Cioran - The Undelivered

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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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. . . .

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Cioran - Thinking against oneself

ALMOST all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God, insofar as He interests us—it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role, it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Faithful to his appearances, the man of violence is not discouraged, he starts all over again, and persists, since he cannot exempt himself from suffering. His occasional efforts to destroy others are merely a roundabout route to his own destruction. Beneath his self-confidence, his braggadocio, lurks a fanatic of disaster. Hence it is among the violent that we meet the enemies of themselves. And we are all violent— men of anger who, having lost the key of quietude, now have access only to the secrets of laceration.

Instead of letting it erode us gradually, we decided to go time one better, to add to its moments our own. This new time grafted onto the old one, this time elaborated and projected, soon revealed its virulence: objectivized, it became history, a monster we have called up against ourselves, a fatality we cannot escape, even by recourse to the formulas of passivity, the recipes of wisdom.

Try as we will to take the “cure” of ineffectuality; to meditate on the Taoist fathers’ doctrine of submission, of withdrawal, of a sovereign absence; to follow, like them, the course of consciousness once it ceases to be at grips with the world and weds the form of things as water does, their favorite element—we shall never succeed. They scorn both our curiosity and our thirst for suffering; in which they differ from the mystics, and especially from the medieval ones, so apt to recommend the virtues of the hair shirt, the scourge, insomnia, inanition, and lament.

“A life of intensity is_contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one. But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves. Is religion declining? We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equaling that of the monasteries in their heyday. If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair.

The mind, as well as the body, pays for “a life of intensity.” Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being. And what for the great Chinaman was a symbol of failure, a proof of imperfection, constitutes for us the sole mode of possessing, of making contact with ourselves.

“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse). A maxim as profound as it is invalid. The apogee of indifference—how attain it, when our very apathy is tension, conflict, aggression? No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue.

According to our Chinese again, only the detached mind penetrates the essence of the Tao; the man of passion perceives only its effects: the descent to the depths demands silence, the suspension of our vibrations, indeed of our faculties. But is it not revealing that our aspiration to the absolute is expressed in terms of activity, of combat, that a Kierkegaard calls himself a “knight of Faith” and that a Pascal is nothing but a pamphleteer? We attack and we struggle; therefore we know only the effects of the Tao. Further, the failure of Quietism, that European equivalent of Taoism, tells the story of our possibilities, our prospects.

The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom’s first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything—the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?

There are certain forms of wisdom and deliverance which we can neither grasp from within nor transform into our daily substance, nor even frame in a theory. Deliverance, if we insist upon it, must proceed from ourselves: no use seeking it elsewhere, in a ready-made system or in some Oriental doctrine. Yet this is often what happens in many a mind avid, as we say, for an absolute. But such wisdom is fraudulent, such deliverance merely dupery. I am indicting not only theosophy and its adepts, but all those who adopt truths incompatible with their nature. More than one such man has an Instant India and supposes he has plumbed its secrets, when nothing—neither his character nor his training nor his anxieties—prepares him for any such thing. What a swarm of the pseudo-”delivered” stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear—do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle. They aim, further, so high that any conventional religion seems to them a family prejudice by which their “metaphysical mind” cannot be satisfied. To convert to India, doubtless that is more satisfying. But they forget that India postulates the agreement of idea and act, the identity of salvation and renunciation. When one possesses a “metaphysical mind,” such trifles are scarcely worth one’s concern.

After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are imprisoned in illusion. If he depends on them, he takes his revenge by studying them, a specialist in the underbelly of “noble” sentiments. His sloth, of a very rare quality, truly “delivers” him from a world of fools and dupes. About renunciation he knows more than many of your esoteric works. To be convinced of this, you need only walk out into the street… But you prefer the texts that teach mendicancy. Since no practical consequence accompanies your meditations, it will not be surprising that the merest bum is worth more than you … Can we conceive a Buddha faithful to his truths and to his palace? One is not “delivered-alive” and still a landowner. I reject the generalization of the lie, I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called “salvation” and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

*

When at every turn you confront us with “the absolute,” you affect a profound, inaccessible little ogle, as if you were at grips with a remote world, in a light, a darkness all your own, masters of a realm to which nothing outside of yourselves can gain access. You grant us other mortals a few scraps of the great discoveries you have just made, a few vestiges of your prospecting. But all your labors result in no more than this: you murmur one poor word, the fruit of your reading, of your learned frivolity, of your bookish void, your borrowed anguish.

The Absolute—all our efforts come down to undermining the sensibility which leads to the absolute. Our wisdom (or rather our unwisdom) repudiates it; relativists, we look for our equilibrium not in eternity but in time. The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes. Anyone who supposes he can avoid it is either boasting or blind. Stuck with appearances, we keep espousing an incomplete wisdom, half-fantasy and half-foolishness. If India, to quote Hegel again, represents “the dream of the infinite Spirit,” the turn of our intellect, as of our sensibility, obliges us to conceive of a Spirit incarnate, limited to historical processes, embracing not the world but the world’s moments, a faceted time which we escape only by fits and starts, and only when we betray our appearances.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality’s detriment. The degree of our liberation is measured by the quantity of undertakings from which we are emancipated, as by our capacity to convert any object into a non-object. But it is meaningless to speak of liberation apropos of a hurried humanity which has forgotten that we cannot reconquer life nor revel in it without having first abolished it.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonie verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes.

Gorged on sensations and on their corollary—becoming, we are “undelivered” by inclination and by principle, sentenced by choice, stricken by the fever of the visible, rummaging in surface enigmas of a piece with our bewilderment and our trepidation.

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

To resist happiness—the majority manages that; suffering is much more insidious. Have you ever tasted it? You will never be sated once you have, you will pursue it greedily and preferably where it does not exist, you will project it there since without it everything seems futile to you, drab. Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous. The savor and solution of things, accident and obsession, caprice and necessity—suffering will make you love appearance in whatever is most powerful, most lasting, and truest, and will tie you to itself forever, for “intense” by nature, it is, like any “intensity,” a servitude, a subjection. The soul unfettered, the soul indifferent and void— how in the world achieve that? How conquer absence, the freedom of absence? Such freedom will never figure among our mores, any more than “the dream of the infinite Spirit.”

To identify oneself with an alien doctrine, one must adopt it without restrictions: what is the use of acknowledging the truths of Buddhism and of rejecting transmigration, the very basis of the idea of renunciation? Of assenting to the Vedanta, of accepting the unreality of appearances and then behaving as if appearances existed? An inconsistency inevitable for any mind raised in the cult of phenomena. For it must be admitted: we have the phenomenon in our blood. We may scorn it, abhor it, it is nonetheless our patrimony, our capital of contortions, the symbol of our hysteria here on earth. A race of convulsionaries, at the center of a cosmic farce, we have imprinted on the universe the stigmata of our history and shall never be capable of that illumination which lets us die in peace. It is by our works, not by our silences, that we have chosen to disappear: our future may be read in our features, in the grimaces of agonized and busy prophets. The smile of the Buddha, that smile which overhangs the world, does not elucidate our faces. At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one’s sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire’s Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife”—that is our absolute, our eternity.

