The enigma of Time — queer, tempting, insoluble

We have already observed that, like a child, a primitive mankind acquires (as part of the inward experience that is the birth of the ego) an understanding of number and ipso facto possession of an external world referred to the ego. As soon as the primitive’s astonished eye perceives the dawning world of ordered extension and the significant emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere impressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his proper, his inner, world gives form and direction to his waking life, there arises in the soul — instantly conscious of its loneliness — the root feeling of longing (Sehnsucht). It is this that urges “becoming” towards its goal, that motives the fulfillment and actualizing of every inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of individual being. It is the child’s longing, which will presently come into the consciousness more and more clearly as a feeling of constant direction and finally stand before the mature spirit as the enigma of Time — queer, tempting, insoluble. Suddenly, the words “past” and “future” have acquired a fateful meaning.

But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also, in the intimate essence of every soul, a dread as well. As all becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it ends, so the prime feeling of becoming — the longing — touches the prime feeling of having-become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling away, the past implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the irrevocable, the attained, the final — our dread of mortality, of the world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier-like birth — our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its goal. It is the deep world-fear of the child — which never leaves the higher man, the believer, the poet, the artist — that makes him so infinitely lonely in the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn, behind the screen of sense phenomena. The element of direction, too, which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibility to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely varied external culture which reflects this life. Like a secret melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form language of every true art work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually dead man of the autumnal cities — Hammurabi’s Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Islamic Baghdad, Paris and Berlin today — only the pure intellectual, the sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it by setting up a secretless “scientific world view” between himself and the alien. As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something whose thousand-formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather than denoted by, the word “time,” so the other prime feeling, dread, finds its expression in the intellectual, understandable, outlinable symbols of extension; and thus we find that every Culture is aware (each in its own special way) of an opposition of time and space, of direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as becoming precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread, becomes the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the intellect, the other is its servant. The role of the one is purely to experience, that of the other purely to know (erleben, erkennen). In the Christian language, the opposition of the two world feelings is expressed by: “Fear God and love Him.”

In the soul of all primitive mankind, just as in that of earliest childhood, there is something which impels it to find means of dealing with the alien powers of the extension world that assert themselves, inexorable, in and through space. To bind, to bridle, to placate, to “know” are all, in the last analysis, the same thing. In the mysticism of all primitive periods, to know God means to conjure him, to make him favorable, to appropriate him inwardly. This is achieved, principally, by means of a word, the Name — the “nomen” which designates and calls up the “numen” — and also by ritual practices of secret potency; and the subtlest, as well as the most powerful, form of this defense is causal and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and number. In this respect man only becomes wholly man when he has acquired language. When cognition has ripened to the point of words, the original chaos of impressions necessarily transforms itself into a “Nature” that has laws and must obey them, and the world-in-itself becomes a world-for-us.*

The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form language hammers out brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible.

* From the savage conjurer with his naming magic to the modern scientist who subjects things, by attaching technical labels to them, the form has in no wise changed.

Quote from the book Decline of the West

Craving

If only I could say with that Hasidic rabbi: “The blessing of my life is that I have never needed a thing before I possessed it!”

*
He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire….

*
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

*

Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco, … Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.

*
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

*

Better than anyone I know the danger of being born with a thirst for everything. A poisoned gift, a vengeance of Providence. Thus encumbered, I could get nowhere, on the spiritual level, of course, the only one that matters.
Anything but accidental, my failure is identified with my essence.

*

Lucidity does not extirpate the desire to live—far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.

*

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

*

This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity.
Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

*

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

*

Some diabolic thirst keeps me from exposing my pact with breathing.

*
What still attaches me to things is a thirst inherited from ancestors who carried the curiosity to exist to the point of ignominy.

*
Since day after day I have lived in the company of Suicide, it would be unjust and ungrateful on my part to denigrate it. What could be healthier, what could be more natural? What is neither healthy nor natural is the frantic appetite to exist — a grave flaw, a law par excellence, my flaw.

