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

Sunday, March 30, 2014

True vision of things


If I could only go back to being a child and remain one for ever, oblivious to the values that man attached to things and to the relations they established between them! (…)

Gold is worth no more than glass to a child. And is gold value truly greater? The child obscurely senses the absurdity of the wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren't all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd?

O divinely absurd intuition of children! True vision of things, which we always dress with conventions, however nakedly we see them, and always blur with our ideas, however directly we look at them!

Might not God be an enormous child? Doesn't the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of mischievous child? So unreal, so …

Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
translation: Richard Zenith
p. 406
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