The Seriality of the One

 

Series are everywhere, unfolding before our eyes like unseen, self-writing lines in all external and internal directions. Or as Clarice Lispector says, “What I’m writing to you is a ‘this’. It won’t stop: it goes on . . .” (Agua Viva). From the vast manifest universe to the invisible center of oneself and beyond, there is nothing that is not, in a whole series of senses, the series of itself. As every number is expressible as a series of numbers, so one sees that seriality, once defined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as “simultaneous unity and multiplicity,” belongs at every scale to the essence of everything.

Following this idea of the series as a fundamental feature of reality, The Seriality of the One investigates its metaphysical, ontological, and existential significance in dialogue with an open constellation of modern and premodern authors, giving special attention to the way seriality mediates and measures the relation between the individual and the universal, bridging by ellipsis the unbounded interpenetrating unities of the one and the One. Seen through the ongoing perspective of the series, beings, events, and facts are never discrete and definable identities that can ever be counted or discounted as having greater or lesser importance or status than others. Nothing is merely itself or a part of something else. In the infinity mirror of seriality, all are simultaneously equivalent to all or the totality itself.

The implications and parameters of this insight are here explored in five chapters focused on the categories of quality and quantity. First, through a counter-reading of a passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics in which the primacy of substance is established in relation to the specter of a universe of mere succession, seriality is identified as the overflowing unity of one and many. Second, in light of the serial basis of counting and Nietzsche’s critique of enumeration, the nature of quantification is examined as a pervasive limitation of our times, the instrument of a “transparency” that works to obfuscate actuality. Third, paralleling Hegel’s prioritization of quality over quantity, the nature of quality is interrogated as the spiritual core of life’s spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. Fourth, elaborating upon Meher Baba’s figuration of seriality as the interface of reality and illusion, the concept of seriality is examined in its simplicity as the way of moving beyond the opposition or dialectical oscillation between quality and quantity. Last, drawing on the geometric metaphor of divine vision in Dante’s Paradiso, the principle of measure is explicated in order to articulate the poetic and creative nature of seriality as process or activity, this immeasurable reality’s never-ending reckoning of its own indivisibility.

HERE

Whoever I Am: On the Quality of Life

Paul Neagu, Human Hand (1973)

"Whoever I Am: On the Quality of Life." Religions 15 (2024): 735.

Abstract: What is the relation between quantification and the mysterious question of identity? What order of quality is proper to the inexplicable fact that one is oneself? Starting with an examination of the ontological blind spots of counting, this essay investigates the priority of quality over quantity, in connection with the spiritual nature of life understood as the spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. It argues, in face of the forces of quantophrenia and numerocracy, for the importance of recognizing the essentially serial and apophatic structure of identity, the existential sense that all entities are the living question of themselves. As such, no individual may be considered as merely a part of reality. Each is, no less, the totality.

HERE

Glossator 13: In a Sea of Commentary -- CFP

https://glossator.org/2023/11/20/glossator-13-in-a-sea-of-commentary-cfp/

"He would gaze into the celestial sea, never tiring of contemplating its movements, its clouds, its lights. He would collect rocks, flowers, beetles of all species, and array them in manifold sequences and combinations. He would keep a keen eye on both men and beasts and sit on the seashore searching for shellfish. He would eavesdrop attentively on his own thoughts and emotions. He knew not whither his yearnings impelled him . . . " (Novalis)

In the beginning the seeker of Truth is like a man who, having heard that a priceless pearl is to be got from the depths of the ocean, goes down to the seashore and first admires the vastness of the ocean and then paddles and splashes about in the shallows and, intoxicated with this new excitement, forgets about the pearl. Out of many who do this, one after a while, remembers his quest and learns to swim and starts to swim out. Out of many who do this, one masters swimming and reaches the open sea; the others perish in the waves. Out of many who master swimming, one begins to dive; the others in their enjoyment of mastery, again forget about the pearl. Out of many who practise diving, one reaches the ocean bed and grasps the pearl. Out of many who get hold of the pearl, one swims back up to the surface with it; the others stay stuck on the floor gazing with wonder at the pearl. Out of many who swim up to the surface, one returns to the shore. -- Meher Baba

Four4 Great Errors broadside and poems

 

Broadside designed by Oswaldo García. 

Available HERE.

