The point is that, in the last analysis, a man chooses what he does choose in order to obtain happiness, whether it is the immediate satisfaction of an urgent desire or a remote future happiness bought perhaps with present acceptance of suffering. This means that the questions ‘What is the purpose of existence?’ and ‘How is happiness to be obtained?’ are synonymous; for they are both the ethical question, ‘What should I do?’ But there is happiness and happiness, and the intelligent man will prefer the permanent to the temporary. The question, then, is ‘How is permanent happiness, if such a thing exists, to be obtained?’
Nanavira Thera
Happiness is no easy matter; it is very difficult to find in ourselves and impossible to find elsewhere.
Chamfort
The reduction of one's needs is indeed something that should be inculcated in youth. “The fewer needs one has, the happier one is” is an old but often unrecognized truth.
Lichtenberg
We must not follow those who advise us to have human thoughts, since we are human, and mortal thoughts, as mortals should; on the contrary, we should try to become immortal as far as is possible and do our utmost to live in accordance with what is highest in us.
Aristotle
Whatever is great in the sphere of the universally human must… not be communicated as a subject for admiration, but as an ethical requirement.
Kierkegaard
A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.
Pessoa
An ethics that does not command us to renounce is a crime against the dignity to which we should aspire and against the happiness which we can obtain.
The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space and time.
There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.
[There is no more important rule of conduct: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are more abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them]
Lichtenberg
Once I believe I have mastered a truth, the argument which interests me is not the one which confirms it but the one which refutes it.
[Valid as long believing is not replaced by direct knowledge. See also below ↓]
Nicolas Gomez Davila
The question that led to the essential condition of ‘knowing that I do not know’ set European thinking on solid ground. The essential thing is that I should have no illusions. Any method must have its origin here: starting from the fact that he knows that he does not know, man builds something, goes back to zero and finds his way forward. This is what Socrates originated. And where the mind refuses to be exposed and does not build on initial ignorance, there appears dogmatism.
Dragomir
[Yes, but since the Buddha knows, it is a function of faith to adhere to right dogmatism]
The word ‘inauthentic’ is used by Heidegger to describe the ostrich-like attitude of the man who seeks to escape from his inescapable self-responsibility by becoming an anonymous member of a crowd. This is the normal attitude of nearly everybody. To be ‘authentic’ a man must be constantly and deliberately aware of his total responsibility for what he is.
For example, a judge may disclaim personal responsibility for sentencing people to punishment. He will say that as a judge it is his duty to punish. In other words it is as an anonymous representative of the Judiciary that he punishes, and it is the Judiciary that must take the responsibility. This man is inauthentic. If he wishes to be authentic he must think to himself, whenever he sits on the Bench or draws his salary, ‘Why do I punish? Because, as a judge, it is my duty to punish.
Why am I a judge? Is it perhaps my duty to be a judge? No. I am a judge because I myself choose to be a judge. I choose to be one who punishes in the name of the Law. Can I, if I really wish, choose not to be a judge? Yes, I am absolutely free at any moment to stop being a judge, if I so choose. If this is so, when a guilty man comes up before me for sentence, do I have any alternative but to punish him? Yes, I can get up, walk out of the courtroom, and resign my job. Then if, instead, I punish him, am I responsible? I am totally responsible.’
Freud’s celebrated ‘unconscious’ withers and dies before the blast of Sartre’s criticism in L’Être et le Néant. Sartre gives us instead the notion of ‘bad faith’ or tacit self-deception, a far more delicate instrument. But the important point is this, that nothing of what I am at present can hide from reflexion; and I am thus totally open to self-criticism. Were this not so, meditation would be no more effective against our mental defilements than skin lotion is against smallpox.
But things are significant; that is to say, they are imperatives, they call for action (like the bottle in Alice in Wonderland labelled ‘Drink Me!’). Heidegger, and Sartre after him, describe the world as a world of tasks to be performed, and say that a man at every moment of his life is engaged in performing tasks (whether he specifically pays attention to them or not). Seen in this light the Four Noble Truths are the ultimate tasks for a man’s performance—Suffering commands ‘Know me absolutely!’, Arising commands ‘Abandon me!’, Cessation commands ‘Realize me!’, and the Path commands ‘Develop me!’.
But by transforming things into facts (and the Four Noble Truths, which are descriptions of things, into propositions) I automatically transform myself into logic—that is to say, I destroy my situation as an existing individual engaged in performing tasks in the world, I cease to be in concreto (in Kierkegaard’s terminology) and become sub specie æterni. (By regarding the Four Noble Truths as propositions, not as instructions, I automatically exempt myself from doing anything about them.) The world (if it can still be called a world) becomes a logician’s world—quite static and totally uninhabited. (It is significant that Wittgenstein, in his celebrated Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which helped to establish modern logical positivism, starts off by declaring:
‘1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’ Compare, in this connexion, the note in the Preface to Notes where it is said ‘Things, not facts, make up my world’.)
Nanavira Thera
Clearing the Path is a work book. Its purpose is to help the user to acquire a point of view that is different from his customary frame of reference, and also more satisfactory . Necessarily, an early step in accomplishing this change is the abandonment of specific mistaken notions about the Buddha’s Teaching and about the nature of experience. More fundamentally, however, this initial change in specific views may lead to a change in point-of-view, whereby one comes to understand experience from a perspective different from what one has been accustomed to—a perspective in which intention, responsibility, context, conditionality, hunger, and related terms will describe the fun-damental categories of one’s perception and thinking—and which can lead, eventually, to a fundamental insight about the nature of personal existence.
Such a change of attitude seldom occurs without considerable prior development, and this book is intended to serve as a tool in fostering that development. As such it is meant to be lived with rather than read and set aside. These notions are developed more fully throughout Clearing the Path but it is as well that they be stated concisely at the outset so that there need be no mistaking who this book is for: those who find their present mode of existence unsatisfactory and who sense, however vaguely, the need to make a fundamental change not in the world but in themselves.
Samanera Bodhesako
Yet, sometimes at night I get a feeling of claustrophobia; of being smothered by my own personality, of choking through being in the world. During these moments the universe seems a prison wherein I lie fettered by the chains of my senses and blinded through being myself. It is like being pinned underneath the hull of a capsized boat, yet being afraid to dive deeper and get clear. In those moments it seems that there must be a way out, and that through sloughing off the personality alone can it be taken.
Connolly
The most useful knowledge is to know that we have been deceived, and the most delightful discovery is to find out that we have been mistaken. ‘Capable of forsaking an error’—this is fine praise, and a fine quality.
Those who never retract love themselves better than truth.
Joubert
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