*

Remaining consistent: to this end, according to the Zohar, God created man and recommended frequentation of the Tree of Life. Man, however, preferred the other tree, located in the “region of variations.” His fall? A craving for change, fruit of curiosity, that source of all misfortunes. Thus what was only a whim in the first among us was to become law for us all.
*
while we live, we have desires, and desire presupposeth a further end. Seeing all delight is appetite, and desire of something further, there can be no contentment but in proceeding, and therefore we are not to marvel, when we see that as men attain to more riches, honour, or other power, so their appetite continually groweth more and more; and when they are come to the utmost degree of some kind of power they pursue some other, as long as in any kind they think themselves behind any other.
Hobbes
*
The wise men teach us well to save ourselves from our treacherous appetites and to distinguish true wholesome pleasures from pleasures diluted and crisscrossed by pain. Most pleasures, they say, tickle and embrace us only to throttle us, like those thieves whom the Egyptians called Philistae.  If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess: but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train. Montaigne

Ignorance & God

The argument that God cannot have created the world because of the suffering, misery and ugliness in it ( or some similar form) has always seemed to me as inconclusive for the proof that there is no God as the opposite argument that 'God must have created the world because of the order, joy and beauty in it' (or some similar form) seemed for proof that there is a God. In either case it is presumed that one knows, can distinguish, what God ought to be. Both alike imply that the holders of each view will only believe in what they approve of, i.e. in what pleases them.

Now, surely, is it not that assumption, that growth or surcease in one's subjective self, that ought to be understood and faith in its subsidence cultivated?

Nanamoli Thera

Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism" and "atheism".

Nanamoli Thera↑

And what, then, about the Buddha’s Teaching—how does it tell us to deal with the question whether or not God exists? The first thing is to refuse to be bullied into giving a categorical answer, yes or no, to such a treacherous question. The second thing is to see that the answer to this question will depend on the answer to a more immediate question: ‘Do I myself exist? Is my self in fact eternal, or is it something that perishes with the body?’ And it is here that the difficulties begin. The Buddha says that the world is divided, for the most part, between the Yeas and the Nays, between the eternalists and the annihilationists, and that they are forever at each other’s throats. But these are two extremes, and the Buddha’s Teaching goes in between.

So long as we have experience of our selves, the question ‘Does my self exist?’ will thrust itself upon us: if we answer in the affirmative we shall tend to affirm the existence of God, and if we answer in the negative we shall deny the existence of God. But what if we have ceased to have experience of ourselves? (I do not mean reflexive experience as such, but experience of our selves as an ego or a person.

This is a hard distinction to see, but I must refer you to the Notes for further discussion.) If this were to happen—and it is the specific aim of the Buddha’s Teaching (and of no other teaching) to arrange for it to happen—then not only should we stop questioning about our existence and the existence of God, but the whole of Jaspers system, and with it the doctrine of ciphers, would collapse. And what room, then, for despair?

Nanavira Thera

*

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false, you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst. With the body comes the world, with the world — God, who is supposed to have created the world and thus it starts — fears, religions, prayers, sacrifices, all sorts of systems — all to protect and support the child-man, frightened out of his wits by monsters of his own making. realise that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone all suffering ends.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Cioran - Silence

 Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

*
To expend oneself in conversations as much as an epileptic in his fits.
*
Withdraw into yourself, perceive there a silence as old as being, even older….

*
The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.
*
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
*
The pure passing of time, naked time, reduced to an essence of flux, without the discontinuity of the moments, is realized in our sleepless nights. Everything vanishes. Silence invades — everywhere. We listen; we hear nothing. The senses no longer turn toward the world outside. What outside? Engulfment survived by that pure passage through us that is ourselves, and that will come to an end only with sleep or daylight. . . .
*
... he took refuge in complete silence ...
*
...temptation to silence...
*
After having palavered for hours, I am invaded by the void. By the void and by shame. Is it not indecent to display one’s secrets, to proffer one’s very being, to tell and to tell oneself, whereas the fullest moments of one’s life have been known in silence, in the perception of silence?
*
... laconism must resign itself to silence if it wants to avoid a fake enigmatic profundity.
*
Moreover, what could she own and utter, when silence stood for her soul and perplexity for the universe?
*
When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.
*
We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.
*
No accident that the Trappist order was founded in France rather than in Italy or Spain. Granted the Spanish and the Italians talk ceaselessly, but they do not hear themselves talk, whereas the Frenchman relishes his eloquence, never forgets he is talking, is consummately conscious of the fact He alone could regard silence as an ordeal, as an askesis.
*
Saint Seraphim of Sarov, in his fifteen years of complete seclusion, opened his cell door to no one, not even to the bishop who occasionally visited the hermitage. “Silence,” he would say, “brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.”
What the saint should have added is that silence is never deeper than in the impossibility of prayer….
*
“Sicknesses, some by day, others by night, in their fashion, visit men, bearing suffering to mortals—in silence, for wise Zeus has denied them speech” (Hesiod).
Fortunately, for, being mute, they are already excruciating—what would they be if they were garrulous as well? Can we imagine even one proclaiming itself?