As for our redeemers, come among us for our greater harm, we love the noxiousness of their hopes and their remedies, their eagerness to favor and exalt our ills, the venom that infuses their “lifegiving” words. To them we owe our expertise in a suffering that has no exit. To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet’s equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone’s grasp; daylight strips us of the night’s gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved ail our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts.

Even as we ransack our own diseases, those of other people regard us no less. In an age of biographies, no one bandages his wounds without our attempting to lay them bare, to expose them to broad daylight; if we fail, we turn away, disappointed. And even he who ended on the cross— it is not because he suffered for us that he still counts for something in our eyes, but because he suffered and uttered several lamentations as profound as they were gratuitous. For what we venerate in our gods are our own defeats en beau.

*

Doomed to corrupted forms of wisdom, invalids of duration, victims of time, that weakness which appalls as much as it appeals to us, we are constituted of elements that all unite to make us rebels divided between a mystic summons which has no link with history and a bloodthirsty dream which is history’s symbol and nimbus. If we had a world all our own, it would matter little whether it was a world of piety or derision! We shall never have it, our position in existence lying at the intersection of our supplications and our sarcasms, a zone of impurity where sighs and provocations combine. The man too lucid to worship will also be too lucid to wreck, or will wreck only his … rebellions; for what is the use of rebelling only to discover, afterwards, a universe intact? A paltry monologue. We revolt against justice and injustice, against peace and war, against men and against the gods. Then we come around to thinking the worst old dotard may be wiser than Prometheus. Yet we do not manage to smother a scream of insurrection and continue fuming over everything and nothing: a pathetic automatism which explains why we are all statistical Lucifers.

Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something. What could be more contrary to the passive consideration of the world? But such is our fate: to be incurables who protest, pamphleteers on a pallet.

Our knowledge, like our experience, should paralyze us and make us indulgent to tyranny itself, once it represents a constant. We are sufficiently clear-sighted to be tempted to lay down our arms; yet the reflex of rebellion triumphs over our doubts; and though we might have made accompushed Stoics, the anarchist keeps watch within us and opposes our resignations.

“We shall never accept history”: that, it seems to me, is the adage of our incapacity to be true sages, true madmen. Are we then no more than the ham-actors of wisdom and of madness? Whatever we do, with regard to our acts we are subject to a profound insincerity.

From all evidence, a believer identifies himself up to a certain point with what he does and with what he believes; there is no significant gap between his lucidity, on the one hand, and his thoughts and actions, on the other. This gap widens excessively in the false believer, the man who parades convictions without adhering to them. The object of his faith is a succedaneum. Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. But I cannot not subscribe to it. We can never ponder enough Kirilov’s description of Stavrogin: “When he believes, he doesn’t believe he believes; and when he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe he doesn’t believe.”

*

Even more than the style, the very rhythm of our life is based on the good standing of rebellion. Loath to admit a universal identity, we posit individuation, heterogeneity as a primordial phenomenon. Now, to revolt is to postulate this heterogeneity, to conceive it as somehow anterior to the advent of beings and objects. If I oppose the sole truth of Unity by a necessarily deceptive Multiplicity—if, in other words, I identify the other with a phantom—my rebellion is meaningless, since to exist it must start from the irreducibility of individuals, from their condition as monads, circumscribed essences. Every act institutes and rehabilitates plurality, and, conferring reality and autonomy upon the person, implicitly recognizes the degradation, the parceling-out of the absolute. And it is from the act, and from the cult attached to it, that the tension of our’mind proceeds, the need to explode and to destroy ourselves at the heart of duration. Modern philosophy, by establishing the superstition of the Ego, has made it the mainspring of our dramas and the pivot of our anxieties. To regret the repose of indistinction, the neutral dream of an existence without qualities, is pointless; we have chosen to be subjects, and every subject is a break with the quietude of Unity. Whoever takes it upon himself to attenuate our solitude or our lacerations acts against our interests, against our vocation. We measure an individual’s value by the sum of his disagreements with things, by his incapacity to be indifferent, by his refusal as a subject to tend toward the object. Whence the obsolescence of the idea of Good; whence the vogue of the Devil.

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. Let us pray to him, then, since far from being a product of our subjectivity, a creation of our need for blasphemy or solitude, he is the master of our questionings and of our panics, the instigator of our deviations. His protests, his violences have their own ambiguity: this “Great Melancholic” is a rebel who doubts. If he were simple, all of a piece, he would not touch us at all; but his paradoxes, his contradictions are our own: he is the sum of our impossibilities, serves as a model for our rebellions against ourselves, our self-hatred. The recipe for hell? It is in this form of revolt and hatred that it must be sought, in the torment of inverted pride, in this sensation of being a terrible negligible quantity, in the pangs of the “I,” that “I” by which our end begins …

Of all fictions, that of the golden age confounds us most: How could it have grazed our imaginations? It is in order to expose it, to denounce it, that history, mans aggression against himself, has taken its flight and form; so that to dedicate oneself to history is to learn to rebel, to imitate the Devil. We never imitate him so well as when, at the expense of our being, we emit time, project it outside ourselves and allow it to be converted into events. “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!

*

To be convinced that rebellion enjoys an undue privilege among us, we need merely reflect on the manner in which we describe minds unfit for it. We call them insipid. It is virtually certain that we are closed to any form of wisdom because we see in it a transfigured insipidity. However unjust such a reaction may be, I cannot help suffering it— to Taoism itself. Even knowing that it recommends efface-ment and abandonment in the name of the absolute, not of cowardice, I reject it at the very moment I suppose I have adopted it; and if I acknowledge Lao Tse’s victory a thousand times over, I still understand a murderer better. Between serenity and blood, it is toward blood one finds it natural to incline. Murder supposes and crowns revolt: the man who is ignorant of the desire to kill may profess all the subversive opinions he likes, he will never be anything but a conformist.

