment of time rejoins the first one and dissolves into it.
. . .
Let us scour consciousness of everything it includes, of every universe it drags in its wake, let us purge ourselves along with perception, confine ourselves to white, let us forget all the colors except the one which denies them. What peace, once we annul diversity, once we escape the calvary of nuance and are engulfed in the uniform! Consciousness as pure form, then the very absence of consciousness.
To elude the intolerable, let us seek out a counterirritant, a means of avoidance, a region where no sensation condescends to take a name, nor any appetite to be made flesh—let us recover that initial repose and abolish, with the past, odious memory and consciousness above all, our age-old enemy whose mission it is to impoverish us, to erode us. Unconsciousness, on the contrary, is nutritive, it fortifies, it makes us participate in our beginnings, in our primal integrity, and plunges us back into beneficent chaos, the chaos before the trauma of individuation.
. . .
Nothing matters: a great discovery, if ever there was one, from which no one has been able to gain any advantage. To this discovery, supposedly a depressing one, only the void, of which it is the motto, can give a stirring resonance; only the void takes its place, takes the place of everything, fulfills all the irreparable into the possible. That there is no self we know, but our knowledge is encumbered with reservations. Luckily the void is there, and when the self is withdrawn the void takes its place, takes the place of everything, fulfills all our expectations, affords us the certitude of our nonreality. The void—the abyss without vertigo.
Instinctively, we incline to the self; everything in us lays claim to it: It satisfies our demands for continuity, for solidity, it confers upon us, against all evidence, a timeless dimension: Nothing more normal than to cling to it, even when we put it in question, divulge its impostures: The self is any living man’s reflex. . . . All the same it seems inconceivable for us once we consider the self coldly: it crumbles, it vanishes, it is nothing more than the symbol of a fiction.
Our first movement bears us toward the intoxication of identity, toward the dream of indistinction, toward Atman, which answers our deepest, most secret summons. But as soon as we gain a little perspective, coming to our senses, we abandon the supposed basis of our being, turning toward the fundamental destructability, knowledge and experience of which, a disciplined obsession, lead to nirvana, to plenitude within the void.
. . .
It is because it gives us the illusion of permanence, it is because it promises what it cannot provide, that the idea of the absolute is suspect, not to say pernicious. Assailed at the roots of our being, utterly unfit to last, perishable to our very essence, it is not consolation we require but cure. The absolute neither resolves our perplexities nor suppresses our ills: It is merely a makeshift and a palliative. A doctrine which extols it is true insofar as it confines itself to analysis, insofar as it exposes appearances; it inspires doubts as soon as it confronts them with an ultimate reality. Once we leave the realm of the illusory and struggle to substitute the indestructible for it, we skid into falsehood. If we lie less with the void, it is because we do not seek it out for itself, for the truth it is supposed to contain, but for its therapeutic virtues; we make it into a remedy, we imagine it will correct the mind’s oldest deviation, which consists in supposing that something exists. . . .
A compromised animal, man has passed the stage of being content with a “hope”; what he expects is not just another artifice, but deliverance. Who will bring it to him? On this point, the only one that matters, Christianity has shown itself less helpful than Buddhism, and Western speculation less effective than Oriental. Why bother with abstractors deaf to our cries or with redeemers busy rubbing salt into our wounds? And what is still to be hoped for from this part of the world which regards contemplation as abulia, awakening as torment?
We need some saving shock. It is incredible that a Saint Thomas should have seen in stupor an “obstacle to philosophic meditation,” whereas it is precisely when we are “stupefied” that we begin to understand, that is, to perceive the inanity of all “truths.” Stupor benumbs us only to awaken us the more readily: it opens to us, it releases us to the essential. A complete metaphysical experience is nothing but an uninterrupted stupor—a triumphal stupor.
. . .
It is a sign of indigence to be unable to open ourselves to the purifying void, the void that appeases. We are so low, and so entangled in our philosophies that we have been able to conceive only nothingness, that sordid version of the void. We have projected all our uncertainties, all our miseries and terrors there, for what is nothingness, finally, but an abstract complement of hell, a performance of reprobates, the maximum effort toward the lucidity available to beings unsuited for deliverance? Too tainted by our impurities for it to let us make the leap toward a virgin concept such as the void is for us (the void, which has not inherited from, “taken after” hell, which is not contaminated by it), nothingness, in truth, represents only a sterile extremity, only a disconcerting, vaguely funereal way out, quite close to those attempts at renunciation which turn sour because too much regret is mixed in with them.
