Thoughtlessness

“ Had I quickened him with a sense of the Beautiful, his Life would have been a Misery—his Death a Crime. For know that Mind alone can sympathize with Mind; and mindless Man enriches those who minister rather to the luxury of his Senses than to the refinement of his Intellect. ”

“ All human history presents itself to me as the unconscious or half-unconscious struggle of human thought to emerge from the sightless interplay of instinct, individual passion, prejudice, and ignorance. ”

“ And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. ”

“ The older we grow, the more tender we must become toward the strange vagaries of the human conscience. That’s not the letter of a man, whose mind is unhinged. And yet, what is one to make of a conscience so strangely misformed? ”

“ When we have deducted all these silly and trivial and useless thoughts from the sum of human thinking,—and evil and malicious thoughts, still worse by far,—what small residuum of room is there, alas, for anything like real serious reflection! ”

“ Idle thoughts, critical thoughts of those about us, silly vain thoughts of self,—how covered with confusion and shame we should be if some by-stander were able to look within and see the busy, thronging procession that streams through our mind unchallenged, nay more, welcomed and indulged. ”

“ There was in all his ways a certain beautiful unconsciousness of self—an outgoing of the whole nature that we see in children, who are by learned men said to be long ignorant of the Ego—blessed in many respects in their ignorance! ”

“ Those who find perpetual interest in misshapen minds and bodies and souls are either physicians or are themselves in some manner misshapen.... Unhappiness, ugliness, squalor, misery, evil,—in the midst of these, or of the even more terrible isolation of the lonely mind,—always one can summon courage to dream nobly.... And what one dares dream one can become,—inwardly always,—often outwardly and actually. ”

“ Some say that nothing is real to us except our souls, all else being a delusion born of ignorance. These men sit for untold years in silent, motionless meditation, fed by the charity of passers-by, watching without emotion their limbs consumed by ulcers and sores. ”

“ It is impossible. Altho you are devoid of all sense and all feeling—as in truth you are—still you are acquainted with yourself, and with your trophies, and with your friends. Nor do I believe that you, either waking or sleeping, can ever act with quiet sense. ”

“ It must be that speech and thought are being, for being is, and that not-being is nothing: which things I bid thee ponder. First, keep thy mind from that path of inquiry, then, too, from that on which mortals who know nothing wander in doubt; helplessness sways in their breasts the erring mind; hither and thither are they borne, deaf, yea, and blind, in wonderment, confused crowds who fancy being and not-being are the same and not the same ”

“ How often in hearing it we make the mental question, "Do you understand yourself?"
You see the greatest impediment to our understanding ourselves is our unwillingness to see what is not good in ourselves. ”

“ Brains and hearts these persons have none; they are destitute of manners, modesty and sense. The sight of their painted faces, the memory of their horrible slang, their simian cleverness, their vulgar “aliases,” their dissolute lives, half emotion and half wine—these are a sickness to any cleanly soul. ”

“ For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. ”

“ While nothing in Nature contradicts itself, is man alone a contradiction? Or perhaps not man in general, but only me and those who resemble me? Had I but been contented to remain amid the pleasant delusions that surrounded me, satisfied with the immediate consciousness of my existence, and never raised those questions concerning its foundation, the answer to which has caused me this misery! ”

“ Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality?—the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality? Again, are men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? ”

“ These are all needless to us; for, as he confesses, and we boast, we comprehend at once by instinct what he and his poor fellows in weakness and ignorance can only grasp by a long and painful process which they call reasoning, by which they are often led into absurdities attainable in no other way. ”

“ Is the world so made that only to superficial contemplation or unreflecting consciousness does it appear to be one and without contradiction, but to accurate, earnest thinking, contradictory and illusory? ”

“ Without disagreeable prolixities and repetitions, it is not in my power to represent what pains I took, in trying so to counteract those occupations which distracted my attention and disturbed my peace of mind, that my heart, in spite of them, might still be open to the influences of the Invisible Being. ”

“ And sure I am, that that is an awful thought, a dreary thought, a crushing thought, which makes a man feel as small, and worthless, and helpless, and hopeless, as a grain of dust, or a mote in the sunbeam—that thought of God for ever contained in Himself, and saying for ever to Himself, “I Am, and there is none beside Me.” ”

