being

Being and not being are not two different realities, but two different aspects of the same reality.

and the idea of nothingness _ the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling _ has, in my dear master__ work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.

I love flowers for being flowers, directly.And I love trees for being trees without my thought.

the Great Vaccination _ the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.

That thing over there was more there than it__ there!Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn__ exist.But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,And the rest are the dreams men have,The myopia of someone who doesn__ look very much,

Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn__ have limits. Existence means there__ always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn__ always being some other thing that__ beyond it?__t that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.__ook, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number _ say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 _ there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger...___ut that__ just numbers,_ protested my master Caeiro.And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:__hat is 34 in Reality, anyway?

When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen _ that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface _ gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm _ walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen. __t astonished Adolphe that everyone failed to realize they were just figures on a tapestry, the shadows of something else. He was therefore amused by the conceit of women, for instance, who who admired the creamy color of their skin when in fact it was only the haze of some other woman behind the vast screen staring into a mirror. Adolphe could explain all of this to himself but he could not explain Janine: Janine wasn't the same as the others. Janine was like their mother; and Adolphe decided Lulu was from this place beyond the surface, and she had, perhaps when she was a little girl, slipped through. __dolphe wondered why Lulu hadn't told them about this, and then realized she probably would when she thought they were old enough to understand it. He could see it wasn't something one would want to tell a child too soon.

In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.

It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen. This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself.

So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not what things are or what and how is that which is, but for what reason that X which we call Being is in the Universe, and with regard to knowledge we must not ask for its bases and limits__s Plato, Aristotle Descartes, Kant did__ut for something which comes before all this: for what reason we concern ourselves with trying to know.

Where there is no consciousness, there is no time.

To say "all that which does not exist" is to introduce, effectively, a new concept, but it does not bring into existence anything more than that very concept which it introduces. That is, a certain entity about which we know nothing except that it bears the name of "all that which does not exist.

I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impoliteness merely a *plenitude*? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a "nature" with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be "normal" (exempt from love)..."__rom_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.No wind whatsoever brought you now.Now you__e here.What you were isn__ you, or else the whole rose would be here.

I don__ always feel what I know I should feel.My thought crosses the river I swim very slowlyBecause the suit men made it wear weighs it down.