Four4 Great Errors [PDF]

Kisses on the Feet of a Metalhead: Some Indices on Standing

[published in X 1 (2022): www.x-n1.com]

[photo by José Castrellón]

You are not on earth as you believe, but lighting, fleeing its proper place, never sped so fast as you, going back to yours.

 – Dante, Paradiso

 

To know everything in a flash takes an eternity in the illusion of time while you gradually die to yourself.

– Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing

 

There’s restless joy in standing watch and waiting!

– Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 

 

The question is where to stand (?)

 

“Love means that you remain standing close to your Beloved, when you would be deprived of your attributes.”[1] So said Hallāj, whose decapitated “trunk remained erect for two hours [after] the head fell between his two legs, repeating a single phrase ‘Only One! O Only One!’”[2]

 

To stand is to remain standing, to fall with whatever falls, fly with whatever flies, to flash with the fastest stillness of the soul, which is “whole and undivided, at once in the foot, in the eyes and in every member,”[3] especially when your head falls to your feet. To stand is to hang out with the question where it answers itself, to hold the line or horizon where “severing is also a joining and a relating.”[4]

 

The modern question mark derives from the medieval punctus interrogativus, which indicates the rising intonation of the question with a line resembling a flash of lighting suspended above a point.[5] A/the question seizes with the continuity of a thunder strike, a stroke connecting being and doing, head and feet, heaven and earth, cause and effect. Feel the heavy metal shock of being struck by the question of oneself as another pointing back: “What is this that stands before me / Figure in black which points at me?”[6] Of being seen by the other of one’s own vision, “you in whose eyes I have become a question to myself.”[7] Who withstands standing in the infinite current of their own event? Are you (not) someone “who is struck by his own thoughts as if from outside, from above and below . . . who is perhaps a storm himself, pregnant with new lightning[?]”[8]

 

The form in question reflects the infinity of individuation’s depth charge, a force hidden within the absolutely asymmetrical crack connecting oneself to everything. Is one or is one not intrinsically one with Reality? Is one’s will other than that which is creating, preserving, and destroying the universe – yes or no!? What fact can the fact that one is oneself – summit of impossibility – not make to tremble? As Meher Baba explains, the cause of this whole multifarious cosmic mess without and within oneself – not the universe or a universe but this one, today – is the unaccountable whim of the eternal or divine Reality to know itself, which operates as the universal dialectic from ‘Who am I?’ to ‘I am God’, generating en route, in the spiral of evolution and involution, all temporary beings as provisional answers: ‘I am stone’, ‘I am plant’, ‘I am human’, and so on.

 

“Beyond the sphere that circles widest / passes the sigh that issues from my heart” (Dante, Vita Nuova). “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Be silent” (Hafiz, Divan). To speak without speaking, just breathing the word(s), in passing. To inhabit language, the so-called “house of being,” like a passerby or prison escape artist, just standing there.    

 

“We became enamoured of travel, intoxicated / with the sensation of movement . . . We must go somewhere where we will not find ourselves . . . More time to consider the lily in another's heart? / to watch the leaf-bud and flower putting-forth of our own?”[9] Fleeing what? And what the hell had to happen for a three-staked instrument of torture (trepalium) used to punish runaway serfs/slaves to become our name for going somewhere (travel), not to mention labor or useful/productive activity (trabajo)? On the one hand, “The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.”[10] On the other hand, “Travelling is a fool’s paradise . . . I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”[11] Between fleeing and being forced to stay there is standing, only way out. “Escape,” says Levinas, “is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même].”[12] Only the lonely. Good luck to you. O way of being the way!

 

Flames of sun fall to earth. Earth melts matter into fire. Fire burns heart into light. Light flashes mind to ash. Ash condenses into star. Star . . . Love loves you (so do I) without any care whatsoever about whoever you are. “That the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition [cogito ER/GO sum]) – that is what the State cannot in any way stand [tollerare].”[13]

 

Why do you want them to answer your question???