Wisdom and Revolt: two poisons. Unfit to assimilate them naively, we find neither one a formula for salvation. The fact remains that in the Satanic adventure we have acquired a mastery we shall never possess in wisdom. For us, even perception is an upheaval, the beginning of a trance or an apoplexy. A loss of energy, a will to erode our available assets. Perpetual revolt involves an irreverence toward ourselves, toward our powers. How can we find in it the wherewithal for contemplation, that static expenditure, that concentration in immobility? To leave things as they are, to regard without trying to regulate the world, to perceive essences—nothing is more hostile to the conduct of our thought; we aspire, rather, to manipulate things, to torture them, to attribute to them our own rages. It must be so: idolators of the gesture, of the wager and of delirium, we love the daredevil, the stake-all, the desperado, as much in poetry as in philosophy. The Tao Te Ching goes further than Une Saison En Enfer or Ecce Homo. But Lao Tse has no delirium to propose, whereas Rimbaud and Nietzsche, acrobats straining at the extreme limits of themselves, engage us in their dangers. The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

No way out for a man who both transcends time and is bogged down in it, who accedes by fits and starts to his last solitude and nonetheless sinks into appearances. Wavering, agonized, he will drag out his days as an invalid of duration, exposed at once to the lure of becoming and of eternity. If, according to Meister Eckhart, there is an “odor” of time, there must with all the more reason be an odor of history. How can we remain insensitive to it? On a more immediate level, I distinguish the illusion, the nullity, the rottenness of “civilization”; yet I feel I belong to this rottenness: I am the lover of carrion. I cannot forgive our age for having subjugated us to the point of haunting us even when we detach ourselves from it. Nothing viable can emerge from à meditation on circumstances, from a reflection on the event. In other, happier times, the mind could unreason freely, as if it belonged to no age, emancipated as it was from the terror of chronology, engulfed in a moment of the world which it identified with the world itself. Without concern for the relativity of its work, the mind dedicated itself to that work entirely. Inspired stupidity, gone forever! Fruitful exaltation, never compromised by a consciousness drawn and quartered! Still to divine the timeless and to know nonetheless that we are time, that we produce time, to conceive the notion of eternity and to cherish our nothingness; an absurdity responsible for both our rebellions and the doubts we entertain about them.

To seek out suffering in order to avoid redemption, to follow in reverse the path of deliverance, such is our contribution in the matter of religion: bilious illuminati, Buddhas and Christs hostile to salvation, preaching to the wretched the charm of their distress. A superficial race, if you like. The fact still remains that our first ancestor left us, for our entire legacy, only the horror of paradise. By giving names to things, he prepared his own Fall and ours. And if we seek a remedy, we must begin by debaptizing the universe, by removing the label which, assigned to each appearance, isolates it and lends it a simulacrum of meaning. Meanwhile, down to our nerve cells, everything in us resists paradise. To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction. It was ever thus, and will be, as long as a cure-by-eternity has not disintoxicated us from becoming, from duration, as long as we have not approached that state in which, according to a Chinese Buddhist, “a single moment is worth ten thousand years.”

Then since the Absolute corresponds to a meaning we have not been able to cultivate, let us surrender to all re bellions: they will end by turning against themselves, against us … Perhaps then we shall regain our supremacy over time; unless, the other way round, struggling to escape the calamity of consciousness, we rejoin animals, plants, things, return to that primordial stupidity of which, through the fault of history, we have lost even the memory.

From: The Temptation to Exist

Hell on Wheels

The Job of a Conductor on a New York City Subway Train Is a Voyage into the Heart of Darkness

by Daniel Attila

 I was born in Hungary, from which I escaped in 1982 at age 18. I settled in New York in 1984 with the intention of becoming an artist, but after nearly a decade of struggle I realized I might never make it. In 1993 I enrolled in the City University of New York, while I supported myself for four years as a conductor on New York City subway trains. There can be only a few jobs that so quickly introduce an immigrant to the realities of multi-racialism. Beneath the streets of New York I have seen and done things that very few whites will—I hope—ever see or do.

Conductors operate the doors of trains, make announcements, give information to the passengers, and oversee the safety of people on trains and platforms. Most of the time they stay in a small compartment, or cab, in the middle car of the train. There are many cities that operate subways with only a driver, but New York City is a challenging place, where putting only one person on the train would expose the system to violence and chaos.

Attending college while working under ground is not a dream come true, but conductors are well paid. The starting salary is $30-40,000 a year, with a top salary of $40-50,000, which can be reached in three years. Conductors who become drivers can earn $50-70,000 a year, depending on overtime. The high salaries are a result of the monopoly the Transit Au thority (TA) enjoys over city transportation. The union is a mostly-black workforce, which cannot be tampered with by any politician who wants a career in New York. Even as far back as the 1930s, the all-powerful TA got through the depression without laying off a single employee.

I went to a high school in China Town to take the civil service exam for the job. Once inside, I noticed that I was the only white person there. Except for an Asian-Indian woman who sat in front of me, I saw only black people, even though there were at least 40 of us taking the test. “How come I’m the only white person here?” I wondered. “Don’t white Americans want a job that pays $40-60,000 a year and doesn’t even require a high-school education?” Perhaps in answer, one of the blacks in front of me turned around and gave me a bizarre, hate-filled look—a look I would often encounter in the years ahead.

The test was easy—surprisingly so—and I wondered if it was possible for anyone over the age of six not to pass it. I clearly remember one of the questions; I find it impossible to forget:

If you are a bus driver and find that a kid jumped onto the back of the bus, traveling on the outside, what are you going to do?

a) I will suddenly brake, then accelerate, repeating this process until the kid falls off and learns a lesson.

b) I will just ignore the kid and keep on driving as if unaware of the problem.

c) I will stop the bus and personally make sure that the kid gets off.

As part of the test, we also had to find various places in the city, such as the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn  Bridge, and the United Nations, with the help of a city map provided to us. This is similar to having Parisians find the Eiffel tower with the help of a map. Needless to say, the test went well and I congratulated myself for having settled in a country where well-paying jobs are so easy to get.

I began learning about the reality of America’s racial dilemma right at the beginning of my training program at the Transit Authority. There was a huge black fellow in our class who had the habit of physically bumping into me at every opportunity. I could feel that he did this intentionally, trying to make it hurt more than an accidental collision would, but not enough to make it look like an assault.

The class consisted of about 80 people, with only a half dozen whites. Most of the training was given by an old white veteran who kept telling us funny and scary stories about transit workers on duty. We were told to watch out for assaults by passengers. “Every one of you will be spat at,” he insisted repeatedly, “I guarantee it.” After the class training, which lasted about four weeks, we spent two weeks on trains, operating under the supervision of experienced conductors. Right on the first day, a strong black man who stood on the platform, whose right arm was bigger than both of my thighs put together, made a sudden attempt to punch me in the face as I leaned out the window to observe the platform. The conductor who supervised me assured me that such things are very dangerous and happen every day.

Also during the break-in period, I saw a horrible incident in the East New York section of Brooklyn. A horde of black teenagers descended upon a black boy who was sitting quietly by himself. Within seconds, they beat him from head to toe, then quickly fled before the doors closed. We tried to talk to the boy, who was in bad shape, asking him if he wanted medical help or the police. When he said he didn’t want ei ther, we asked about the attack. It turned out he was on his way to the first day on a job. The gang beat him up because they didn’t want him to work.

