Sunday, 30 October 2011

Intolerable Blessedness

“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.”

Blaise Pascal

2 comments:

Sue said...

Hence the need for silence, as you were talking about in your comment on my latest blog post.

It's funny, though, isn't it. We do feel this aversion to this complete rest. We fear we will entirely disappear ... and of course we will. But then the mystic knows that that would also be the thing that we would desire the most, if only we could know what we were disappearing into.

Harry Riley said...

You said it, Sue:)

The things is, we are Silence, Stillness etc.. It's the imagined self, which, err, imagines itself to be real, that is unmasked for what it is. The True Self then simply takes over its natural role. That which 'disappears' doesn't exist anyway, but is made 'real' simply by our conditioned attention to it.