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, March 28, 2014

To take abdication to unprecedented heights


Since every step I took in life brought to me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That's why haw badly life terrifies and tortures me.

Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
translation: Richard Zenith
p. 397
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