Quotations relevant to the Path

[Jiva]

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understand the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who go there are saunterers In the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”

Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’

[Jiva]

Man is always a sedimented being, a figure articulated on the already-begun of labor, life, and language. Not contemporaneous with those regions in which his being appears, existing within histories that have a calendar in which he does not figure, man discovers himself as time, as the figure who is dispersed within alien chronologies and yet who hopes for the dawn that will unite, in a harmonious achievement, his reality with those of production, life, and language. Human being as an historically existing man is thus the holy grail of modern thought: the revelation of his identity and the vehicle for achieving his harmony.

James Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight – a linear analysis of the development of Foucault’s philosophy. The above quote relates to Foucault’s conclusions of his early work regarding madness and the clinic.

[obnoxion]

Plutarch placed his story about the death of Pan in a discussion about why the oracles had become defunct. With the death of Pan, the maidens who spoke out the natural truths were no more either, for the death of Pan means as well the death of nymphs. As Pan eventually turned into a Christian devil, so the nymphs became witches, and prophecy became sorcery. Pan's message in the body became calls from the devil; any nymph who evoked such calls could be nothing but a seductive witch.

- James Hillman: Pan and the Nightmare -

[obnoxion]

Perfect Nature is so surely the ultimate secret... It is the one part of mystical theosophy revealed by the Sages exclusively to their disciples and never mentioned, whether orally or in writing, outside their circle.

- Henry Corbin: "The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism"-

[Jiva]

"To be sure, the nothing seems to be an utter nullity; it is as though we were doing it too great an honour when we call it by name. Yet this utterly common affair proves to be so uncommon that we can experience it only in unusual circumstances. This meanness of the nothing consists precisely in the circumstance that it is capable of seducing us into thinking that our empty chatter – our calling the nothing an utter nullity – can shunt the matter aside. The nothing of being follows the Being of being as night follows day. When would we ever see and experience the day as day if there were no night! Thus the most durable and unfailing touchstone of genuineness and forcefulness of thought in a philosopher is the question as to whether or not he or she experiences a direct and fundamental manner the nearness of the nothing in the being of beings. Whoever fails to experience it remains forever outside the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry."

From the second volume of Heidegger's analysis of Nietzsche in a section entitled 'The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position; The Possibility of Such Positions in the History of Western Philosophy.'

[Jiva]

"From this kind of view Bouxx seemed to have drawn a strange conclusion: that his main chance was on the side of the State organizations, and that the innumerable agents of the official organizations had to be his allies and not his adversaries. For this reason as well the whole system of oppression and inequality that he hated because it was for him, precisely, the reign of universal law and nothing else, became his own system, set up everywhere that he had power and perfected through the methodical madness that was tearing him apart. In this way he had established many links with civil servants of all kinds; he had little clandestine groups in all the areas where the State had a public presence. It was the State’s need to be, in certain places, manifest and immutable that, he claimed, gave him the means necessary to combat it. Any official organization had to end up sheltering its own secret organization: the same resources served both of them – the same papers, the same seals, sometimes the same men, but one was illegal, the use of the regular forms being only one more falsification, whereas the other was true and made true everything that invoked its customs. Bouxx must have known that his whole network, so cleverly and meticulously constructed, was completely known to those he wanted to take by surprise, that he had certainly benefited from the complicity of public organizations in order to establish it, but also that this complicity went in both directions, since it betrayed him as much as it served him. Everything he did and decided was known, classified, assessed; everything he thought he had discovered uncovered him and made him harmless. He was like his own spy; he sold his secrets just as soon as he bought them. That didn’t bother him. He had a mania for activity that was encouraged by everything, and the more he saw himself exploited by the games of the official forces that were using him against himself, the more he resented their hypocrisy, their cowardice, and their lies, to the point of finding in his failure a new reason to fight and win."

From Maurice Blanchot’s The Most High, a kind of postmodern continuation of books like Zamyatin’s We and Orwell’s 1984. Even if the subject matter is primarily political I see varying degrees of spiritual value in these sort of books: the quote above highlighting the futility of simply inverting the traditional Platonic relationship.

[obnoxion]

One cannot call another person a bastard without making bastardy a dimension of his own life also.

- George Kelly -

[obnoxion]

In fact, we have experiences of non-dual awareness all the time, though we tend to dismiss them as unimportant - an interesting reaction in itself. These are moments in which there is full awareness without any reflexive consciousness of self. Some common instances: we hear our name called and we respond spontaneously, without thinking about it; we are doing something that normally makes us feel uncomfortable, anxious, or self-conscious, and suddenly, this time, we just do it, without anxiety or self-consciousness - taking out the garbage, allowing someone to cut in front of us while driving, responding to our child's request for help with their homework; working through and resolving a misunderstanding or distortion with a client and both of us sitting in silence together, aware of each other as if for the first time.

- Jack Engler -

[Heith]

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

[obnoxion]

We have only to speak of an object to think we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it.

- Gaston Bachelard: Psychoanalysis of Fire -