Mam aspires to eternity but loves time more

What is most essential in us struggles with time. It is impossible to not accept space; it is too great a piece of evidence. But there is a moment from which you don’t want to accept time. The dramatic moment of the individual existence culminates always in the struggle with time. This struggle, however, is without escape, because the being touched by temporality, once having conquered eternity, inevitably regrets time. The desire to flee from time is found only in people ill with time, people who are tied too strongly by the bonds of fleeting moments. Redemption is such an inconsistent aspiration because of the regret experienced by those who are after the joys, surprises, and tragedies that the world, which lives and dies in the meanwhile, has to offer. If there is a temporal pressure, there is also, none the smaller, an infinity pressure.

Man aspires to infinity, but loves time more. As this life that we live and consume is the only value that we are given, it is impossible not to conceive of eternity as a loss, which we nonetheless respect. The only thing one can love is life itself, which I detest. It is absolutely impossible to get rid of time, without getting rid of life at the same time. Wherever you position yourself, time is the biggest temptation: a greater temptation than life itself, because if death is not in time, then time will become the occasion of death. This is why the pure ecstasy of time reveals to us such bizarre mysteries and it introduces us to the secrets that bind the two worlds.

When man wouldn’t know the access to eternity through absolute living in the moment, when he wouldn’t be able to leap through eternity already living in the temporal whirlpool and would be forced to choose one of the two for eternity, would he then not hesitate to prefer time? Or when, also for ever, he would have to choose between Cleopatra and Saint Therese, would he hide his predilection for the first?



Cioran
The book of delusions
translation: Camelia Elias

Skeleton

Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre.

„Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable.

In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra!

Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.



Cioran, The New Gods

A deep awareness of the impossibility of being happy

"When a truly unfortunate man understands and feels a A deep awareness of the impossibility of being happy, and the great and certain unhappiness of humankind, he begins by becoming indifferent about himself, like someone who can hope for nothing, and neither lose nor suffer more than what he already knows and expects. But if misfortune reaches its peak, indifference is not enough, and he loses nearly all his self-love (which had already been so violated by this indifference), or rather directs it in a way that is entirely contrary to normal behavior; he begins to hate life, existence, and himself, he becomes abhorrent to himself, as though he were an enemy, and that is when the prospect of new misfortunes, or the idea and act of suicide, gives him a terrible and almost barbarous joy, especially if he succeeds in killing himself while being obstructed by others. That is the time of that malign, bitter, and ironic smile, like that of a cruel man who has carried out a revenge he has long, fervently, and impatiently desired. That smile is the last expression of extreme despair and supreme unhappiness."


(from "Zibaldone" by Giacomo Leopardi, Michael Caesar, Franco D'Intino, Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, Martin Thom, Pamela Williams)

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.