 

Rogare, to ask, derives from rog-, to stretch out the hand (cf. reach), a variant of the root reg-, to move in a straight line. This is also the root of ergo, therefore, in consequence of. ER/GO: To stand in the reach of the question which points to everything as its answer. To touch everywhere by not reaching anywhere, holding on to the hem, reaching into the roots of oneself with closed hands, asking nothing. To play the one game, every game, the infinite game of question and answer, by standing, taking the only possible, the infinitesimal shortcut (from here to Here), precisely where there is none: “With the infinite question, there arises also the infinite answer. The infinite question is infinite unconsciousness; the infinite answer is infinite consciousness. But the infinite question and the infinite answer do not simply annul each other and relapse into the original unity of the Beyond. The two aspects have now descended into the primal duality which can resolve itself only by fulfilling the entire game of duality and not by any shortcut.”[14]

 

See how the world, this society we co-create, wants you to keep moving, shifting, likes you unfirm, choosing, without a proper place to stand, always towards the next thing, the hopefully yet never quite?^[15] Ergo they cannot stop offering new opportunities to repeat ourselves, to do the same thing in novel guises, educating us in the opposite of being where one is. Stop and look, but keep moving. Stand – in line. Browse (a word that means to graze on young shoots and buds, cf. breast). Whatever you do, don’t stay. Instead, stay distracted, not where your body is, like January shopping his mind for May in The Merchant’s Tale: “Many fair shap and many a fair visage / Ther passeth thurgh his herte night by night; / As whoso tooke a mirour polisshed bryght, / And sette it in a commune market-place, / Thanne sholde he see ful many a figure pace / By his mirour.”[16] At least as it passes . . . you may skip ad in . . . I can “try to take seriously how advertising never tires of repeating itself.”[17]

 

Not milk but its mother’s milk is what a baby needs, food of the one whose mouth puts me wherever she wants, makes me walk on air.[18] My intellect is a straying kitten, a babbling infant whose life feeds and grows strong in becoming more and more centered, stilled in satisfying desire – Et erit tamquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarium (Psalms 1:3) – not in being promiscuously passed around, but in nursing (from sna-, to swim), swimming the ocean-flow of love via the sucking, sapient depth of all-consuming interest: “Truth cannot be grasped by skipping over the surface of life and multiplying superficial contacts. It requires the preparedness of mind which can centre its capacities upon selected experiences and free itself from its limiting features . . . Such whole-hearted concentration and real interest is necessarily precluded when the mind becomes a slave to the habit of running at a tangent and wandering between many possible objects of similar experience.”[19] Ergo, the real problem of distraction as inevitable imperative to remain (become more and more) distracted by something that all distractions distract from, to distract distraction itself. To think from one’s feet.

 

“The feet, which are physically the lowest part of the body, are spiritually the highest. Physically, the feet go through everything — good and bad, beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty — yet they are above everything. Spiritually, the feet of a Perfect Master are above everything in the universe, which is like dust to him.”[20]

 

What is their stance, they (whoever) for whom market is mother, touchpad their mouth, browser the breast? In what sky do their thoughts swim, what horizon their hearts rest? Where the earth in which their body or soul nests? “Unless a man takes his stand against the world of a dying civilization, / unless he stops discriminating the patterns of shadow / and turns his face to the Sun . . .”[21] Ergo: ground yourself by touching the blessed feet of a cherubic breast-fed metalhead, charged with standing in the light of that which never has to be brought from anywhere, which fills the world by staying where it is.

 

It seems not so much that one stands somewhere, as that standing is the place where place happens. Here and there, inner and outer, silence and language, spin around the axis of standing, this ground zero of the horizon that, pointing to itself, makes all other indications possible. But who wants to think about that? Why bother guarding the stance which guards thinking? “Pointing can only be done from a standing location. My standing location matters because I am in the midst of things, in media res . . . We are in a place where we can point at the hand and at the mountain; we are among them. We can therefore think about what is around us.”[22]

 

Back off (stay proximate), all you posers who want position (not stance), who crave identity (not birth/death), who like to take pictures with your eyes (not X). Ergo, what is the photograph, as materialization of an image of an instant, but a projection of the standing question, the question of standing, an indexical capturing of the what-is-this-that-stands-before-me (figure-in-black-which-points-at-me)?

 

Photography as science devoid of – before/after – project. The photographed, gaze-species of something invisible, as an objective not-seeing of someone-who-stands, i.e. the in-stans itself, a gesture of time’s likeness to eternity or imaginal place in which being becomes. Ergo, photographer as reflector of the standing that the photograph abstracts into concrete image.

