There is only one way out of this, namely, total separation from all the world. But withdrawal from the world does not mean physical removal from it. Rather, it is the withdrawal by the soul of any sympathy for the body. One becomes stateless and homeless. One gives up possessions, friends, ownership and property, livelihood, business connection, social life and scholarship. The heart is made ready to receive the imprint of sacred teaching, and this making ready involves the unlearning of knowledge deriving from evil habits. To write on wax, one has first to erase the letters previously written there, and to bring sacred teaching to the soul one must begin by wiping out preoccupation rooted in ordinary habits.

Basil of Caesarea

Cioran

Thinking about C., for who drinking coffee is the only reason to exist. One day, with a trembling voice, I was extolling Buddhism, he answered: "Nirvana, yes, but not without coffee."
We all have some mania that stops us from unreservedly accepting complete happines.

Cow urine was the only medicine monks had permission to use in the early Buddhist communities. A most sensible measure. If one covets peace, one will attain it only in rejecting whatever may cause trouble, whatever man has grafted onto his original simplicity, his original health. Nothing speaks of our fall more eloquently than the spectacle of a drugstore: remedies for every ailment but the essential one, which no human nostrum will ever cure.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

Without excessive overconfidence, I think that as regards perception, and even the experience of emptiness, I went as far as several Buddhist or Tibetan hermits - because everything I do revolves around this fundamental unreality.

On the mantelpiece, the photograph of a chimpanzee and a statuette of the Buddha. This proximity, more accidental than intentional, makes me wonder over and over where my place might be between these two extrems, man's pre and transfiguration.

,I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at dose range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs-between a false promise and the end of all promises.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 151 -

,And our very being - what a mistake, what an injury to have adjoined it to existence, when we might have persevered, intact, in the virtual, the invulnerable! No-one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if ever there was one. Yet it is with the hope of being cured of it some day that we accept life and endure its ordeals. The years pass, the wound remains.''

- The Fall Into time, Quadrangle Books, 1970 (1964), page 69 -

,,It is our birth, in fact, that we must attend to if we want to extirpate the evil at its source. We take a stand against death, against what must come; birth, a much more irreparable event, we leave to one side, pay little or no attention to it: to each man it appears as far in the past as the world's first moment. Only a man who plans to suppress himself reaches back that far; it seems he cannot forget the unnamable mechanism of procreation and that he tries, by a retrospective horror, to annihilate the very seed from which he has sprung.''

- The Fall Into time, Quadrangle Books, 1970 (1964), pages 169-170 -

,,To procreate is to love the scourge - to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours: annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is sombre, it is infernal by essence.''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 11 -

,,In the Council of 1211 against the Bogomils, those among them were anathematized who held that ,,woman conceives in her womb by the cooperation of Satan, that Satan abides there upon conception without withdrawing hence until the birth of the child.'' I dare not suppose that the Devil can be concerned with us to the point of keeping us company for so many months; but I cannot doubt that we have been conceived under his eyes and that he actually attended our beloved begetters.''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 62 -

,,The disgust with the useful aspect of sexuality, the horror of procreation, constitutes part of the interrogation of the creation: what is the good of multiplying monsters?''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 62 -

,,The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 102 -

,,We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good-have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.''
- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 4 -

,,Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 4 -

,,To have committed every crime but that of being a father.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 6 -

,,If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 19 -

,,In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth". An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 33 -

,,Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 98 -

,,That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 157 -

,,If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 147 -

,,When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 181 -

,,Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles...''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 211 -

,,Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 212 -

,,Birth, what an exile!''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Anyone who lives is defeated and birth is a foretaste of capitulation.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Every birth is a capitulation.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,The only thing I know - I flatter myself that I understood it already, when I was twenty years old - that one should not procreate.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Crime is to transmit, through procreation, one’s frailties to someone else, to force someone to experience the same things we are experiencing: Gehenna, which may be even worse than our own. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my miseries.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Compassion makes you not want to be a ,,progenitor''. This is the cruelest word I know.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

Degradation Through Work

"Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality.

Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness of eternity not enough? It is the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us. Work is the negation of eternity. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity. To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness. The lazy man has an infinitely keener perception of metaphysical reality than the active one."


Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity

The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. -- Cioran

There's a word in Pali bāhulika that is usually translated as "luxurious", though in his draft translation of the Majjhima Nikāya Ven. Ñanamoli sometimes translates it as "busy". I've always thought of this as being a bit idiosyncratic, but this passage from Cioran makes it apparent that the two words aren't as dissimilar as one might suppose.

(from Dhamma forum)

To what extend I am responsible for my own birth?

To what extend I am responsible for my own birth? I am responsible for it, in so far I am glad to be born.

Cioran

The sin of having been born.

Here, as always, Proust is completely detached from all moral considerations. There is no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world. (Except possibly in those passages dealing with the war, when for a space he ceases to be an artist and raises his voice with the plebs, mob, rabble, canaille.) Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organised by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his ‘soci malorum,’ the sin of having been born.

‘Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido.’

S. Beckett

History is a dimension man could have done without

E M Cioran on Samuel Beckett:

He lives not in time but parallel to it, which is why it has never occurred to me to ask him what he thinks of events. He is one of those beings who make you realize that history is a dimension man could have done without.

Can we conceive a Buddha faithful to his truths and to his palace?

“After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are imprisoned in illusion. If he depends on them, he takes his revenge by studying them, a specialist in the underbelly of “noble” sentiments. His sloth, of a very rare quality, truly “delivers” him from a world of fools and dupes. About renunciation he knows more than many of your esoteric works. To be convinced of this, you need only walk out into the street … But you prefer the texts that teach mendicancy. Since no practical consequence accompanies your meditations, it will not be surprising that the merest bum is worth more than you … Can we conceive a Buddha faithful to his truths and to his palace? One is not “delivered-alive” and still a land-owner. I reject the generalization of the lie, I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called “salvation” and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.”

― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist


“Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.”

― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Our withdrawal from life is a purely practical matter

„Nothing is better proof of how humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentation”. (TBB 4). At the best we can say that humanity has adjusted itself to its temporal condition and learned to survive it without suicide, but that is not much to show for millennia of conscious existence: „After having botched the true eternity, man has fallen into time, where he has managed if not to flourish at least to live; in any case he has adjusted himself to it. The process of this fall and this adjustment is called History. (FT 180)

In this circumstance, what Cioran can suggest amounts to no more than an adjustment to that „adjustment”. Like Schopenhauer's instructions for the construction of a fire-proof room, he attempts to adapt to situation that is fundamentally hellish. And like Schopenhauer, his suggestions have a tone that is ascetical, to a point, stoic. But whereas Schopenhauer predicated the idea of withdrawal or resignation from life on the claim that time-consciousness was something fundamentally unreal and that, in approaching nirvana, we actually approach true knowledge, Cioran does not comfort himself with the idea of an alternate reality or a compensatory knowledge. Our withdrawal from life is a purely practical matter: „As for happiness, if this word has a meaning, it consists in the aspiration to the minimum and the ineffectual, in the notion of limitation hypothesized. Our sole recourse: to renounce not only the fruit of action, but action itself (FT 65). Cioran technique then, is to radicalize the isolation that our time-consciousness creates, almost to the point of hermitage. Rather then strive after an impossible renunciation, we should rest (not rest content, just rest) within our boundaries. In this way we will minimize our unhappiness, be free from illusion, and do the least harm to others.(...)