Porchia: A new pain enters and the old pains of household receive it with their silence, not with their death.
*
Although I have sworn never to sin against blessed concision, I am still in complicity with words, and if I am seduced by silence I dare not enter it, I merely prowl on its peripheries.
*
The only valid attitude is absolute silence or a cry of despair.
*
... metaphysical reality, requires, most of the time, silence ...
*
Man has forgotten the meaning of silence...
*
Facing Silence
Once you have come to set great store by silence, you have hit upon a fundamental expression of life in the margins. The reverence for silence of great solitaries and founders of religions has far deeper roots than we think. Men's presence must have been unendurable and their complex problems disgusting for one not to care about anything except silence.Chronic fatigue predisposes to a love of silence, for in it words lose their meaning and strike the ear with the hollow sonority of mechanical hammers; concepts weaken, expressions lose their force, the word grows barren as the wilderness. The ebb and flow of the outside is like a distant monotonous murmur unable to stir interest or curiosity. Then you will think it useless to express an opinion, to take a stand, to make an impression; the noises you have renounced increase the anxiety of your soul. After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.
*
Silence can be so deep sometimes that you hear thoughts rustling in freshly dug graves.
*
True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
*
God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
*
“No language can hope for anything but its own defeat” (Gregory Palamas).
So radical a condemnation of all literature could come only from a mystic—from a professional of the Inexpressible.
*
Each time I think of the Essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.
*
Existence might well have had some attraction before the advent of noise—let us say, before the neolithic age. When will he come, the man who can rid us of all men?
*
Immense, supernatural aridity: as if I were beginning a second existence on another planet where speech is unknown, in a universe refractory to language and incapable of creating such a thing for itself.
*
At the Luxembourg, a woman of about forty, almost elegant but with a certain bizarre look about her, was speaking in an affectionate, even impassioned tone to someone who was not to be seen. As I caught up with her, I noticed that she was clutching a marmoset to her bosom. She then sat down on a bench, where she continued her monologue with the same intensity. The first words I heard as I passed her were: “You know, I’ve had about enough.” I walked on, not knowing whom to pity more: her or her confidant.

John Climacus

Let us monks, then, be as trustful as the birds are; for they do not have cares, and they do not collect.

He who has tasted the things on high easily despises what is below. But he who has not tasted the things above finds joy in possessions.

A monk is one who is conditioned by virtues as others are by pleasures.

The soul has dispassion who is immersed in the virtues as the passionate are in pleasures.

But he who has an attachment to anything visible is not yet delivered from grief. For how is it possible not to be sad at the loss of something we love?

If anyone thinks he is without attachment to some object, but is grieved at its loss, then he is completely deceiving himself.

Those who are thoroughly versed in secular philosophy are indeed rare; but I affirm that those who have a divine knowledge of the philosophy of true solitude are still more rare.

A proud monk has no need of a devil; he has become a devil and enemy to himself.

He who has died to all things remembers death, but who ever is still tied to the world does not cease plotting against himself.

As of all foods bread is the most essential, so the thought of death is the most necessary of all works. The remembrance of death amongst those in the midst of society gives birth to distress and frivolity, and even more—to despondency. But amongst those who are free from noise it produces the putting aside of cares, and constant prayer and guarding of the mind.

The monk is he who within his earthly and soiled body toils towards the rank and state of the incorporeal beings. A monk is he who strictly controls his nature and unceasingly watches over his senses. A monk is he who keeps his body in chastity, his mouth pure and his mind illumined. A monk is a mourning soul that both asleep and awake is unceasingly occupied with the remembrance of death.

The beginning of freedom from anger is silence of the lips when the heart is agitated; the middle is silence of the thoughts when there is a mere disturbance of soul; and the end is an imperturbable calm under the breath of unclean winds.

Those who enter this contest must renounce all things, despise all things, deride all things, and shake  off all things, that they may lay a firm foundation. A good foundation of three layers and three pillars is innocence, fasting and temperance.

He who cherishes his stomach and hopes to overcome the spirit of fornication, is like one who tries to put out a fire with oil.