 

“[P]erhaps it is from the most obscure and the most irreflexive depth of the body that the photographic act departs . . . from a stance rather than a position . . . ‘Stance’ – this word means: to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s own immanence, to be at one’s station rather than in a position relative to the ‘motif’.”[23]

 

Verbless language. Silent speech. Motionless gesture. Each thing simply a pointing to everything through itself. Speak now – after there is something to say: “God made sense turn outward: therefore / man looks out. Now and again a daring man / looks back and finds himself. Now and again / after becoming God he speaks.”[24]

 

Better to point (by not pointing) than burp a word. “The universe is deictic or indexical, and therefore demonstratives are better equipped than substantives to deal with it, and ultimately to provide some sort of account of it.”[25] Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus (Psalms 13:1). The fool hath blabbed to himself, hath spoken as a substantivist. What are you talking about?

 

Better that one “s’ascose nel foco che li affina” (Purgatorio 26.148), put oneself away (abs-con-dere) in flame, staying in the fire which life never stops being a birth-like leap from and into: “To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world.”[26] Better to stand on the threshold between prepositions, wearing the sandals of the sacred, and there remain more and more a white hot black metal head. For it is precisely and paradoxically the iron’s passive power or strongest weakness to resist omnipotence, the all-powerful impotence of its inability to be consumed by fire, in other words, the metal’s remaining itself or intensive standing in the midst of all that strips it of whatever it appears to be, which is the groundless ground of becoming all fire or liquifying in the love of . . . .[27]

 

Standing says: I am that I am. Man walks upon earth, but she stands in universe.

 

To stay means to remain where you are by being in your being, to stand by withstanding the heaviest-lightest weight of things. Not to be someplace but to insist on the in-stance of existence, which “has no purpose by virtue of its being real, infinite and eternal.” To stand is to dwell in staying without purpose, to step into what, “being everything and everywhere, cannot have any direction,” to insist on not taking the first step of creating a false goal, for the “Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality.”[28]  

 

Stand up and say what you truly think. Do what you really want. Stay. Stop being mobilized, for life, against death, vice-versa, always on this side or that, never out of position, never without project, lost between ends and means, in line. Everything has already happened, and it will never happen again, because nothing ever happens. Except this. Says Rosenzweig, “The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark . . . Man should not cast aside from him the fear of the earthly; in his fear of death he should – stay. He should stay. He should therefore do nothing other than what he already wants: to stay.”[29]

 

But my God what the hell on earth is the human waiting for?

 

“Damned I also call those who must always wait – they offend my taste . . . Indeed, I too learned to wait, and thoroughly – but only to wait for myself. And above all I learned to stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance. But this is my teaching; whoever wants to fly someday must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance – one cannot fly one’s way to flight!”[30]

 

ER/GO: To stay as to wait without waiting, to stand as waiting to wait. Here is a kind and degree of waiting that starts by escaping the boring/excited egoism of waiting (waiting as my waiting), an order of waiting that offers at once the best and the worst way to wait, as per the three-fold meaning of waiting to wait, which bears 1) the flat sense of superadded waiting, waiting only to wait more, where to refers infinitively to the activity one is waiting for; 2) the intensive sense of waiting as means of its own end, where to signifies the instrumentality of action (in order to, so as to); 3) the paradoxical sense of waiting that does not wait at all precisely by deferring or postponing it, that waits to wait, waiting, yes, yet not yet. Waiting to wait in this triple way is graspable as a form of eternal waiting, keeping in mind the word’s double reference to the timeless and the sempiternal, now and forever. Tying together, like head and tail of the ouroboros, a waiting that never ends and a waiting that never begins, eternal waiting unites the opposite senses of waiting to wait around the middle sense of the present moment of waiting per se. As the anagogic sense of medieval exegesis proverbially gives a ‘foretaste [praegustus] of paradise’, finding in the suspended moment of reading the palpable presence of a truth or reality that is non-futurally to come, so is waiting to wait, far from being anything that need ever arrive from anywhere else, simply the immediate elevation of simple waiting, a flight of the ground where waiting waits.

 

Neither thinking (cogito) nor being (sum), but the flash of what links them (ergo) and not even that because it is that itself. I.e. a standing in the current of what joins by severing the link between thinking and being.

 

To stand or wait eternally, waitlessly, for all that is here and now (nunc stans). Therefore . . . 

---

[1] Louis Massignon, The Passion of Al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, Volume 3: The Teaching of al-Hallaj (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 11.