After the break-in period, I was qualified as a conductor and began to operate without supervision. It didn’t take long for our instructor’s prediction to come true. I was conducting a “D” train in the Bronx when I noticed a large group of black men gathered on the platform, just outside the conductor’s window. I felt their threatening presence instinctively, but the rules require that the conductor lean out the window and look down the platform in both directions before he closes the doors. I had no choice but to open my window and take the risk. As soon as I opened it, one of the men spat right into my eyes. I was wearing safety goggles but still got some of the saliva on my skin—regulations require that goggles be worn primarily to protect against passenger assaults.

Throughout the four years I spent as a conductor, blacks and Latinos would hide behind posts or other cover and spit at me—with astonishing power and accuracy. Other times they would throw things at me, try to punch me, or yell vile and sometimes inarticulate things at me.

One attack involved a black man of about thirty, who threw a large, glass bottle at my face. I managed to close the window just as the bottle struck—it hit with such force, a piece of glass stuck in the acrylic window of my cab all the way to the end of the trip. As we came into the terminal, I spotted a black supervisor on the platform and couldn’t help asking: “What am I supposed to do when someone attacks me as I operate, and the attack is really nasty?” “If you have an injury, you pull the cord and call command to send for the police and the ambulance,” was the reply. “But what if you have no injuries? What if he almost killed you but you lucked  out?” I continued. “Then there is no problem,” said the supervisor, “you keep on going.”

On another occasion, when conducting a “D” train in the Bronx, a boy in a crowd of high-school students threw a heavy stone right at my face with great accuracy and force. I instinctively held up my hand to shield my face and was injured severely enough to go to the emergency room. At the hospital, the nurse told me that a bus driver, also injured in an assault, had just been treated and released a couple of hours earlier.

When operating during the “school hours,” the early afternoon when students come home from public schools, rowdy students—none of whom was ever white or Oriental—would routinely disable the trains. They would break windows, pull the emergency brake, and tear open the seats so they could cut out electric switches. If the train crew couldn’t fix the problem, we would discharge the passengers and transfer the train to the storage yard for repair. When we discharged trains, black and Latino passengers would threaten violence, accusing us of deliberately disabling trains so that we could “go home early.”

My ordeal did not end with the work-day. The commute home was just as agonizing as time on the job. In the late hours, when I usually made my way home, the trains were largely bereft of normal, working people. Often there were gangs of “youths” roaming the trains, walking from car to car, jumping on seats, starting fights, and harassing passengers. I often locked myself in the conductor’s cab, as I did on the job.

One night, after work, as I was climbing the steps from the subway platform in my own neighborhood, a tall black man came running the other way and crashed into me. He was so badly dressed he looked like a bum. He was carrying a box of Chinese take-out food, which he dropped when he  slammed into me. There went his dinner. Although the collision was entirely his fault, he began threatening me, cursing me, and demanding money. I looked around to see if there was anybody else in the station—not that one can expect help from whites in situations like this—but there was no one.

I don’t know how long we argued, but it seemed like an eternity. Keeping him from attacking me took all the energy I had. I finally managed to break away and run home. Exhausted, I collapsed on the floor and began crying, in a way I don’t remember doing since I was a small child. What broke me down was not so much this particular incident but the sum of all the assaults and humiliation that took place before it—the attacks, the spitting, the name calling, and, ultimately, my complete inability to do anything about it. Violent self-defense would certainly cost any white transit worker his job.

From: FACE TO FACE WITH RACE

Edited and with an Introduction by

Jared Taylor

Trãirism’ and Existentialism

 

Trãirism developed from the thought of Nae Ionescu, whose philosophical term trãire (‘living-ism’) became an inspiration for the younger intellectuals56 between the two World Wars. Tutea was influenced by this, along with Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. The fact that Ionescu is not universally held in high regard today should not be allowed either to obscure his historical significance, nor debar him from consideration as a thinker in his own right. Ionescu developed trãirism in a religious and non-materialist direction. His horror of system, especially of Marxism,57 is shared by Tutea, who refers to Ionescu’s description of the system as a ‘coffin’, in contrast to ‘living thought’.58 He quotes Ionescu’s view that salvation precludes any sense of ‘frozen form’.59This fundamental emphasis in Ionescu profoundly influenced Þuþea’s own stance against rigidly conceived and constructed systematic thought.

Eliade and especially Cioran transmuted trãirism, as it was originally conceived, into a form of secular existentialism which, Tutea claimed, was itself a system incapable of leading beyond the ‘antechamber of life’.60 Secular existentialism ‘cannot accommodate holiness or heroism’.61 Hence Camus’s ‘radical pessimism’ and view of absurdity as the ultimate context of all experience, at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’62  Furthermore, for Camus, Sisyphus is almost a Romantic hero or anti-hero. Tutea’s criticism of Camus grows out of his very different experience of life – in its crudest physical and mental brutality. For Tutea, Sisyphus in Hades, pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again as he reaches the top, represents stupefying mindlessness, dehumanising emptiness, and barren stereotyping of humanity as a concept rather than joyful creative celebration of human personality in the infinite diversity and extent of its actual living ‘nuances’. Tutea regards what Camus calls obliquely Sisyphus’s ‘happiness’ as a form of moral suicide inseparable from the absurdity63 of his toil. Camus’s existentialism was simply concerned with existence, not life. Although Tutea appreciated the attempt of trãirism to engage with the totality of the human person, he was unable to accept the existentialist world view of Ionescu’s disciples.

‘Absurd indifference toward, and existential disgust for, the world are characteristics of the period in which we live.’64 Chaos (meaninglessness) and aesthetic anarchy, in Tutea’s view, provide no worthwhile response to, or escape from, the deadening commonplaces and clichés of existence. He rejects pursuit of the absurd, the gratuitous, and the grotesque as means of escape from existential impasse. He has no patience with Camus’s declaration (at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus) that suicide is ‘la question fondamentale de la philosophie’.65 Reduced to the level of ‘existential technique’, secular existentialism indicates a condition of drained communicativeness derived from a kind of colour-blindness in the use of nuance:

‘Lack of communication leads to solipsism, for which Schopenhauer prescribes internment in the madhouse.’66 Within a perspective bounded absolutely by human birth and death, existential pessimism and despair are not surprising, for existence is characterised merely by the futility of change, and by circular, repetitive experience (including failed attempts at escape). Because secular existentialists like Camus live ‘without hope and illusion’, their happiness is ‘inseparable from the absurd’ in which ‘Sisyphus forever shoulders anew his futile burden’.67 Their concept of movement being limited to this world, they can know nothing of nuance in the liberating, transformative, sacramental sense which Tutea offers.