Let us pay close attention to ourselves so that we are not deceived into thinking that we are following the strait and narrow way when in actual fact we are keeping to the wide and broad way. The following will show you what the narrow way means: mortification of the stomach, all-night standing, water in moderation, short rations of bread, the purifying draught of dishonour, sneers, derision, insults, the cutting out of one’s own will, patience in annoyances, unmurmuring endurance of scorn, disregard of insults, and the habit, when wronged, of bearing it sturdily; when slandered, of not being indignant; when humiliated, not to be angry; when condemned, to be humble. Blessed are they who follow the way we have just described, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Self-esteem without any other passion can ruin a man, and in the same way, if we have formed the habit of judging, we can be utterly ruined by this alone, for indeed the Pharisee was condemned for this very thing.

Let no one with right principles suppose that the sin of lying is a
small matter, for the All-Holy Spirit pronounced the most awful sentence of all against it above all sins.
If you have promised Christ to go by the strait and narrow way, restrain your stomach, because by pleasing it and enlarging it, you break your contract. Attend and you will hear Him who says: ‘Spacious and broad is the way of gluttony that leads to the perdition of fornication, and many there are who go in by it; because narrow is the gate and hard is the way of fasting that leads to the life of purity, and few there are who go in by it.”

A vigilant monk is a foe to fornication but a sleepy one mates with it.

A monk who denies himself sleep is a fisher of thoughts, and in the stillness of the night he can easily observe and catch them.

Long sleep produces forgetfulness, but vigil purifies the memory.

The devil often has the habit, especially in warring against ascetics and those leading the solitary life, of using all his force, all his zeal, all his cunning, all his intrigue, all his ingenuity and purpose, to assail them by means of what is unnatural, and not by what is natural. Therefore, ascetics coming into contact with women, and not in any way tempted either by desire or thought, have sometimes regarded themselves as already blessed, not knowing, poor things, that where a worse downfall had been prepared for them, there was no need of the lesser one.

The mother of sweetness is earth and dew, and the mother of purity is silence with obedience. Dispassion of the body attained by silence, has often been shaken on coming into contact with the world; but that obtained by obedience isgenuine and inviolable everywhere.

A fish swiftly escapes a hook; and a sensual soul shuns solitude.

Meekness is an unchangeable state of mind, which remains the same inhonour and dishonour.

In meek hearts the Lord finds rest, but a turbulent soul is a seat of the devil.

A small hair disturbs the eye, and a small care ruins solitude; because solitude is the banishment of thoughts and ideas, and the rejection of even laudable cares.

Cioran - Solitude

 A broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls. What a language! The most heartrending I know, and I shall never forget it. From now on, in moments of excessive solitude, I need merely recall those sounds to have the sense of belonging to a community.

