Every happiness that a man enjoys, and almost every friendship that he
cherishes, rest upon illusion; for, as a rule, with increase of
knowledge they are bound to vanish. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere, a
man should courageously pursue truth, and never weary of striving to
settle accounts with himself and the world. No matter what happens to
the right or to the left of him,--be it a chimaera or fancy that makes
him happy, let him take heart and go on, with no fear of the desert
which widens to his view. Of one thing only must he be quite certain:
that under no circumstances will he discover any lack of worth in
himself when the veil is raised; the sight of it would be the Gorgon
that would kill him. Therefore, if he wants to remain undeceived, let
him in his inmost being feel his own worth. For to feel the lack of it
is not merely the greatest, but also the only true affliction; all other
sufferings of the mind may not only be healed, but may be immediately
relieved, by the secure consciousness of worth. The man who is assured
of it can sit down quietly under sufferings that would otherwise bring
him to despair; and though he has no pleasures, no joys and no friends,
he can rest in and on himself; so powerful is the comfort to be derived
from a vivid consciousness of this advantage; a comfort to be preferred
to every other earthly blessing. Contrarily, nothing in the world can
relieve a man who knows his own worthlessness; all that he can do is to
conceal it by deceiving people or deafening them with his noise; but
neither expedient will serve him very long.
Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders
Existence - system of null-functions activated into partial non-nullity by ignorance.
The Void, of which it cannot be said that it is or is not, nor that it has consciousness or has none, while it denies absoluteness to any experiential value (alike to being and to consciousness) cannot be identified. And that is the doctrine of not-self (anatta) as I see it in one aspect at present. This voidness cannot be “is-ed” and so introduced into the worldly scheme, except as the denial of absoluteness of all particular values. It has no more effect on ordinary life than the theory of relativity. But just as that theory completely alters calculation of enormous speeds, so, as I see it, this void-element completely alters calculations of extraordinary situations, of death (as killing, suicide or the partner of old age). N.T
Friday, January 17, 2014
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