The void is nothingness stripped of its negative qualifications, nothingness transfigured. If we should manage to develop a taste for it, our relations with the world are transformed; something in us changes, though we keep our old defects. But we are no longer from here in the same way as before. This is why it is salutary to resort to the void in our crises of rage: our worst impulses are blunted upon that contact. Without the void, who knows, we might now be in prison or in some padded cell. The lessons in abdication it teaches also invite us to a subtler behavior with regard to our denigrators, our enemies. Should they be killed, or spared? Which does more harm, which gnaws deepest: vengeance, or victory over vengeance? How decide? In our uncertainty, let us choose the torture of not taking revenge.
Such is the limit-concession we can make if we are not saints.
. . .
Only the man oppressed by the universality of torment is ripe for deliverance. To try to free yourself without the awareness of this torment is either an impossibility or a vice. There is no gratuitous deliverance; we must be liberated from something, in this case from the omnipresence of the intolerable—which we suffer as much in the hypothesis of being as of non-being, since things and the appearances of things make us suffer equally. But the hypothesis of vacuity offers an advantage after all: it casts a clearer light over the excess of the torment, over the proportions it assumes and the inanity of the cause which provokes it. We always torture ourselves too much, whether this world is real or unreal. The majority, it is true, are unaware of how much they are suffering. It is the privilege of consciousness to waken to the excruciating, to perceive the throbbing illusion to which human beings are in thrall.
It is with deliverance as it is with Christian salvation: some theologian, in his scandalous naïveté, believes in redemption even while denying original sin; but if sin is not consubstantial with humanity, what meaning can we attribute to the advent of the redeemer? What has he come to redeem? Anything but accidental, our corruption is permanent, it is congenital. The same with iniquity: abusively charged with “mystery,” iniquity is an evidence, it is even what is most visible here on earth, where to put things back in order would require a savior for each generation, or rather for each individual.
. . .
Once we cease to desire, we become the citizen of all worlds and of none. It is by desire that we are from here; desire vanquished, we are no longer from anywhere and have nothing further to envy a saint nor a specter.
It may happen that there is happiness in desire, but beatitude appears only where every bond is broken. Beatitude is not compatible with this world. It is for beatitude that the hermit cuts all his moorings, for beatitude that he destroys himself.
. . .
Cow’s urine was the only medicine monks were authorized to use in the first Buddhist communities. One cannot imagine a more judicious restriction. If we pursue peace, we shall reach it only by rejecting whatever is a factor of disturbance, whatever man has grafted onto simplicity, onto his original health. Nothing exposes our failure better than the spectacle of a pharmacy: all the remedies desirable for each of our ills, but none for our essential ill, for the disease of which no human invention can cure us.
. . .
If believing ourselves unique is the result of an illusion, it is, let us admit, an illusion so total, so imperious that we are entitled to wonder if we can still call it one. How desist from what we shall never recover, from that pathetic and unheard-of nothing which bears our name? The illusion in question, source of all the pangs we must suffer, is so deeply anchored in each of us, that we can vanquish it only by means of a sudden whirlwind which, sweeping away the ego, leaves us alone, without anyone, without ourselves. . . .
Unfortunately, we cannot exterminate our desires; we can only weaken them, compromise them. We are up against the self, infected with the venom of the “I.” It is when we escape it, when we imagine we escape it, that we have some right to use the high words employed by the true (and the false) mysticism. As for a fundamental conversion, there is no such thing: we convert with our nature. Even the Buddha after illumination was only Siddhartha Gautama with knowledge in addition.
Everything we believe we have smothered rises to the surface again after a certain time: defects, vices, obsessions. The most patent imperfections we have “corrected” return disguised but as awkward as before. The pains we have taken to rid ourselves of them will not, however, have been altogether in vain. A desire, long supplanted, reappears; but we know it has come back; it no longer gnaws us in secret nor takes us unawares; it dominates us, subjugates us, we are still its slaves, true, but not consenting slaves. Every conscious sensation is a sensation we have unsuccessfully opposed. We are not the more pained for that, since its victory will have driven it from our deepest life.
. . .
In each encounter we have chosen what is easiest: God or His substitutes, persons in any case, in order to have someone to gossip or argue with. We have replaced contemplation with tension, thereby creating tiresomely emotional relations between divinity and ourselves. Only men who seek but are unwilling to find could have become virtuosi of the inner drama. The great modern discovery is spiritual malaise, the quartering between substance and vacuity, more precisely between the simulacre of each. Whence the cult of singularity, in every realm. In literature, a rare mistake is worth more than any tried, acknowledged truth. The unwonted, on the contrary, has no value on the spiritual level, where all that matters about an experience is its depth.