*
Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not.
*
What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster Is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.
*
Won over by solitude, yet he remains in the world: a stylite without a pillar.
*
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
*
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
*
An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not open them, he flung them into the fire in order to escape the assault of memory. We cannot sustain communion with oursclf and our thoughts if we allow ghosts to appear, to prevail. The desert signifies not so much a new life as the death of the past: at last we have escaped our own history. In society, no less than in the Thebaid, the letters we write, and those we receive, testify to the fact that we are in chains, that we have broken none of the bonds, that we are merely slaves and deserve to be so.
*
There are certain moments when, remote as we are from any faith, we can conceive of only God as our interlocutor. To address ourselves elsewhere seems an impossibility, a madness. Solitude, in its extreme reaches, requires a form of conversation, also extreme.
*
Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.
*
After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as to greet them thus?”
*
To fathom this separate man, we should focus on the phrase “to hold oneself apart,” the tacit motto of his every moment, on its implication of solitude and subterranean stubbornness, on the essence of a withdrawn being who pursues an endless and implacable labor.
*
If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?
*
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
*
When, out of the appetite for solitude, we have sundered our bonds, the Void seizes us: nothing, no one … Whom to liquidate now? Where to unearth a durable victim? — Such perplexities open us to God: at least with Him we’re sure of being able to break indefinitely…
*
The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
*
The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer.
*
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful. Such as the novel’s. Let us salute it, then, even celebrate it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last, we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions and our limits, the futility of having a life, of becoming a character or of creating one.
*
... hatred of learning and of the solitude which is its condition.
*
Solitude is a mission, not a donnée; to rise to its level and assume it means renouncing the vulgarity that insures success, religious or otherwise. Recapitulate the history of ideas, acts, attitudes and you find that the future was always on the side of the rabble. One does not preach in the name of Marcus Aurelius: since he spoke only to himself, he had neither disciples nor votaries; on the other hand, temples are still being built where certain Epistles are cited to satiety. As long as this goes on, I shall persecute this saint so adept at interesting us in his torments.
*
Abstinence—voluntary or forced—sets the individual both above and below the Species, makes him into an alloy of Saint and Imbecile that intrigues and abashes us. Whence our equivocal hatred for the Monk, as for any man who has renounced woman, who has renounced being like us. We shall never forgive him his solitude: it degrades as much as it disgusts us; it is a provocation. O the strange ascendancy of flaws! Gogol once confessed that love, had he yielded to it, would have “instantaneously reduced me to dust.” Such an admission, as fascinating as it is dreadful, reminds us of Kierkegaard and his “thorn in the flesh.” Yet the Danish philosopher’s nature was an erotic one: his broken engagement, his debacle as a lover, tormented him all his life and tainted even his theological works. Can we then compare Gogol to Swift, that other “blasted” man? This would be to forget that the Dean, if he lacked the luck to love, possessed at least that of breaking hearts. To “place” Gogol, we must imagine a Swift with neither Stella nor Vanessa.
*
As lonely as Swift, that pamphleteer of another age, that pamphleteer anterior to man. When everything leaves me, when I leave myself, I think of them both, I cling to their disgusts and to their cruelty, support myself on their vertigo. When I leave myself, yes, I turn to them: nothing then could separate me from their solitude.
*
According to Cassian, Evagrus, and Nilus of Ancyra, no demon is more redoubtable than the demon of acedia. The monk who succumbs to it will be its victim to the end of his days. Glued to the window, he will stare outside, will await visits, any visits, in order to palaver, to forget himself.
To strip oneself of everything and then discover one had taken the wrong path, to cool one’s heels in solitude and be unable to leave it! For every hermit who has succeeded, there are a thousand who have failed. These defeated men, these failures steeped in the ineffectiveness of their prayers —the Church sought to revive them by song, imposed upon them exultation, the discipline of joy. Victims of the demon, how could they have raised their voices, and to whom? As remote from Grace as from the age, they spent hours comparing their sterility to that of the desert, to the material image of their void.

Glued to my window, to what would I compare my sterility if not to that of the City? Yet the other desert, the real one, haunts me. If only I could go there and forget the odor of men! As God’s neighbor, I should inhale His desolation and His eternity that I dream of at the moments there awakens in me the memory of a distant cell. In a previous life, what monastery did I abandon or betray? My incompleted prayers, broken off then, pursue me now, while in my brain some heaven or other appears and disappears.
*
The desert, in fact, provides the image of duration translated into coexistence: a motionless flow, a metamorphosis bewitched by space. The solitary retires there less to expand his solitude and enrich his absence than to produce within himself the tonality of death.