Like the earlier pessimists, Cioran associates ends-oriented activity with frustration and suffering. On the daily level, this suggest that we ought to cease our pursuit of objects outside ourselves, whatever their nature: „Civilization instructs us how to take hold of things, wheres it is the art of letting go that it should teach us .. Every new acquisition signifies a new chain” (FT 69). But this behavior if generalized, amounts to an „art of living”, albeit a monastic one – a withdrawal, insofar as humanly possible, from the effects of time. While we cannot leap out of time in ecstatic fashion, we can hunker down, as it were, mark our doors with blood, and let the worst of it pass over us. Thus, to Cioran is the condition that we ought to call freedom: if we were to wrest ourselves from our desires we should thereby wrest ourselves from destiny; … by the sacrifice of our identity we would accede to freedom, inseparable from training in anonymity and abdication. 'I am no one, I have conquered my name' exclaims the man who, reaching the degradation of leaving tracts, tries to conform to Epicurus's commend: „Hide your life'”. (FT 66) While the passage makes the freedom Cioran describes sound entirely negative, elsewhere, as we have seen, he describes the release from destiny as something that should „delight our hearts” on the grounds that it liberates the individual in the most radical way possible (SHD 149).

Epicurus is the figure to whom Cioran recurs on several occasions always as an example of the sort philosopher he would like to emulate, one who has stop thinking and .. begun to search for happiness. (TS 50). While showing no interest in Epicurean metaphysic, Cioran directly identifies with the idea of a search for an „art of living” and with a practical approach to pleasure and pain. But where Epicurus recommended friendship as a core element of personal happiness, Cioran's stringent search for nothingness ends in isolation: „I suppressed word after word from my vocabulary. When that massacre was over, only one had escaped: Solitude. I awakened euphoric” (TBB 92). To escape our destiny, we must escape from all trappings of social existence, which constantly threaten, as Rousseau argued, to generate new desires and aims for which we will futilely strive. Even more then hiding our lives, Cioran's advice, in effect, is to hide your soul. He replaces ecstasy of transfiguration with the satisfactions of solitude. The atheist mystic has become an atheistic monk.
Joshua Foa Dienstag
from: Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

It's harder than you think to gain disciples

"On this immaculate page, a gnat was making a dash for it. "Why be in such a hurry? Where are you going, what are you looking for? Relax!" I screamed out in the middle of the night. I would have been so pleased to see it collapse! It's harder than you think to gain disciples."

Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

If life occupies the first place in the hierarchy of lies, love comes immediately afterward, lie within the lie

If life occupies the first place in the hierarchy of lies, love comes immediately afterward, lie within the lie. Expression of our hybrid position, love is surrounded by an apparatus of beatitudes and torments thanks to which we find in someone a substitute for ourselves. By what hoax do two eyes turn us away from our solitude? Is there any failure more humiliating for the mind? Love lulls knowledge; wakened, knowledge kills love. Unreality cannot triumph indefinitely, even disguised in the appearances of the most exalting lie. And moreover who would have an illusion solid enough to find in the other what he has vainly sought in himself? Would a furnace of guts afford what the whole universe could not give us? And yet this is the actual basis of this common, and supernatural, anomaly: to solve à deux rather, to suspend—all enigmas; by means of an imposture, to forget that fiction in which life is steeped; by a double murmur to fill the general vacuity; and—parody of ecstasy—to drown oneself at last in the sweat of some accomplice or other. . . .

Cioran, A Short History of Decay
translation: Richard Howard
p. 56

Modern complacency is limitless

Modern complacency is limitless: we suppose ourselves more enlightened, more profound than all the centuries behind us, forgetting that the teaching of a Buddha confronted thousands of beings with the problem of nothingness, a problem we imagine we have discovered because we have changed its terms and introduced a touch of erudition into it. But what Western thinker would survive a comparison with a Buddhist monk? We lose ourselves in texts and terminologies: meditation is a datum unknown to modern philosophy. If we want to keep some intellectual decency, enthusiasm for civilization must be banished from our mind, as well as the superstition of History. As for the great problems, we have no advantage over our ancestors or our more recent predecessors: men have always known everything, at least in what concerns the Essential; modern philosophy adds nothing to Chinese, Hindu, or Greek philosophy. Moreover, there cannot be a new problem, despite our naïvete or our infatuation which would like to persuade us to the contrary.