As a Christian form of existentialism, trãire means, for Tutea, ‘mystical experience which releases the human being from the antechamber of life and knowledge’ and which, ‘through faith, makes the impossible possible in the believer’s heart’.68 It comprehends the whole of a person’s being, and leads to spiritual growth: ‘This is the sense of Nae Ionescu’s trãirism. Trãirism should be conceived in theological rather than philosophical terms.’69 Yet Tutea’s philosophy of nuances, as I will show later in this chapter, goes beyond the theological, into terms essentially sacramental in nature – perhaps (to suggest a different nuance of categorisation) a kind of affirmative liturgical ‘philosophy’.

From: Petre Tutea
Beetwen Sacrifice and Suicide
by Alexandru Popesku

The Ambiguity of Fame

Fame: Hopes and Horrors
IF each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised." No one will make such a confession, for it is less shameful to commit an abomination than to proclaim so pitiable and so humiliating a weakness, looming out of a feeling of solitude and insecurity from which both the fortunate and the rejected suffer with equal intensity. No one is sure of what he is, nor of what he does. However imbued we may be with our merits, we are gnawed by anxiety and ask, in order to surmount it, only to be deceived, only to receive approbation from anywhere, from anyone. The observer detects a suppliant nuance in the expression of anyone who has finished an enterprise or a work, or performs, quite simply, any activity whatever. The weakness is a universal one; and if God  appears immune from it, it is because, once the creation was completed, He could not, lacking witnesses, count on commendations. He bestowed them upon Himself, it is true, and at the end of each day!

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Just as each of us, in order to "make a name for himself," strives to outstrip the others, similarly in the beginning man must have known the vague desire to eclipse the animals, to affirm himself at their expense, to shine at any price. A breakdown of equilibrium, source of ambition if not of energy, having occurred in his vital economy, he found himself thereby projected into a competition with all living things, waiting to enter into competition with himself by that craving to transcend which, in its aggravated form, was to define him in his own right. Man alone, in the state of nature, wanted to be important, man alone, among the animals, hated anonymity and did his utmost to escape from it. To put himself forward, such was and such remains his dream. It is difficult to believe he has sacrificed Paradise out of a simple desire to know good and evil; on the other hand, it is easy to imagine him risking everything to be Someone. Let us correct Genesis: if he spoiled his initial felicity, it was less from a thirst for knowledge than from an appetite for fame. Once he yielded to its attraction, he went over to the Devil. And indeed fame is diabolic, in its principle as in its manifestations. On its account, the most gifted of the angels ended as an adventurer and more than one saint as a charlatan. Those who have known or merely approached fame can no longer turn away and, to remain in its vicinity, will shrink from no degradation, no villainy. When one cannot save one's soul, one hopes at least to save one's name. The usurper who was to assure himself a privileged position in the universe-would he have achieved his purpose without the desire to be talked about, without the obsession, the mania of reputation? If this mania were to seize any animal in its grip, however "retarded" that animal might be, it would press forward and catch up with man.

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And if the desire for fame should leave you? With it will go those torments which goaded you on, which impelled you to produce, to realize yourself, and to leave yourself behind. Once they are gone, you will be satisfied with what you are, you will subside within your boundaries, your will to supremacy and excess conquered and abolished. Free of the Serpent's kingdom, you will not retain a trace of the old temptation, of the stigma which distinguished you from the other creatures. Is it even certain that you are still man? At the most a conscious plant.

The theologians, by identifying God with pure mind, have revealed that they possess no sense of the process of creation, of physis in general. The mind as such is unsuited to produce; it projects but, in order to carry out its plans, an impure energy is required to set it in action. It is the mind, and not the flesh, which is weak, and it becomes strong only when stimulated by a suspect thirst, by some blameworthy impulse. The more dubious a passion, the more its victim is spared the danger of creating false or fleshless works. Is a man ruled by cupidity, jealousy, vanity? Far from being blamed, he should be praised for these sins: what would he be without them? Almost nothing-that is, pure mind, or more precisely, an angel; now, the angel is by definition sterile and ineffectual, like the light in which he vegetates, which engenders nothing, deprived as it is of that obscure, underground principle which resides in every manifestation of life. God seems much more favored, since He is molded out of shadows: without their dynamic imperfection, He would have remained in a state of paralysis or absence, incapable of playing the part we all know so well. He owes them everything, including His being. Nothing of the fecund and the true is altogether luminous, nor altogether honorable. To say of a poet, apropos of this or that weakness, that it is a "flaw in his genius" is to fail to recognize the source and the secret if not of his talents, certainly of his "output." Every work, however high its level, proceeds from the immediate and bears its mark: no one creates in the absolute nor in the void. Imprisoned in a human universe, once we manage to escape it, why produce and for whom? The more man claims us, the more men cease to interest us; yet it is on account of them and of the opinion they have of us that we bestir ourselves, as evidenced by the incredible hold  flattery has over every mind, crude and delicate alike. It is a mistake to believe that it has no effect upon the solitary, who is in fact more sensitive to it than is supposed, for not often having to suffer its charm or its venom, he cannot protect himself against it. However blase he is about everything, he is not blase about compliments. As he does not receive many, he is not accustomed to them; should the occasion arise to lavish them upon him, he will swallow them with a childish and disgusting greed. Versed in so many things, he is a novice in this one. Also to his liabilities must be added the fact that every compliment functions physically and provokes a delicious frisson which no one can stamp out or even master without a discipline, a self-control which is acquired only by the practice of society, by a long frequentation of knaves and fools alike. In truth, nothing, neither scorn nor mistrust, immunizes us against the effects of flattery: if we suspect or disparage someone, we shall be nonetheless attentive to the favorable judgments he makes upon us, and we shall even change our minds a bout him if they are sufficiently lyrical, sufficiently exaggerated to seem to us spontaneous, involuntary. In appearance, everyone is self-satisfied; in actuality, no one. Should we then, out of a spirit of charity, burn our incense before friends and enemies both, before all mortals without exception, and say amen to each of their extravagances? So deeply does self-doubt work in us that, to remedy it, we have invented love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other, to praise each other shamelessly.

Madmen aside, there is no one who is indifferent to commendation or blame; as long as we remain somewhat normal, we are sensitive to the one and the other; if we become refractory to them, what else can we look for among our fellow-men? It is incontestably humiliating to react as they do; on the other hand, it is hard to raise oneself above all these miseries which harass and overwhelm them. To be human is no solution, any more than ceasing to be so.

The least venture outside the world constrains our desire to realize ourselves, to surpass and crush the others. The angel's misfortune is a consequence of the fact that he has no need to struggle in order to accede to glory: he is born in it, takes his ease there, glory is consubstantial with him. What can he aspire to thereafter? He lacks the very resource of inventing desires for himself. 

 If to produce and to exist are coincident, there is no condition more unreal, more disheartening than his.

To play at detachment, when one is not predestined to it, is dangerous: thereby one loses more than one enriching defect, necessary to the achievement of a work. To shed the Old Adam is to deprive ourselves of our own depths, it is to thrust ourselves of our own accord into the impasse of purity. Without the contribution of our past, of our mud, of our corruption-recent as well as original-the spirit is out of a job. Woe to the man who does not sacrifice his salvation!