*

At this moment, I am alone. What more can I want? A more intense happiness does not exist. Yes: that of hearing, by dint of silence, my solitude enlarge.
*
The assent to death is the greatest one of all. It can be expressed in several ways …
There are among us daylight ghosts, devoured by their absence, for whom life is one long aside. They walk our streets with muffled steps, and look at no one. No anxiety can be discovered in their eyes, no haste in their gestures. For them an outside world has ceased to exist, and they submit to every solitude. Careful to keep their distance, solicitous of their detachment, they inhabit an undeclared universe situated somewhere between the memory of the unimaginable and the imminence of certainty. Their smile suggests a thousand vanquished fears, the grace that triumphs over all things terrible: such beings can pass through matter itself. Have they overtaken their own origins? Discovered in themselves the very sources of light? No defeat, no victory dis turbs them. Independent of the sun, they are self-sufficient: illuminated by Death.
*
The other does not exist - this is an obvious and comforting conclusion. To be alone, horribly alone, is the only imperative, and it must be obeyed at any price. The universe is solitary space, and all its creations do nothing but reinforce its solitude. I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.
*
To send someone a book is to commit a burglary—a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.
*
... solitary, omnipresent, he is always there . . . , forever inseparable from what counts in an existence.
*
It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”
*
Turning to the monks meditating night and day on their seclusion, I imagined them mulling over crimes and outrages that were more or less aborted. Every solitary, I told myself, is suspect: a pure being does not isolate himself. To seek the intimacy of a cell, one must have a heavy conscience; one must be afraid of one’s conscience. I regretted bitterly that the history of monasticism had been undertaken by straightforward minds, as incapable of conceiving the need to be odious to oneself as of experiencing that melancholy which moves mountains …
*
Tears do not burn except in solitude. Those who ask to be surrounded by friends when they die do so out of fear and inability to live their final moments alone. They want to forget death at the moment of death. They lack infinite heroism. Why don't they lock their door and suffer those maddening sensations with a lucidity and a fear beyond all limits? We are so isolated form everything! But isn't everything equally inaccessible to us? The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
*
TRUE SOLITUDE is the feeling of being absolutely isolated between the earth and the sky. Nothing should detract attention from these phenomena of absolute isolation: a fearfully lucid intuition will reveal the entire drama of man's finite nature facing the infinite nothingness of the world. Solitary walks—extremely fertile and dangerous at the same time, for the inner life—must take place in such a way that nothing will obscure the solitary's meditation on man's isolation in the world. Solitary walks are propitious to an intense process of interiorization especially in the evening, when none of the usual seductions can steal one's interest. Then revelations about the world spring from the deepest corner of the spirit, from the place where it has detached itself from life, from the wound of life. To achieve spirituality, one must be very lonely. So much death-in-life and so many inner conflagrations! Loneliness negates so much of life that the spirit's blooming in vital dislocations becomes almost insufferable.
*
Real solitude implies a painful intermission in man's life, a lonely struggle with the angel of death. To live in solitude means to relinquish all expectations about life. The only surprise in solitude is death. The great solitaries retreated from the world not to prepare themselves for life but, rather, to await with resignation its end. No messages about life ever issue forth from deserts and caves. Haven't we proscribed all religions that began in the desert? All the illuminations and dreams of the great solitaries reveal an apocalyptic vision of downfall and the end rather than a crown of lights and triumphs.The solitude of the melancholic man is less profound.
*
I seriously ask myself, What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows? Wouldn't it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.
*
The absolute remains un- lovable. I see a form of madness, not of knowledge, in the ecstasy of life's ultimate origins. You cannot experience it except in solitude, when you feel as if you were floating above the world. Solitude is the proper milieu for madness. It is noteworthy that even the skeptic can experience this kind of ecstasy.
*
Many are haunted by the vision of an abandoned world encased in glacial solitude, untouched by even the pale reflections of a crepuscular light. Who is more unhappy? He who feels his own loneliness or he who feels the loneliness of the world? Impossible to tell, and besides, why should I bother with a classification of loneliness? Is it not enough that one is alone?
*
Men value solitude so little! They condemn the sterility of all that it has produced and give praise exclusively to social values, for they cherish the illusion that they have all contributed to their creation. They all aspire to great achievements through which they hope to attain immortality. As if they will not crumble into dust!
*
Were I to withdraw into the most fearsome desert, renounce everything, and live in absolute solitude, still I would never dream of despising men and their pleasure. Since I cannot really enter eternity through renunciation and solitude, since I shall die like the rest, why despise them, why call my way the only true one?
*
An outcast in the world, indifferent to its being dazzling or dismal, self-consumed with triumphs and failures, engrossed in inner drama—such is the fate of the solitary.
*
Let the pathos and drama of infinity come to us once more in the loneliness of death so that our passing away into nothingness will resemble an illumination amplifying the mystery and the meaninglessness of this world.
*
The only explanation for the creation of world is God's fear of solitude. In other words, our role is to amuse Our Maker. Poor clowns of the absolute we forgot that we act out of tragedy to enliven the burden of one spectator whose applause has never reached a mortal ear. Solitude weights on God so much that he invented saints as partners in dialogue.
I can stand up to God only by confronting him with another solitude. I would be nothing more than another clown.
*
Modern acedia is no longer monastic solitude - though our souls are our cloisters - but a void, and the dread of an inefficient, derelict God.
*
"Solitude has made me contemporary with the dead". (Barres) There is no life, only eternity, in solitude.
*