“ And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. ”

“ But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words. ”

“ Either your mind and imagination is well or ill: if it be well, why complain you of all those disturbances, and confusions, and disability to meditate and pray? If it be ill, why will you be so self-conceited as to think yourselves able to judge of yourselves, with such a distempered fantasy of mind? ”

“ How much the imperfection of accurately discriminating ideas one from another lies either in the dulness or faults of the organs of sense, or want of acuteness, exercise, or attention in the understanding, or hastiness and precipitancy natural to some tempers, I will not here examine: it suffices to take notice that this is one of the operations that the mind may reflect on and observe in itself. ”

“ Yet so unconscious were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." ”

“ But the very same extravagances and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty, but of decency, and show themselves in the unpleasing bareness of error. ”

“ You never again permit yourself to say that you are sick, tired, limited, easily tempted or merely human. Such expressions you simply will not employ under any circumstances whatever. You know your divine nature, and every thought you think and every word you speak must express what you know to be true. ”

“ Is there a pessimism of the strong? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, angry, and problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? ”

“ “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; ”

“ The poverty of thine inner vision of God, purblind as thou art, although He is there, makes thee willing to go out of doors from thine own hearth, refusing to linger within thyself, as in the dark. So thou hast nothing to do but go gaping after the external forms of bodies and the opinions of men. ”

“ It happens sometimes when we look into our own souls that in our impulses, in our feelings, in our ways of thinking, we find something contradictory, something enigmatical, which the most conscientious self-examination does not always suffice to make clear. And now there flashed from the utterances of this clairvoyante gleams of light which solved for me many of those contradictions and riddles. ”

“ There are strong minds wrapt in a limited, dried-up consciousness, or a clear, healthy consciousness harnessed in inherited prejudices or acquired preconceptions. And everywhere is a dislike, a contempt for change. ”

“ Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. ”

“ This is man’s task and purpose. Others, however, that are separated from God form the multitude of fools, and do just the opposite. They neglect all thought and all reflection on ideas, and consider as their task the cultivation of the sense of touch,—that sense which is the greatest disgrace; they only think and reason about eating and love. ”

“ What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else." ”

“ We find that ignorance, and that want of the habit of self-control which very commonly accompanies it, predispose very greatly indeed to the violent excitement of the feelings, and to the possession of the mind by ideas which we regard as essentially absurd; and under these states of excitement of feeling, and the tendency of these dominant ideas to acquire possession of the intellect, the strangest aberrations take place, not only in individuals but in communities ”

“ The immediate reaction of the human brain to this inconceivable catastrophe was that of sublime disbelief in its possibility. The finite mind, incapable, as it is, of grasping the infinities, resolutely declined to accept any proposition outside the history of man's experience. ”

“ Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods and fancies. ”

“ Moreover, how could our sensibility fail to be, constantly, more or less impressed by so many general causes which, independent of particular causes, so constantly act upon us, at every instant of our life, and which, so to speak, ceaselessly besiege us, from within and from without? ”

“ Such things must be, and be endured, because they cannot be cured, even in the tiny wound of self-consciousness they inflict, and which will continue to irritate, occasionally, when analogies are in the air. ”

“ Fire his conscience, and he blushes; check his circulation, and he thinks tardily or not at all; impair his secretions, and the moral sense is dulled, discolored, or depraved, his aspirations flag, his hope and love both reel; impair them still more, and he becomes a brute. ”

“ In a lengthened digression the author aims at simplifying the question, and endeavours to show, by a logical process, that ignorance is the head source from which concupiscence and passion take their rise. ”

“ For this purpose you must often imagine—natural dimness of perception, absence of acute sensibility, indifference to wounding the feelings of others from mere carelessness and want of reflective powers, little natural conscientiousness, an entire absence of the taste or the power of metaphysical examination into the effect produced by our actions. ”

“ They know that by gross living the sense of conscience may be dulled, or that by right living it may be strengthened. In like manner the subjective mind perceives by its own senses certain invisible types of evil seeking external manifestations in the microcosm. ”

“ Those scruples which are beyond the range of our ideas we call superstitions and prejudices, and are unwilling to look upon conduct as conscientious, even when prompted by the uninstructed conscience, unless in so far as it is reasonable and right in itself. ”