Philosophy
"A number of schools of Occidental psychological
therapy hold that what we most need and are seeking is a meaning for our
lives. For some, this may be a help; but all it helps is the intellect,
and when the intellect sets to work on life with its names and categories,
recognitions of relationships and definitions of meanings, what is inwardmost
is readily lost. Zen, on the contrary, holds to the realization that life
and the sense of life are antecedent to meaning; the idea being to
let life come and not name it. It will then push you right back to where
you live - where you are, and not where you are named."
-Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, p. 133
Eugen Herrigel's Zen
in the Art of Archery
"This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven
for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction...which
is at bottom purposeless and egoless...is therefore...called 'right presence
of mind. ' This means that the mind or spirit is present everywhere, because
it is nowhere attached to any particular place."
-Eugen Herrigel, p. 41
"The spider dances her web without knowing that there
are flies who will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a
sunbeam, gets caught in the net without knowing what lies in store. But
through both of them 'It' dances, and inside and outside are united in this
dance. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed."
-Eugen Herrigel, p. 65
"I learned to lose myself so effortlessly in the breathing
that I sometimes had the feeling that I myself was not breathing but - strange
as this may sound- being breathed.
-Eugen Herrigel, p. 25
" 'You must learn to wait properly.'
- 'And how does one learn that?'
'By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind
so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension
.' "
-Eugen Herrigel, p. 35
Nietzsche's Daybreak
"Whatever they may think and say about their 'egoism', the great majority
nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do
is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads
of those around them and has been communicated to them."
-Niezsche, p. 61
"All actions may be traced back to evaluations, all
evaluations are either original or adopted - the latter being by far the
most common. Why do we adopt them? From fear - that is to say, we consider
it more advisable to pretend they are our own - and accustom ourself to
this pretence, so that at length it becomes our own nature. Original evaluation:
that is to say, to assess a thing according to the extent to which it pleases
or displeases us alone and no one else [is] something excessively rare!"
-Niezsche, p. 60
"Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one
ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for
individual happiness springs from one's own unknown laws, and prescriptions
from without can only obstruct and hinder it."
-Niezsche, p. 63
"The so-called 'ego' . - Language and the prejudices
upon which language is based are a manifold hindrance to us when we want
to explain inner processes and drives: because of the fact, for example,
that words really exist only for superlative degrees of these processes
and drives; and where words are lacking, we are accustomed to abandon exact
observation because exact thinking there becomes painful; indeed, in earlier
times one involuntarily concluded that where the realm of words ceased,
the realm of existence ceased also. Anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge,
joy, pain - all are names of extreme states: the milder, middle degrees,
not to speak of the lower degrees which are continually in play, elude us,
and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and our destiny.
These extreme outbursts - and even the most moderate conscious pleasure
or displeasure, while eating food or hearing a note, is perhaps, rightly
understood, ...[as] violent exceptions... and, as such, how easy it is for
them to mislead the observer! No less easy than it is for them to mislead
the person in whom they occur . We are none of us that which we appear
to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness
and words, and consequently praise and blame; those cruder outbursts of
which alone we are aware make us misunderstand ourselves.... Our
opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous
path, the so-called 'ego', is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction
of our character and our destiny."
-Niezsche, p. 71
"Cause and effect . In this mirror, and our
intellect is a mirror, something is taking place that exhibits regularity,
a certain thing always succeeds another certain thing, this we call, when
we perceive it and want to call it something, cause and effect - we fools!
As though we had here understood something or other, or could understand
it! For we have seen nothing but pictures of 'causes and effects'!
And it is precisely this pictorialness that makes impossible insight
into a more essential connection than that of mere succession."
-Niezsche, p. 77
"Modern man understands how to digest many things,
indeed almost everything - it is his kind of ambition: but he would be of
a higher order if he did not understand it.... We live between a
past which had a more perverse and stubborn taste than we, and a future
which will perhaps have a more discriminating one - we live too much in
the middle."
-Niezsche, p. 104
" 'What am I really doing ? And why am I
doing it?' - that is the question of truth which is not taught in our present
system of education and is consequently not asked; we have no time for it.
On the other hand, to talk of buffooneries with children and not of the
truth, to talk of compliments to women who are later to become mothers and
not of the truh, to talk of their futures and their pleasures to young people
and not of the truth - we always have time and inclination for that! - But
what, after all, are seventy years! - they run on and are soon over; it
matters so little whether the wave knows how and whither it flows!"
-Niezsche, p. 117
" The 'in itself' '' - Formerly we asked: what
is the laughable? as though there were things external to us to which the
laughable adhered as a quality.... Now we ask: what is laughter? How does
laughter originate? We have thought the matter over and finally decided
that there is nothing good, nothing beautiful, nothing sublime, nothing
evil in itself, but that there are states of the soul in which we impose
such words upon things external to and within us. We have again taken back
the predicates of things, or at least remembered that it was we who lent
them to them: - let us take care that this insight does not deprive us of
the capacity to lend ."
-Niezsche, p. 133
"It seems that the sole purpose of human action is
possession: this idea is, at least, contained in the various languages,
which regard all past action as having put us in possession of something
('I have spoken, struggled, conquered': that is to say, I am now
in possession of my speech, struggle, victory)."
-Niezsche, p. 151
"In ou tbursts of passion, and in the fantasizing
of dreams and insanity, a man rediscovers his own and mankind's prehistory
: animality with its savage grimaces; on these occasions his memory goes
sufficiently far back, while his civilized condition evol ves out of a forgetting
of these primal experiences, that is to say out of a relaxation of his memory.
He who, as a forgetter on a grand scale, is wholly unfamiliar with all this
does not understand man ."
-Niezsche, p. 1 57
" In the great silence - Here is the sea, here
we can forget the city.... Now all is still! The sea lies there pale and
glittering, it cannot speak. The sky plays its everlasting silent evening
game with red and yellow and green , it cannot speak. The little cliffs
and ribbons of rock that run down into the sea as if to find the place where
it is most solitary, none of them can speak. This tremendous muteness which
suddenly overcomes us is lovely and dreadful, the heart swells at it....
Its tongue tied.
My heart swells again: it is startled by a new truth, it too cannot speak
, it too mocks when the mouth calls something into this beauty, it too enjoys
its sweet silent malice. I begin to hate speech, to hate even thinking;
for do I not hear behind every word the laughter of error."
-Niezsche, p. 181
"Why does man not see things? He is himself standing
in the way"
-Niezsche, p. 187