Since everything done that is great, important, unheard of emanates from the hope of fame, what happens when it weakens or fades, when we suffer shame for having aspired to count in other men's eyes? To understand how we can reach this point, let us turn back to those moments when a veritable neutralization of our instincts is brought about. We are still alive, but that scarcely matters to us any longer: a fact of no interest; truth, lie-mere words, one worth no more than the other, signifying nothing. What is, what is not-how know such a thing when we have gone past that stage where one still takes the trouble to grade appearances? Our needs, our desires are parallel to ourselves, and as for our dreams, it is not we who dream them now, someone else dreams them inside us. Our very fear is no longer our own. Not that it diminishes, rather it grows, but it ceases to concern us; drawing on its own resources, it leads, liberated and lofty, an autonomous life; we merely serve it as a prop, a domicile, an address: we lodge our fear. It lives apart, develops and flourishes, and makes its own connections without ever consulting us. Undeterred, we abandon it to its whims, disturb it as little as it disturbs us, and attend-disabused and impassive-the spectacle it affords us.

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Just as we may imaginatively follow in reverse the course of the individual as he comes into life and thereby retrace the various species, so by following the course of history in reverse we may come to its beginnings and even proceed beyond them. This retrogression becomes a necessity in the man who, wrested from the tyranny of opinion, no longer belongs to any period. To aspire to consideration is defensible, in a pinch; but when there is no one on whom to make a good impression, why exhaust oneself being someone, why even exhaust oneself being?

After longing to see our name written around the sun, we lapse to the other extreme and pray that it will be erased everywhere and forever. If our impatience to affirm ourselves knew no limits, our impatience to efface ourselves will know none either. Carrying our desire for renunciation to the point of heroism, we employ our energies in the increase of our obscurity, in the destruction of every vestige of our passage, of the least memory of our breath. We hate anyone who attaches himself to us, counts on us, or expects something from us. The only concession we can still make to others is to disappoint them. In any case, they could not understand our longing to escape the overwork of the self, to stop on the threshold of consciousness and never walk inside, to huddle in the depths of primordial silence, in inarticulate beatitude, in the sweet stupor where all creation once lay, before the din of the Word. This need to hide, to give light the slip, to be last in everything, these transports of modesty in which, competing with the moles, we accuse them of ostentation, this nostalgia for the unrealized and the unnamed-so many modalities of liquidating evolution's attainments in order to regain, by a leap backward, the moment which preceded the agitation of Becoming.

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When one forms a high opinion of effacement and considers with contempt the remark of the least effaced of modern men: "All my life I have sacrificed everything, peace, interest, happiness, to my destiny" -it is not without satisfaction that one imagines, at the antipodes, the relentlessness of the disabused creature who, in order to leave no tracks, orients his undertakings toward a single goal: the suppression of his identity, the volatilization of his ego. So vehement is his desire to pass unperceived that he erects Insignificance into a system, into a divinity, and kneels before it. No longer to exist for anyone, to live as if one had never lived, to banish the event, no longer to take advantage of any moment, any place, to be released forever! To be free is to emancipate oneself from the pursuit of a destiny, to give up belonging to either the chosen or the outcast; to be free is to practice being nothing.

The man who has given all he could give affords a more distressing spectacle than he who, having been unable or unwilling to single himself out, dies with all his gifts, real or supposed, with his capacities unexploited and his merits unrecognized: the career he might have had, lending itself to variant versions, flatters the play of our imagination; which is to say that he is still alive, whereas the former, frozen in his success, fulfilled and hideous, evokes ... a corpse. In every domain, only those intrigue us who, whether out of incapacity or scruple, indefinitely postponed the moment when they had to decide to excel. Their advantage over others is to have understood that we do not realize ourselves with impunity, that we must pay for every gesture which is added to the pure fact of being alive. Nature abhors the talents we have acquired at her expense, she abhors even those which she has granted us and which we have cultivated unduly, she punishes zeal, that road to perdition, and warns us that it is always to our detriment that we seek to make ourselves illustrious. Is there anything more deadly than a superabundance of qualities, than a clutter of merits? Let us maintain our deficiencies and not forget that we perish more readily by the excesses of a virtue than by those of a vice.

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To presume one is known by God, to seek out His complicity and His adulation, to scorn all suffrage but His-what presumption and what power! Only religion can utterly satisfy our good as well as our bad inclinations.

Between a man whom no "kingdom" ignores, and the disinherited creature who has only his faith, which of the two, in the absolute, attains a greater effulgence? One cannot balance the notion God deigns to have of us against the notion our fellow-men arrive  at. Without the desire to be appreciated on high, without the certainty of enjoying there a certain renown, there would be no such thing as prayer. The mortal who has prayed sincerely, were it but once in his life, has touched upon the supreme form of glory. What other success will he count on henceforth? Having reached the summit of his career, his mission here on earth fulfilled, he can rest in peace for the remainder of his days.

The privilege of being known to God may appear insufficient to some. Thus in any case judged our first ancestor who, weary of a passive celebrity, took it into his head to impose it upon the creatures, and upon the Creator Himself Whose omniscience he envied less than His pomp, His circumstantial aspect, His frippery. Dissatisfied with a secondary role, he flung himself, out of spite and histrionics, into a series of exhausting performances, into history, that enterprise not so much to supplant as to dazzle the divinity.

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If we want to advance into self-knowledge, no one can help us so much as the braggart: he behaves as we would do if we were not restrained by vestiges of timidity and shame; he says aloud what he thinks of himself, he proclaims his merits while, lacking boldness, we are doomed to murmur or to stifle ours. Hearing him go into raptures for hours on end over his deeds, his doings, we shudder at the notion that it would take only a trifle for each of us to do as much. 

Since the boaster prefers himself to the universe quite openly, and not in secret like the rest of us, he has no reason to play the part of the misunderstood hero, or the outcast. Since no one is willing to bother with what he is nor with what he is worth, he will attend to the matter himself. In the judgments he passes on himself, no restriction, no insinuation, no nuance. He is satisfied, replete, he has found what all pursue and what few discover.

How pitiable, on the other hand, the man who dares not celebrate his advantages and his talents! He execrates anyone who does not notice them and he execrates himself for not being able to exalt or at the very least to exhibit them. Once the barrier of prejudices was down, once bragging was at last tolerated and even obligatory, what a deliverance for men's minds! Psychiatry would have no further purpose if we were permitted to divulge the immense good we thought of ourselves or if we had, at any hour of the day, a flatterer within reach. Yet happy though the braggart is, his felicity is not flawless: he does not always find someone disposed to listen to him; and what he may suffer when he is reduced to silence it is better not to think of.