[2] Louis Massignon, The Passsion of Al-Hallaj, trans. Herbert Mason, 4 vols., Bollingen XCVIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 2.18.1.

[3] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Herder & Herder, 2009), 341.

[4] “[A]uch das Trennen ist noch ein Verbinden und Beziehen” (Martin Heidegger, “Logik: Heraklit’s Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit, ‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970], 337).

[5] See M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

[6] Black Sabbath, “Black Sabbath,” Black Sabbath (Warner Bros., 1970).

[7] Augustine, Confessions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), X. 33.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174.

[9] Francis Brabazon, Stay with God: A Statement in Illusion on Reality (Woombye, Queensland: Garuda Books, 1959), 96–124.

[10] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 151.

[11] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Complete Essays and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 165.

[12] Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55.

[13] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 85, translation modified.

[14] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1958), 9-10.

[15] “And everybody, in their shallowness, praises movement! Political, religious, educational, social, in the family, let’s do something, let’s go somewhere, let’s act, as if action is salvation, instead it is ruination. Where are you going to find one human being, where are you going to find one man or woman who will say, just a minute, what are you talking about, praising physical, mental, emotional movement as if it is a virtue in itself. I’ll repeat the question, where are going to find someone who will question it? . . . The cry, the wail of the human mind is: give me something to do so that I won’t have to think intelligently about what I am doing.” (Vernon Howard, https://nuncstans.tumblr.com/post/30991647359/and-everyone-in-their-shallowness-praises-movement).

[16] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Merchant’s Tale, lines 1580–5, in The Norton Chaucer, ed. David Lawton (New York: Norton, 2019), 291.

[17] Emanuele Coccia, Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image, trans. Marissa Gemma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 28.

[18] “Who can ever know God? I don’t even try. I only call on Him as Mother. Let Mother do whatever She likes. I shall know Her if it is Her will; but I shall be happy to remain ignorant if She wills otherwise. My nature is that of a kitten. It only cries, ‘Mew, mew!’ The rest it leaves to its mother. The mother cat puts the kitten sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes on the master’s bed” (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna [New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942)

[19] Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1973), I.151.

[20] Meher Baba,

[21] Brabazon, Stay With God, 118.

[22] Hilan Bensusan, Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 14.

[23] François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Urbanomic, 2018), 12.

[24] Brabazon, Stay With God, 124.

[25] Bensusan, Indexicalism, 16.

[26] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 527.

[27] “All love is a fire, but a spiritual fire. What a corporeal fire does for iron, the fire . . . does the same for an impure, cold, and hardened heart . . . The whole mind becomes white-hot from the igniting of the divine fire; it flares up and, at the same time, liquefies in the love of God” (Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity, VI. 2, in Trinity and Creation: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Richard, and Adam of St. Victor, eds. Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coulter [Turnhout: Brepols, 2011]).

[28] Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publication, 1963), 62.

[29] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Ellen Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 9-10.

[30] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156.

Glossator 12: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

VOLUME 12 (2022): COMMENTING AND COMMENTARY AS AN INTERPRETIVE MODE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Edited by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock

Introduction: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock

The Pro-Active Scribe: Preparing the Margins of Annotated Manuscripts
Erik Kwakkel

Thinking from the Margins: Opening and Closing Illuminations and their Commentary Functions around 1000
Kristin Böse

Reading Texts within Texts: The Special Case of Lemmata
Andrew Hicks

The In-/Coherences of Narrative Commentary: Commentarial Forms in the Anegenge
Christina Lechtermann

Dante’s Self-Commentary and the Call for Interpretation
Elisa Brilli

Spiritualizing Petrarchism, “Poeticizing” the Bible: Two Counter-Reformation Self-Commentaries
Christine Ott and Philip Stockbrugger

The Power of Glosses: Francesco Fulvio Frugoni’s Self-Commentary and Literary Criticism in the Tribunal della Critica
Andrea Baldan

Commenting on a Purged Model: The M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton libri omnes novis commentariis illustrati of the Jesuit Matthäus Rader (1602)
Magnus Ulrich Ferber

HERE

Because It's Not There - Climbing Theory

HERE is a climbing theory conversation series with Bo Earle. First two sessions on question of climbing theory and deixis respectively.  