Cioran, A Short History of Decay
translation: Richard Howard

Original sin

The eminent cleric was poking fun at original sin. ‘That sin is your meal ticket. Without it, you’d die of hunger, for your ministry would then no longer have any meaning. If man is not fallen from the very beginning, why did Christ come? to redeem whom and what?’ To my objections, his only response was a condescending smile.

A religion is finished when only its adversaries try to preserve its integrity.

Cioran

Original sin haunted Cioran's work. He believed that man first sinned by deeming himself more important or on par with God. Since man cannot live with the possibility that life has no meaning and individual existence is insignificant, a rotten seed lies in the core of man-- a seed which germinates from the desire to imagine himself the centre of the world. Because life must have meaning, man starts creating ideas. But neutral ideas do not comfort man-- they are too sterile-- so man attaches his own passions to these ideas. Thus man lights the pyre.

Alina Stefanescu

It's when you discover that life is without substance, that it's nothing at all, illusion ...

Jason Weiss - And you remained in that village until what age?

Cioran: Until I was ten. And there we had a garden next to the cemetery, which also played a role in my life because I was a friend of the grave-
digger. I was always around the cemetery, all the time I was seeing the disinterred, the skeletons, the cadavers. For me death was something so
obvious that it was truly a part of my daily life. I didn't start acting like Hamlet, but it is true that after that I began to be obsessed with skeletons
and even the phenomenon of death. And that had an effect on my insomnia. Which means that for someone to have an obsession with death, one
already has a sense of the unreality of life. It's there, the process. It's not the obsession with death that makes you discover that life is unreal, it's
when you discover that life is without substance, that it's nothing at all, illusion, that the obsession with death settles in.

I'll tell you an anecdote that played a role in my life. I was about twenty-two and one day I was in a terrible state. We were living in Sibiu, a city in
the provinces where I spent my whole youth, and where my father was the priest of the city. That day only my mother and I were home, and-when
I remember things, I remember them very precisely, I even remember the hour, it's very strange-I think it was around two in the afternoon, everyone else had gone out. All of a sudden, I had a fantastic fit of despair, threw myself on the sofa and said, "I can't take it anymore." And my mother said this: "If I had known, I would have had an abortion." That made an extraordinary impression on me. It didn't hurt me, not at all. But later I said, "That was very important. I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?" Because, in effect, it's all without substance.

Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all

Self-knowledge — the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.”

“Nothing is better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.”

― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Lapse of memory

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring. …

― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Silence, for Cioran, plays a very important role in his thought

Silence, for Cioran, plays a very important role in his thought, for it is by this that we can possibly get to the foundation of our being human within the universe. To quote: „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.‟ Not only does this quote exemplify again the negativity about our being linguistically oriented, but it also shows how silence „brings us back to essentials‟, how it roots us in our original foundations as prelinguistic beings. By our rooting in silence we can gain a far greater knowledge of reality due to the fact that it will not become obscured or distorted by language. For Cioran places a great emphasis in a truth in wordlessness, in a proper connection with the world and the universe by solitude and silence. This is best exemplified in two illuminating quotes: „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?‟ „True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.‟

In both of these quotes it is apparent that silence, as an inwardly directed solitude, brings a rich connectedness with the universe and the beings/objects which reside in it. In solitude we move retrograde back to a primordial innocence between ourselves and the universe, before any such dialogical shackling occurred; through silence we can regain that original prelinguism and, by this, attempt to ameliorate and mend the damage we have done to the ontology of reality and the universe by language.


Language and Silence: A Discussion Between Gadamer and Cioran on the Prerequisite of Language in Human Being

Brendan Dean