However full of ourselves we may be, we live in an anxious rancor, from which we can escape only if the stones themselves, in an impulse of pity, decided to praise us. So long as they persist in their silence, nothing remains for us but to flounder in torment, to gorge on our own bile.

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If the aspiration to fame assumes an increasingly breathless form, it is because fame has replaced the belief in immortality. The disappearance of a chimera as inveterate as it was legitimate necessarily left a confusion in men's minds, as well as an expectation mixed with frenzy. A facsimile of everlastingness, no one can do without it, still less keep from seeking it everywhere, in any form of reputation, literary first of all. Since death appears to each man as an absolute term, everyone writes. Whence the idolatry of success, and consequently the subservience to the public, that pernicious and blind power, scourge of the century, foul version of Fatality.

With eternity in the background, fame could have a meaning; it no longer has one in a world where time rules, where-to make matters worse-time itself is threatened. We accept that universal fragility, which so affected the Ancients, as something obvious which neither startles nor pains us, and it is with a high heart that we cling to the certitudes of a precarious, a worthless celebrity. Let us add further that if, in the ages when man was rare, there might have been some interest in being Someone, the same is no longer true today, now that man is devalued. On a planet invaded by the flesh, whose consideration matters still, when the idea of one's neighbor is drained of all content and we cannot love humanity in detail or en masse? Merely to aspire to distinguish oneself from it is already a symptom of spiritual death. The horror of fame proceeds from the horror of men: interchangeable, they justify by their number the aversion they inspire. The time is not far off when we shall have to be in a state of grace to be able, not to love them-which is impossible-but simply to endure the sight of them. In the days when providential plagues swept the cities clean, the individual, in his capacity as survivor, inspired with some reason a certain respect: he was still a being. There are no more beings, there is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. To them we prefer almost any animal, if only because it is hunted down by them, despoilers and profaners of a landscape once ennobled by the presence of beasts. Paradise is the absence of man. The more aware of this we become, the less we forgive Adam's act: surrounded by animals, what more could he desire? and how could he fail to recognize the bliss of not having to confront, at every moment, that vile curse inscribed upon our faces? Serenity being conceivable only with the eclipse of our race, let us meanwhile leave off martyring each other for trifles, let us look elsewhere-to that part of ourselves over which no one has any hold. We change perspectives on things when, in a confrontation with our most secret solitude, we discover that there is a reality only in the deepest part of ourselves, and that all the rest is a delusion. Once a man is steeped in this truth, what can others bestow upon him which he does not have already, and what can be taken from him which might sadden or humiliate him? There is no emancipation without a victory over shame and over the fear of shame. The conqueror of appearances, forever released from their seductions, must make himself superior not only to honors, but to honor itself. Without paying the slightest attention to the scorn of his fellows, he will display, among them, the pride of a discredited god.

What relief we feel when we suppose ourselves inaccessible to praise or blame, when we no longer care about cutting a good or bad figure in the eyes of others! A strange relief, punctuated by moments of oppression, a deliverance shadowed by a discomfort.

Far as we may have pursued the apprenticeship to detachment, we cannot yet say where the desire for fame has taken us: do we still feel it or are we quite numb to it? Most likely we have cached it away and it continues to torment us without our knowing it. We triumph over it only at those moments of sovereign dejection when neither the living nor the dead could recognize themselves in us ... In the remainder of our experiences, things are less simple, for so long as one desires at all, one implicitly desires fame. Disenchanted as we may be, we long for it still, since our appetite for it survives the disappearance of all the rest. He who has drunk deep of fame, has wallowed in it, can never do without it, and, unless he knows it always, will lapse into acrimony, insolence, or torpor. The more emphatic our deficiencies, the more fame gains by contrast and engages us; the void within us calls to it; and when it fails to answer, we accept its ersatz: notoriety. Insofar as we aspire to fame, we struggle within the insoluble: we want to conquer time with the means of time, to endure within the ephemeral, to attain to the indestructible through history, and-supreme mockery-to be applauded by precisely those whom we despise. Our misfortune is to have found, as a cure for the loss of eternity, only this deception, only this lamentable obsession, from which no one except a man implanted within Being could free himself. But who is capable of implanting himself within Being, when one is human only because one can do no such thing?

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To believe in history is to lust for the possible, to postulate the qualitative superiority of the imminent over the immediate, to imagine that Becoming is rich enough in and of itself to make eternity superfluous. Once we cease believing this, no event preserves the slightest significance. We are then interested only in the extremities of Time, less in its beginnings than in its conclusion, its consummation, in what will come after, when the exhaustion of the thirst for fame will involve the exhaustion of all appetites, and when, free of the impulse that drove him onward, unburdened of his adventure, man will see opening before him an era without desire.

If we are forbidden to regain our primordial innocence, at least we can conceive another one, and can try to accede to it by means of a knowledge stripped of perversity, purified of its flaws, transformed in its depths, "reclaimed." Such a metamorphosis would be equivalent to the conquest of a second innocence, which, appearing after ages of doubt and lucidity, would have the advantage over the first one of no longer being deluded by the (now exhausted) prestige of the Serpent. 

The disjunction between knowledge and the Fall effected, the act of knowing no longer flattering anyone's vanity, no demoniac pleasure would still accompany the mind's necessarily aggressive indiscretion. We would behave as if we had violated no mystery, and would envisage all our exploits with detachment, if not with contempt. It would be a question of neither more nor less than beginning Knowledge all over again, that is, of constructing another history, a history released from the ancient curse, and in which it would be our task to rediscover that divine mark we bore before the break with the rest of Creation. We cannot live with the sentiment of a total sin, nor with the seal of infamy on each of our undertakings. Since it is our corruption which takes us out of ourselves, which makes us effective and fruitful, the eagerness to produce gives us away, accuses us. If our works bear witness against us, is this not because they emanate from the need to camouflage our collapse, to deceive others, and still more, to deceive ourselves? Doing is tainted with an original vice from which Being seems exempt. And since all we accomplish proceeds from the loss of innocence, it is only by the disavowal of our actions and the distaste for ourselves that we can be redeemed.

From The Fall into Time
Translation: Richard Howard

Undirected meditation

 SN 47: 10 The Bhikkhunīs’ Quarter

Then in the morning the Venerable Ānanda dressed and, taking bowl and robe, he approached the bhikkhunīs’ quarters and sat down in the appointed seat. Then a number of bhikkhunīs approached the Venerable Ānanda, paid homage to him, sat down to one side, and said to him:

“Here, Venerable Ānanda, a number of bhikkhunīs, dwelling with their minds well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, perceive successively loftier stages of distinction.”

“So it is, sisters, so it is! It may be expected of anyone, sisters—whether bhikkhu or bhikkhunī—who dwells with a mind well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, that such a one will perceive successively loftier stages of distinction.

