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

Monday, March 10, 2014

I'm no one, no one at all


Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I'm no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I'd supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself reviled no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I'm the suburbs of non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I'm no one, no one at all. I don't know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I'm a character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me.

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
translation: Richard Zenith
p. 227
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