The Empire was falling, the Barbarians were on the move…. What was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy moment, when there was still somewhere to go, when the empty places were accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the desert.
*
I never tire of reading about the hermits, preferably about those said to be “weary of seeking God.” I am dazzled by the failures of the Desert.
*
And it is to seek a true, purer sentiment of this kind that the hermits took refuge in the desert, that negation of history which they rightly compared to the angels, since—they maintained—both were unaware of sin and the Fall into the realm of time. The desert, in fact, provides the image of duration translated into coexistence: a motionless flow, a metamorphosis bewitched by space. The solitary retires there less to expand his solitude and enrich his absence than to produce within himself the tonality of death.
In order to hear this tonality we must institute a desert within ourselves …
*
However serious our fall, it may nevertheless be useful to us if we turn it into a discipline that can induce us to reconquer the privileges of delirium. The hermits of the first centuries of Christianity will serve us again as an example. They will teach us how, in order to raise our psychic level, we must join a permanent combat with ourselves. It is with singular appropriateness that one Father of the Church has called them “athletes of the desert.” They were warriors whose state of tension, whose relentless struggles against themselves we can scarcely imagine. There were some who recited up to seven hundred prayers a day; they kept track by dropping a pebble after each one … A mad arithmetic which made me admire them all the more for their matchless pride. They were not weaklings, these obsessed saints at grips with the dearest of all their possessions: their temptations. Living only in their behalf, they exacerbated these temptations to have still more to struggle against. Their descriptions of “desire” display such violence of tone that they scrape our senses raw and give us shudders no libertine author succeeds in inspiring. They were ingenious at glorifying “the flesh” in reverse. If it fascinated them to such a degree, what merit in having fought against its attractions! They were titans, more frenzied, more perverse than those of mythology; for the latter would never have been able, in their simplicity of mind, to conceive, for the accumulation of energy, all the advantages of self-loathing.
*
How I would search the nests and caves, wander the deserted mountains and the sea, the hills and the plains!
*
Renounce? But how? Where should you go in order not to renounce it all at once although that is the only genuine renunciation? Actual deserts are not readily available to us in our lands and our climate; we lack the adequate milieu. Not living under the fierce desert sun, with just that one thought about eternity, are we to become saints with roofs over our heads? Not to be able to renounce except through suicide is a strictly modern drama.
*
Ishi, the last American Indian of his tribe, after hiding for years in terror of the White Men, reduced to starvation, surrendered of his own free will to the exterminators of his people, believing that the same treatment was in store for himself. He was made much of. He had no posterity, he was truly the last.
Once humanity is destroyed or simply extinguished, we may imagine a sole survivor who would wander the earth, without even having anyone to surrender to….
*
Those nights when you convince yourself that everyone has evacuated this universe, even the dead, and that you are the last living being here, the last ghost.
*
In order to reach compassion, you must carry self-concern to the saturation point, to nausea, such paroxysms of disgust being a symptom of healthy a necessary condition for looking beyond one’s own trials and tribulations.
*
Whenever I have to meet someone, I am overcome with such a craving for isolation that when I am about to speak". I lose all control over my words, and their somersaulting is taken for . . . verve!
*
The eminent virtue of calumny is that it produces a vacuum around you without your having to raise a finger.
*
Desperate disgust in the presence of a crowd, whether high-spirited or sullen.
*
There comes a moment when one imitates nothing more than oneself.

Sensory experience and it's absence

Space and time are the two great subjective mistakes which we all agree in making and on and in which we build all our disagreements.

The five senses offer us different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive?

It is our eyes that blind us and our ears that deafen us.

When I look at a looking glass, what do I see - the looking glass, my face or me? When I look at the world, what do I see - the world, my perceptions, or me? When I look at you, what do I see, you or a part of my unknown self?

Where I would be (and what would happen to me) if I could see all round me and above and below at once?

—Is the world, the universe, finite or infinite?
—Some scientists say it is finite.
—Well, so it is: for a scientist's eye is the hole in the end of universe through which he looks and observes it. Can he see through the hole the other way?

Nanamoli Thera ↑

We are lead to believe in a lie
When we see with not through the eye ...

