1
The five senses offer us five different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive?Nanamoli Thera
2
Wandering across a city – walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it.. more alleys.. more thoroughfares.. Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys.. .Nanamoli Thera
3
It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is.Nanamoli Thera
4
Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain – shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom? .Nanamoli Thera
5
The basic Irrational Act which is renewed every moment of life, is not to commit suicide.Nanamoli Thera
6
The so-called seven colours of the spectrum together go to make up what is known as light – what, in other words, the scientists say is no more than a mere fractional band in the whole range of electro-magnetic waves– the only section of the wave-range which the visual sense can directly grasp. Indeed each colour is experienced as a particular limitation of light: light itself appears to be a particular limitation of the electro- magnetic wave-range. So would the five senses seem to be five specific limitations of the infinite– five exclusive ways of screening off, of shutting out the rest. In fact, the "outer world", as known through the senses, seems to be conditioned by – shall one say our knowledge of it depends on –the limiting and sifting qualities of our five senses. By means of sifting and excluding, form could be said to be created from Chaos and thus our five senses are at the same time five creators and five ways of being partially blind. We live, as it were, in a cathedral with stained windows whose, to us, magnificent colour patterns let in a little of the light which the sun sheds indiscriminately outside. (1947)(Later addition:) But the "sun" would then stand for Chaos in our simile and how would that be wrong?.Nanamoli Thera
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The word “consciousness, ” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.” To the question “What is consciousness, ” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is, ” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.Nanamoli Thera
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Just as one can arrange bits of iron, etc, into a hermetically sealed box which imprison other pieces of matter, so one can arrange thoughts into a box too, which effectively imprisons other thoughts.Nanamoli Thera
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It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically. It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.Nanamoli Thera
10
Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .Nanamoli Thera
11
It is our eyes that blind us and our ears that deafen us.Nanamoli Thera
12
When we are young the noise of general conversation seems much the most fun. When we grow up we discover the possibilities of the tete-a-tete. In maturity the monologue habit sets is. But now at last there is the chance to investigate the rich depth of the silence when the monologue is suspended.Nanamoli Thera
13
A thought for this Damocletian Age: the trouble with justice is it just isn't it?Nanamoli Thera
14
Sati–sampajanna ("Mindfulness and clear comprehension") should be examined carefully from the point of view of the centipede who could not walk when she thought about how she moved her limbs. And also from the point of view of absorption in, say artistic creation and detached observation of it. Absorption in piano playing or painting seems to be "successful" but detached observation or enjoyment of "my playing" or "my painting" seems to have the centipede effect. What are the facts here and what is the lesson to be drawn?.Nanamoli Thera
15
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women actors on it" says Shakespeare. But actually only the men and women in the public gaze are actors on it. I, for instance, whom – and this I hold one of my greatest blessings while it is so – the public does not gaze on, am not an actor, but only a scene-shifter: the stage is curtained when I and those like me move on it. (Addition:) Or that is how I should like it to be always.Nanamoli Thera
16
Where would I be (and what would happen to me), if I could see all round me and above and below at once ?Nanamoli Thera
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Everyone knows that border across which he cannot go, even in thought, and it is that, not the former, that people automatically shut out and cannot face. Yet one knows at times (in the middle of the night, perhaps, when one is sleepless, or on encountering some revolting experience) that this horror haunts every form of experience (always and ever), and hastily one readjusts the blinkers that had slipped. Put the beautiful before you and the horror behind you. Yes, but then I shall not dare to turn round. The world is a bad place. Is it? But it seems that this haunting, this self-delusion by wearing blinkers, is not an attribute of the world. The haunting is in consciousness itself, in its very nature. Just as when I set up any object in the sunlight a shadow is cast (because it is the nature of sunlight to cast shadows), so anything that comes into the light of consciousness casts a shadow of the unknown. It is in the unknown that the horror resides in the dark of knowledge where the patterns can no longer be traced, where chaos resides, and whence utterly hostile systems may emerge, devour, and digest us.Nanamoli Thera
18
How is it I have the strength to carry my own weaknesses?Nanamoli Thera
19
The more I examine and observe experience (What else can one do? Build castles?), the more I find that I can only say of consciousness (and in this I find a notable confirmation in the Pali Suttas) that it seems only describable (knowable) “in terms of what it arises dependent upon” (i.e. seeing-cum-seen … mind-knowing-cum-mind, known or mind cum-ideas), that is, negatively as to itself. And so, instead of being said to appear, it should rather be called that negativeness or “decompression of being” which makes the appearance of life, movement, behaviour, etc., and their opposites, possible in things and persons. But while life, etc. cannot be or not be without the cooperation of the negative presence of consciousness, which gives room for them (and itself) to “come to be” in this way (gaining its own peculiar form of negative being, perhaps from them)–the only possible way of being–they are, by ignorance, simultaneously individualized in actual experience. Unindividualized experience cannot, I think, be called experience at all. Thus there appears the positive illusion also of individual consciousness: “illusion” because its individuality is borrowed from the individualness of (1) its percepts, and (2) the body seen as its perceiving instrument. Unindividualized perception cannot, any more, I think, be called perception at all. The supposed individuality of consciousness (without which it is properly inconceivable) is derived from that of its concomitants. This illusory individualization of consciousness, this mirage, manifests itself in the sense both of “my consciousness” and of “consciousness that is not mine” (as e.g. in the sensation of being seen when one fancies or actually finds one is caught, say, peeping through a keyhole, and from which the abstract notion of universal consciousness develops). The example shows that the experience of being seen does not necessarily mean that another’s consciousness is seeing one, as one may have been mistaken in one’s fancy owing to a guilty sense (though the experience was just as real at the time), before one found no one was there. To repeat: my supposed consciousness seems only distinguishable from the supposed consciousness that is not mine on the basis of the particular non-consciousness (i.e. material body, etc.) through which its negativity is manifested and with which it is always and inevitably associated in some way. It is impossible, I think, to overemphasize the importance of this fact.Nanamoli Thera
20
Suppose boredom is a backstairs to liberation – insignificant, and so often overlooked. No one who has not known its higher degrees can claim to have lived. Not the Relative Boredom of long waiting at junctions for railway connections on the way to visit friends–or the rashly accepted week-end with acquaintances–the reviewing of a dull book. In such Relative Boredom the "wasting-of-time"-feeling only heightens the enjoyment of the coming escape, the anticipation of which sustains us meanwhile. Absolute Boredom is rather the pain of nausea, it is the loss of one's livelihood as for the pianist who loses his hands, the unsatiable desire for what we know makes us sick, it is the Great Drought, the "Carnal physic for the sick soul", the Dark Night of the Soul after the climbing of Mount Carmel, it is the pillar of salt, the exile from the land which is no more, the Sin against the Holy Ghost, the break-up of patterns, the horror that waits alone in the night, the entry into the desert where Death mocks by serving one one's daily food and one cannot bear hut to keep the darkness of one's own shadow before one for the very brightness of the light that reveals the universal emptiness. Do not try to turn back now – here in the desert perhaps there are doors open–in the cool woods they are overgrown, and in the busy cities they have built over them.Nanamoli Thera