 

Glossator 11 (2021): Cristina Campo: Translation / Commentary

Edited by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro

 

A Bell for Cristina – Writing an Image of Echo and Chimera

Daniela Cascella

L’Imperdonabile Cristina Campo

Laura Boella

Six Poems from Passo d’Addio

Adrian Nathan West

Forme dell’Amicizia negli Epistolari di Cristina Campo

Monica Farnetti

Cristina Campo’s Commentarial Reflection on her Literary Translations

Višnja Bandalo

The Fairy Tales in Cristina Campo’s “Della Fiaba”

Cristina Mazzoni

Gli Anni della Perdita: Missa Romana e La Tigre Assenza di Cristina Campo

Nicola Di Nino

Magnificat Equation

Snejanka Mihaylova

Cristina Campo and Iranian Mysticism

Chiara Zamboni

Cristina Campo – The Unforgiveables: A Translation with Commentary 

Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro

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Unhappiness Explained: On Vicious Vibrations, Spy-Being, and Other Impediments to Who You Really Are

[the following is a transcription of a talk given by Vernon Howard on March 12, 1988]

Unhappiness is very easily explained. And I want you to listen to the explanation of why you are jittery and nervous and have never come to rest, like the airplane that can’t find the landing field. You are unhappy because you are doing the wrong thing with your life.

Now you want to know what the right thing is. No you don’t. Because the right thing to do with your life has been in front of you all your life and you have refused it. I tell you in these classes, over the years, the right thing to do, which is to go against your habitual nature, and you don’t do it because you take it as a threat to your happiness, which you never had in the first place.

The first right thing to do with your life, in order to dismiss any form of anxiety and suffering and tears, the first thing to know is that you are in love with an image of yourself—and that’s it. You have clung to it throughout all the truths that have strayed your way. You’ve hung on to the picture of yourself, to your habitual reactions, you’ve hung on to those simply because you didn’t know any better. And after this talk you will no longer have any excuse for being unhappy.

If you refuse the lessons, again the lessons, if you refuse them then you are refusing the chance you have to transform your nature, a nature that you can’t live without and can’t live with. You can be happy when you have explored and gone to the very very very end of the fact that you can’t be happy at all. You have lived with you, which is the perfect abiding, clinging evidence that you as you are right now in this room can never be happy because you are the essence of unhappiness.

The only thing you can you, the only thing, the only thing you can do with this unhappy nature is not improve it a little bit, not to put a shield over it so the arrows can’t hit and wound you, the only thing you can actually do is replace your nature. And do you know that there is a little bit inside of you that wants to do that, but it doesn’t have a chance against the rest of you? You’re tired, and you know you’re tired, but then you spoil it all by falling in love with your weariness! Because to you it represents continuity, it represents assurance of your existence. It doesn’t.  You do not have a real existence right now, not a higher existence.

Now I am going to tell you what you do have. You have it in place of this new nature, the spiritual self, the godly being that you could have, and I want you to have it, and I want you to use this talk in order to have it, and I want you to get in love with the truth that you are hearing.

You must replace what you are now living from. That replacement comes by long hard work, for you to discover what you are substituting in place of authentic self-command, self-happiness, self-contentment. You know something? You are very afraid to get content. And I mean and I want you to see it. The last thing you want is to be satisfied, soulfully, spiritually satisfied. Because in your distorted thinking, peace, contentment, quietness represents something awful! “I don’t want to be peaceful, I don’t want to be quiet, I don’t want to be in command. I want excitement! That’s what I want. Don’t you dare, don’t you offer me anything but vibrations.” Welcome to them. You’ve got them. They command you, they control you, and they torment you. Yes. Try to get out of that. There is not one of you in this room that can even begin to get out of that because your own pain tells you that it is the truth.

Vicious vibrations. You know what it means to be vicious: wild, hard, cruel, aggressive. Vibrations: physically, emotions, always chasing somewhere. You, you – I’m talking physically now, I’m not talking about the spirit – you can’t even stay home and enjoy yourself, you can’t stay home, you’ve got to go out and go somewhere. Always on the run. You make up reasons for shopping, and spend money you shouldn’t have spent, make up reasons for calling on people, just going somewhere. One of the worst things you can think of is to stay home by yourself and confront what has happened to you. You can’t take it. Well you had better start and you better start now.