According to the Bhagavadgita, a man is lost to this world and to the other who is “given over to doubt,” that same doubt which Buddhism, for its part, cites among the five obstacles to salvation. This is because doubt is not depth or a search for depth but stagnation, the vertigo of stagnation. With doubt, it is impossible to advance, to arrive; doubt is corrosion and nothing but. When we suppose ourselves farthest from it, we relapse into it, and everything begins all over again. It must explode for us to be able to take the path of emancipation. Without this outburst which must pulverize even the most legitimate reasons for doubting, we perpetuate ourselves in malaise, we cultivate it, we avoid the great solutions, we corrode ourselves and delight in our corrosion.
. . .
The passion to withdraw, to leave no trace, is inaccessible to anyone attached to his name and to his work, and even more inaccessible to anyone who dreams of a name or a work—the trifler in short. Such a man, if he persists toward salvation, will achieve it, at best, only by bogging down in nirvana.
. . .
We do not conceive of a bitter mystic. Knowledge according to the world, clairvoyant aridity, excessive lucidity without an inner dimension, bitterness is the appanage of the man who, having cheated in his relations with the absolute and with himself, no longer knows what to hold onto nor whom to turn to. Bitterness is after all more frequent than we suppose, it is normal, everyday, the common lot. Joy, on the other hand, fruit of an exceptional moment, seems to rise up out of a disequilibrium, a derangement in the depths of our being, so contradictory is it to the appearances where we live. And if it were to come from elsewhere, from further than ourselves? Joy is expansion, and every expansion participates in another world, whereas bitterness is constriction, even if infinity looms in the background. But it is an infinity which crushes instead of liberating.
No, it is inconceivable that joy should be deranged, still less that it should come from nowhere; joy is so complete, so enveloping, so marvelously unendurable that we cannot confront it without some supreme reference. In any case it is joy and joy alone which allows the notion that we can forge gods out of our need for gratitude.
. . .
It is not difficult to imagine the language a contemporary man would use if he were obliged to declare his opinion about the only religion which has contributed a radical formula for salvation:
“The search for deliverance is justified only if we believe in transmigration, in the indefinite vagabondage of the self, and if we aspire to put an end to it. But for those of us who do not believe in this, what is there to put an end to? To this unique and infinitesimal duration? It is obviously too brief to deserve the exertion of withdrawing from it. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare is the cessation of this one—of this nightmare. As for nightmares, better give us another, we should be tempted to cry out, in order that our disgraces not end too soon, in order that they have time to follow us through several lives. . . .
“Deliverance corresponds to a necessity only for the man who feels threatened by an additional existence, who dreads the task of dying and dying all over again. For us, condemned not to be reincarnated, what is the use of struggling to liberate ourselves from . . . nothing? to free ourselves from a terror whose end is in sight? And what is the use of pursuing a supreme unreality, when everything here on earth is already unreal? Why bother ridding ourselves of something so little justified, so unfounded? . . .
“An increase in illusion and in torment, that is what each of us aspires to, each of those who have no opportunity to believe in the endless circle of births and deaths. We sigh for the curse of being reborn. The Buddha has really taken too much trouble to what end? A definitive death: what the rest of us are sure to obtain without meditations or mortifications, without any effort whatever. . . .”
It is more or less in this manner that our fallen man would express himself, if he consented to expose his real thoughts. And who would dare cast the first stone? Who hasn’t spoken this way to himself? We have sunk so deep into our own history that we want it to be perpetuated without respite. But whether we live once or a thousand times, whether we own one hour or all of them, the problem is the same: an insect and a god would not differ in their way of considering the fact of existing as such, which is so terrifying (as only a miracle can be) that when we linger over it, we conceive the desire to disappear forever, in order not to have to consider it again in other existences. It is on this phenomenon that the Buddha has insisted, and it is doubtful that he would have modified his conclusions if he had ceased believing in the mechanism of transmigration.
. . .
To find that everything lacks reality and not to put an end to it all, this inconsistency is not an inconsistency at all: taken to extremes, the perception of the void coincides with the perception of the whole, with the entrance into the All. At last we begin to see, we grope no longer, we are reassured, we are confirmed. If a chance of salvation exists outside of faith, it is in the faculty of enriching ourselves upon contact with unreality that we must seek it.
Even if the experience of the void were only a deception, it would still deserve to be tried. What it proposes, what it attempts, is to reduce to nothing both life and death, and this with the sole intention of making them endurable to us. If it occasionally succeeds, what more can we desire? Without it, no cure for the infirmity of being, nor any hope of reinstating, even for a few moments, the prenatal joy, the light of pure previousness.
From: The new gods by E. M. Cioran; translated from the French by Richard Howard
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