”Then the Venerable Ānanda instructed, exhorted, inspired, and gladdened those bhikkhunīs with a Dhamma talk, after which he rose from his seat and left. Then the Venerable Ānanda walked for alms in Sāvatthī. When he had returned from the alms round, after his meal he approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, sat down to one side, and reported all that had happened. [The Blessed One said:]

“So it is, Ānanda, so it is! It may be expected of anyone, Ānanda—whether bhikkhu or bhikkhunī—who dwells with a mind well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, that such a one will perceive successively loftier stages of distinction.

“What four? Here, Ānanda, a bhikkhu dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. While he is contemplating the body in the body, there arises in him, based on the body, either a fever in the body or sluggishness of mind, or the mind is distracted outwardly. That bhikkhu should then direct his mind towards some inspiring sign. When he directs his mind towards some inspiring sign, gladness is born. When he is gladdened, rapture is born. When the mind is uplifted by rapture, the body becomes tranquil. One tranquil in body experiences happiness. The mind of one who is happy becomes concentrated. He reflects thus: ‘The purpose for the sake of which I directed my mind has been achieved. Let me now withdraw it.’ So he withdraws the mind and does not think or examine. He understands: ‘Without thought and examination, internally mindful, I am happy.’

“Again, a bhikkhu dwells contemplating feelings in feelings … mind in mind … phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. While he is contemplating phenomena in phenomena, there arises in him, based on phenomena, either a fever in the body or sluggishness of mind, or the mind is distracted outwardly. That bhikkhu should then direct his mind towards some inspiring sign. When he directs his mind towards some inspiring sign … He understands: ‘Without thought and examination, internally mindful, I am happy.’

“It is in such a way, Ānanda, that there is development by direction.

“And how, Ānanda, is there development without direction? Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.’

“Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’ Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating feelings in feelings, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.

’“Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’ Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating mind in mind, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.’

“Not directing his mind outwardly, a bhikkhu understands: ‘My mind is not directed outwardly.’ Then he understands: ‘It is unconstricted after and before, liberated, undirected.’ Then he further understands: ‘I dwell contemplating phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful; I am happy.’

“It is in this way, Ānanda, that there is development without direction.“Thus, Ānanda, I have taught development by direction, I have taught development without direction. Whatever should be done, Ānanda, by a compassionate teacher out of compassion for his disciples, desiring their welfare, that I have done for you. These are the feet of trees, Ānanda, these are empty huts. Meditate, Ānanda, do not be negligent, lest you regret it later. This is our instruction to you.”

This is what the Blessed One said. Elated, the Venerable Ānanda delighted in the Blessed One’s statement.

Nisargadatta Maharaj on meditation

Questioner: All teachers advise to meditate. What is the purpose of meditation?
Maharaj: We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.
Incidentally practice of meditation affects deeply our character. We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we over-come it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious. The dissolution of the unconscious releases energy; the mind feels adequate and become quiet.
Q: What is the use of a quiet mind?
M: When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining oneself to be something: 'I am this, I am that', continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps.
Q: As I can make out, I live on many levels and life on each level requires energy. The self by its very nature delights in everything and its energies flow outwards. Is it not the purpose of meditation to dam up the energies on the higher levels, or to push them back and up, so as to enable the higher levels to prosper also?
M: It is not so much the matter of levels as of gunas (qualities). Meditation is a sattvic activity and aims at complete elimination of tamas (inertia) and rajas (motivity). Pure sattva (harmony) is perfect freedom from sloth and restlessness.
Q: How to strengthen and purify the sattva?
M: The sattva is pure and strong always. It is like the sun. It may seem obscured by clouds and dust, but only from the point of view of the perceiver. Deal with the causes of obscuration, not with the sun.
Q: What is the use of sattva?
M: What is the use of truth, goodness, harmony, beauty? They are their own goal. They manifest spontaneously and effortlessly, when things are left to themselves, are not interfered with, not shunned, or wanted, or conceptualised, but just experienced in full awareness, such awareness itself is sattva. It does not make use of things and people — it fulfils them.
Q: Since I cannot improve sattva, am I to deal with tamas and rajas only? How can I deal with them?
M: By watching their influence in you and on you. Be aware of them in operation, watch their expressions in your thoughts, words and deeds, and gradually their grip on you will lessen and the clear light of sattva will emerge. It is neither difficult, nor a protracted process; earnestness is the only condition of success.

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Q: Will meditation help me to reach your state?
M: Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you.
Q: By whom?
M: By the same power that brought you so far, that prompted your heart to desire truth and your mind to seek it. It is the same power that keeps you alive. You may call it Life or the Supreme.
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Q: What is meditation and what are its uses?
M: As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations, or prayers may be good for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation — the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation.
Q: How is it done?
M: You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don't get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.
Q: I heard of holding on to one thought in order to keep other thoughts away. But how to keep all thoughts away? The very idea is also a thought.
M: Experiment anew, don't go by past experience. Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it.
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Q: In meditation, who meditates, the person or the witness?
M: Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensations and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs. Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret.
Q: How do I come to know that my experience is universal?
M: At the end of your meditation all is known directly, no proofs whatsoever are required. Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity. Definitions and descriptions have their place as useful incentives for further search, but you must go beyond them into what is undefinable and indescribable, except in negative terms.
After all, even universality and eternity are mere concepts, the opposites of being place and time-bound. Reality is not a concept, nor the manifestation of a concept. It has nothing to do with concepts. Concern yourself with your mind, remove its distortions and impurities. Once you had the taste of your own self, you will find it everywhere and at all times. Therefore, it is so important that you should come to it. Once you know it, you will never lose it.
But you must give yourself the opportunity through intensive, even arduous meditation.
Q: What exactly do you want me to do?
M: Give your heart and mind to brooding over the 'I am', what is it, how is it, what is its source, its life, its meaning. It is very much like digging a well. You reject all that is not water, till you reach the life-giving spring.
Q: How shall I know that I am moving in the right direction?
M: By your progress in intentness, in clarity and devotion to the task.
Q: We, Europeans, find it very difficult to keep quiet. The world is too much with us.
M: Oh, no, you are dreamers too. We differ only in the contents of our dreams. You are after perfection — in the future. We are intent on finding it — in the now. The limited only is perfectible. The unlimited is already perfect. You are perfect, only you don't know it. Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders.
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M: As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity. You must put in true worth before you can expect something real. What is your worth?
Q: By what measure shall I measure it?
M: Look at the content of your mind. You are what you think about. Are you not most of the time busy with your own little person and its daily needs? The value of regular meditation is that it takes you away from the humdrum of daily routine and reminds you that you are not what you believe yourself to be. But even remembering is not enough — action must follow conviction. Don't be like the rich man who has made a detailed will, but refuses to die. 

Q: Is not gradualness the law of life? 

M: Oh, no. The preparation alone is gradual, the change itself is sudden and complete. Gradual change does not take you to a new level of conscious being. You need courage to let go.