Back to vicious vibrations. You know what they are. See when I say that, what I did was give you two words that fit together very nicely and now you can use those words, you can use them to see that it’s quite an accurate description of your secret private life, the one you live all alone with yourself and even your wife and your husband, your brothers or sisters or parents or children, even they don’t know what’s going on, but you do. You know what’s happening inside of you. You know how you repressed that sarcastic remark that you wanted to say, you suppressed it, pushed it down, that’s a vicious vibration. Sorrow, sadness, just plain heaviness and gloom, that’s a vicious vibration, and you say, “this is great I’ve always got something to think about, which is my problems, don’t you dare take away those vicious vibrations or I won’t know what to do with myself!”

The purpose of your life here on earth is to NOT know what you are doing with yourself. So that you are absolutely delighted to let the traumas and the griefs and the weepings and the pride fall away and not vibrate you anymore. Isn’t it – come on, what word would you like to use? How about ‘wackedly weird’? Not a bad one, right? It is wackedly weird for any man or woman – I’ve already told you you are included, it is wackedly weird for any man or woman to just like carelessly, ignorantly, and dangerously, dangerously – you don’t now what danger you are in, but you sure sense it. You are worried at the next, evil, vicious thing you are going to do to yourself, aren’t you? Yes you are. You listen to this talk and that’ll clear that away.

Why would anyone be so weirdly wacky, wicked as to use emotional outbursts, uprisings of aggressiveness, hatred, why would anyone choose to settle down in that sort of a horrible life in which you give to your spouse what you are and you are not even ashamed of it! You are not even ashamed of it! As a matter of fact you’re proud, you’re glad! You men, you get a sense of power, don’t you, over the way you treat that woman. You get a sense of being a man. You’re not a man. You are miserable wretch for what you do to her and she knows it. She has her problems too and she can’t understand them. I’m talking to you men and especially right now.

Vibrations. Why do you have them, live with them? I will tell you why, and you men listen to this. Because any lazy human being can submit to being controlled by vicious vibrations. No work involved! Since you were a little kid you picked those up down at the playground, at grammar school, picked them up, everybody else did the same thing, everybody throwing rocks at each other, tattling on each other, hurting on each other. By the time you were five years old you looked around, “well, this is the way of life, this is the way it is.” Of course no one ever told you any different because no one knew any different, your parents didn’t know any different. Religionists didn’t know any different. Nobody knew any different, cause you even sensed those adults, those big six feet tall men and those women, all the teachers and all the adults around you, you knew they were in trouble and that scared you, because you had no good guide to look to, you were thrown back on yourself so you took the only course of action you had, which is to fall into the trampling parade, the mob marching down the street, everyone out of step with everyone else and poking at each other, criticizing each other, and taking neurotic pleasure out of it.

Why would – the question, for about the fifth time now – why would anyone choose to remain, as miserable as it is, remain sitting back and being a grand critic of life, feeling superior, and then the next second feeling inferior, and not understanding either one? I’ll give you the answer to the question now. People live with this kind of an interior storm, hurricane, they live with it because it gives them an illusion of going someplace and doing something. The space is filled up. You are in it. You are it. The easiest, weakest, thing that you could do, among other weak and sick things, is just let wickedness and vicious vibrations do what it wants to do with you, and it does.

See, you know as I am talking to you I am watching my own mind, watching my own reactions, listening to my own words, and I know what happens when I make a statement like that, that you just like to sit back and let wickedness rule and ruin your life. I know first of all that it is an absolute fact and I also know that you know it is an absolute fact. Not that you’ve faced it. But you know it is, because you are the sufferer. And anguish is a pressure, isn’t it? When was the last time, would it be ten minutes ago, when you lashed out at someone, with your tongue or in your mind? Mostly in your mind. When’s the last time you blasted someone? When’s the last time you made someone feel nervous and uncomfortable? When’s the last time you caused pain in another human being, because you are a neurotic human being? I am asking you a question, an extremely practical one. Because the pain that you give to that other person is the pain that you, that you first feel, experience, and suffer from. Whatever you give to the other person you have first given to yourself.

Now I ask you the question, why would you endure it? You endure it because you don’t know anything better, and in this talk today you will hear something better and again you’ll have no excuse, you will never again have any excuse for being cruel to anyone, for making those little smart remarks, those arrogant glances. No more excuses for anyone after this talk. Don’t take excuses. You make a right choice for what you are going to do with what you are hearing.

