person turning suddenly
real because he is common and human and recognizable.
The discoveries in this sense are unutterable and
incommunicable. And unthinkable. That is why in grace I stayed seated, quiet,
silent. It’s like in an annunciation. Not being however preceded by angels. But
it’s as if the angel of life came to announce the world to me.
Then I slowly emerged. Not as if I had been in a trance—
there’s no trance—you emerge slowly, with the sigh of one who had everything
just as the everything is. It’s also already a sigh of longing. Since having
experienced gaining a body and a soul, you want more and more. No use wanting:
it only comes when it wants and spontaneously.
I wanted to make that happiness eternal through the
intermediary of the objectification of the word. Right afterwards I went to look
up in the dictionary the word beatitude which I hate as a word and saw that it
means spasm of the soul. It speaks of calm happiness—I would however call it
transport or levitation. Nor do I like how the dictionary continues: “of one
absorbed in mystical contemplation.” That’s not true: I wasn’t meditating in any
way, there was no religiosity in me. I’d just had breakfast and was simply
living sitting there with a cigarette burning in the ashtray.
I saw when it started and took me. And I saw when it
started growing faint and ended. I’m not lying. I hadn’t taken any drug and it
wasn’t a hallucination. I knew who I was and who others were.
But now I want to see if I can capture what happened to
me by using words. As I use them I’ll be destroying to some extent what I felt—
but that’s inevitable. I’m going to call what follows “On the edge of
beatitude.” It starts like this, nice and slow:
When you see, the act of seeing has no form—what
you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t. The act of seeing is
ineffable. And sometimes what is seen is also ineffable. And that’s how it is
with a certain kind of thinking-feeling that I’ll call “freedom,” just to give
it a name. Real freedom—as an act of perception—has no form. And as the true
thought thinks to itself, this kind of thought reaches its objective in the very
act of thinking. By that I don’t mean that it either vaguely or gratuitously is.
It so happens that the primary thought—as an act of thought—already has a
form and is more easily transmitted to itself, or rather, to the very person who
is thinking it; and that is why—because it has a form—it has a limited
reach. Whereas the thought called “freedom” is free as an act of thought. It’s
so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.
The true thought seems to have no author.
And beatitude has that same quality. Beatitude
starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the
necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has
surpassed the author’s need to think—he no longer needs to think and now finds
himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the “everything.”
But “everything” is a quantity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning.
The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers and where a
person can scatter their thinking-feeling.
This beatitude is not in itself religious or secular. And
none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or
non-existence of a God. What I’m saying is that the thought of the man and the
way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability—
that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point
of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.
Sleeping brings us very close to this empty and yet full
thought. I’m not talking about the dream, which, in this case, would be a
primary thought. I’m talking about sleeping. Sleeping is abstracting yourself
and scattering into the nothingness.
I also want to tell you
real because he is common and human and recognizable.
The discoveries in this sense are unutterable and
incommunicable. And unthinkable. That is why in grace I stayed seated, quiet,
silent. It’s like in an annunciation. Not being however preceded by angels. But
it’s as if the angel of life came to announce the world to me.
Then I slowly emerged. Not as if I had been in a trance—
there’s no trance—you emerge slowly, with the sigh of one who had everything
just as the everything is. It’s also already a sigh of longing. Since having
experienced gaining a body and a soul, you want more and more. No use wanting:
it only comes when it wants and spontaneously.
I wanted to make that happiness eternal through the
intermediary of the objectification of the word. Right afterwards I went to look
up in the dictionary the word beatitude which I hate as a word and saw that it
means spasm of the soul. It speaks of calm happiness—I would however call it
transport or levitation. Nor do I like how the dictionary continues: “of one
absorbed in mystical contemplation.” That’s not true: I wasn’t meditating in any
way, there was no religiosity in me. I’d just had breakfast and was simply
living sitting there with a cigarette burning in the ashtray.
I saw when it started and took me. And I saw when it
started growing faint and ended. I’m not lying. I hadn’t taken any drug and it
wasn’t a hallucination. I knew who I was and who others were.
But now I want to see if I can capture what happened to
me by using words. As I use them I’ll be destroying to some extent what I felt—
but that’s inevitable. I’m going to call what follows “On the edge of
beatitude.” It starts like this, nice and slow:
When you see, the act of seeing has no form—what
you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t. The act of seeing is
ineffable. And sometimes what is seen is also ineffable. And that’s how it is
with a certain kind of thinking-feeling that I’ll call “freedom,” just to give
it a name. Real freedom—as an act of perception—has no form. And as the true
thought thinks to itself, this kind of thought reaches its objective in the very
act of thinking. By that I don’t mean that it either vaguely or gratuitously is.
It so happens that the primary thought—as an act of thought—already has a
form and is more easily transmitted to itself, or rather, to the very person who
is thinking it; and that is why—because it has a form—it has a limited
reach. Whereas the thought called “freedom” is free as an act of thought. It’s
so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.
The true thought seems to have no author.
And beatitude has that same quality. Beatitude
starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the
necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has
surpassed the author’s need to think—he no longer needs to think and now finds
himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the “everything.”
But “everything” is a quantity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning.
The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers and where a
person can scatter their thinking-feeling.
This beatitude is not in itself religious or secular. And
none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or
non-existence of a God. What I’m saying is that the thought of the man and the
way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability—
that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point
of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.
Sleeping brings us very close to this empty and yet full
thought. I’m not talking about the dream, which, in this case, would be a
primary thought. I’m talking about sleeping. Sleeping is abstracting yourself
and scattering into the nothingness.
I also want to tell you
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