***

“Friends, when the Blessed One rose from his seat and entered his dwelling after reciting a synopsis in brief without expounding the meaning in detail, that is: ‘Bhikkhus, I say that the end of the world cannot be known, seen, or reached by travelling. Yet, bhikkhus, I also say that without reaching the end of the world there is no making an end to suffering,’ I understand the detailed meaning of this synopsis as follows:

That in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world—this is called the world in the Noble One’s Discipline. And what, friends, is that in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world? The eye is that in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world .The ear ... The nose ... The tongue ... The body ... The mind is that in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world. That in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world—this is called the world in the Noble One’s Discipline. SN 35:116

“Bhikkhus, before my enlightenment, while I was still a bodhisatta, not yet fully enlightened, the thought occurred to me: ‘My mind may often stray towards those five cords of sensual pleasure that have already left their impression on the heart but which have passed, ceased, and changed, or towards those that are present, or slightly towards those in the future.’ Then it occurred to me: ‘Being set on my own welfare, I should practise diligence, mindfulness, and guarding of the mind in regard to those five cords of sensual pleasure that have already left their impression on the heart, which have passed, ceased, and changed.’

“Therefore, bhikkhus, in your case too your minds may often stray towards those five cords of sensual pleasure that have already left their impression on the heart but which have passed, ceased, and changed, or towards those that are present, or slightly towards those in the future. Therefore, bhikkhus,  being set on your own welfare, you should practise diligence, mindfulness, and guarding of the mind in regard to those five cords of sensual pleasure that have already left their impression on the heart but which have passed, ceased, and changed.

“Therefore, bhikkhus, that base should be understood, where the eye ceases and perception of forms fades away. That base should be understood, where the ear ceases and perception of sounds fades away.… That base should be understood, where the mind ceases and perception of mental phenomena fades away. That base should be understood.” Having said this, the Blessed One rose from his seat and entered his dwelling. (...) ↓

… The Venerable Ānanda said this: (...) This was stated by the Blessed One, friends, with reference to the cessation of the six sense bases. SN 35:117

“Venerable sir, is there any eye by means of which one describing the Buddhas of the past could describe them—those who have attained final Nibbāna, cut through proliferation, cut through the rut, exhausted the round, and transcended all suffering? Is there any ear by way of which one describing the Buddhas of the past could describe them?… Is there any mind by way of which one describing the Buddhas of the past could describe them—those who have attained final Nibbāna, cut through proliferation, cut through the rut, exhausted the round, and transcended all suffering?"

“There is no eye, Phagguna, by means of which one describing the Buddhas of the past could describe them—those who have attained final Nibbāna, cut through proliferation, cut through the rut, exhausted the round, and transcended all suffering. There is no ear by means of which one describing the Buddhas of the past could describe them…. There is no mind by means of which one describing the Buddhas of the past could describe them—those who have attained final Nibbāna, cut through proliferation, cut through the rut, exhausted the round, and transcended all suffering.”  SN 35: 83

“Sister, the arahants maintain that when the eye exists there is pleasure and pain, and when the eye does not exist there is no pleasure and pain. The arahants maintain that when the ear exists there is pleasure and pain, and when the ear does not exist there is no pleasure and pain…. The arahants maintain that when the mind exists there is pleasure and pain, and when the mind does not exist there is no pleasure and pain.”  SN 35:133

... if a bhikkhu wishes: ‘May I, with the abandoning of pleasure and pain, and with the previous passing away of joy and displeasure, enter and dwell in the fourth jhāna, which is neither painful nor pleasant and includes the purification of mindfulness by equanimity,’ this same concentration by mindfulness of breathing should be closely attended to. SN 54: 8

For one who has attained the base of the infinity of space, the perception of form has ceased.
SN 36:2

“Again, friend, with the complete surmounting of perceptions of forms, with the passing away of perceptions of sensory impingement, with non-attention to perceptions of diversity, [perceiving] ‘space is infinite,’ a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the base of the infinity of space. To this extent, too, the Blessed One has spoken of the achievement of an opening amid confinement in a provisional sense. There, too, there is confinement. And what is the confinement there? Whatever perception of the base of the infinity of space has not ceased there is the confinement in this case. AN 9:42

“There is, bhikkhus, equanimity that is diversified, based on diversity; and there is equanimity that is unified, based on unity. “And what, bhikkhus, is equanimity that is diversified, based on diversity? There is equanimity regarding forms, sounds, odours, flavours, and tangibles. This, bhikkhus, is equanimity that is diversified, based on diversity.

“And what, bhikkhus, is equanimity that is unified, based on unity? There is equanimity regarding the base of infinite space, the base of infinite consciousness, the base of nothingness, and the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. This, bhikkhus, is equanimity that is unified, based on unity. 20. “Here, bhikkhus, by depending and relying on equanimity that is unified, based on unity, abandon and surmount equanimity that is diversified, based on diversity. It is thus this is abandoned; it is thus this is surmounted.

M137