Now I’ll explain more about vicious vibrations. When you are troubled, either attacking someone else or attacking yourself, which is what anguish and agony is – agony is self-attack. Now look at it that way for a change, instead of glorifying it, instead of blaming someone for hurting your precious darling feelings. Grow up and take responsibility for the way you feel because you are responsible. Any violation of that law and you will be punished as you have been. Now is the chance to break the punishment by no longer violating the law, the law that you are supposed to be a good person and not a bad person.

When things are all jumbled and clashing and smashing inside, you take a false sense of I/self/me/identity, you take that and connect it to the emotional upset. Someone disappoints you, someone lets you down, someone betrays you, you get an emotional impact from it. Oh it hurts, heartache, you wanna blab to someone, you want to put your troubles on to them, which you always do, because you have no conscience. You won’t bear it alone, you’ve got to dilute it, which means that you’ll never get rid of it, you’ll never get rid of it in the right way of getting rid of it, because that’s part of your pleasure to pass it on, “oh see how much I suffer.”

You have the hurricane going on inside of you because the world didn’t treat you the way you demanded that it should, didn’t get the raise, didn’t get this or that. And when this comes, the neurotic self-deceitful mind sees an opportunity. It sees the opportunity to join a partner in crime. Guess who is the victim of the crime? You are. Because you are careless with your mind. When’s the last time you sat down and said, I am going to understand how my mind works? Never, never! You are 30, 80, how old are you? You have never once sat down and said I am going to understand what’s going on up there! That’s the problem. And that’s why you have a problem.

You are going to have to get a lot smarter than you have been. You are going to have to allow an affection for your own life to enter. If you don’t have affection for your life it’ll just stay the way it is, only get worse. You won’t make a turn in the opposite direction.

So you have the shock, tears, anger, rage, you have that, and the mind says, hah here’s a chance for me to remain in charge of this person. See, there’s so many things – every point I make something else has to be explained. For example, the absolute domination of evil spirits straight from hell over the multitudes of human beings on Earth. You can at least take that little one and connect it with what I am going to say next.

Evil forces, which are hurtful forces, which want only destruction for mankind, and for you as an individual, when they see you being so shallow, so immature, so childish, so self-centered, as to want to get a thrill from life, one thrill after another, one vicious vibration after another, when they see you make that choice, they rejoice. I’ll tell you, there’s rejoicing both in heaven and there is rejoicing in hell. In this case, down there in the hot place, they ring the bells down there too, “we’ve got another sucker, he’s fallen for it again.” And here’s what that means.

It means that you have a mere belief that you are you. You’re not that physical self. See, the real you can endure, permanently, throughout eternity. The physical self isn’t. You don’t want to be your physical body all the time, do you? It doesn’t work that way. It works in another way. And I am telling you about that other way.

Misbelieving, calling yourself a great man or a failure or a sinner or a saint, this becomes a point of identity, of you telling yourself who you are. And then, when troubles come up, the hurricane strikes, and the marriage goes shaky, the friendship, the love affair falls apart, the security program dissolves, when that happens, the false me, the false I says, “ah, this man, this woman isn’t going to have a chance to use this to wake up, which he could do, because I am going to fool him. I am going to tell that man, I am going to tell that woman, that when they suffer, that is a marvelous experience.” And you – c’mon do a little work – look how much he cares, all that balling, see how righteous he is for that social cause, how he wants only betterment for everyone on earth.

Don’t you think – please agree with this – don’t you think you’ve fallen for it once too often? Don’t you think you should have stopped it a number of years ago? Why have you wasted your life? Don’t you go out of here and waste it again now.

Point: when you combine neurosis in the mind and neurosis in the emotions you get an enormously powerful point, a false point, a false power. You get something – o don’t miss this. The combination of two sicknesses combining in criminal conspiracy, the two of them give you a feeling of existence, cause you’ve said, I am experiencing great pain, I am the victim of other people, on and on and on and on. This gives you a false sense of security. You have chosen a false sense of security because now what you can do to keep yourself going, which is false to begin with, what you can do to keep yourself going is to put yourself in a position where you will be persecuted even more. That woman who has been battered by four men in a row, she is looking for the fifth man who will batter her. You have got to look, and I suggest you do it now, for your favorite neurotic tricks and traps whereby you feel secure in sin, feel secure. “No questions. I’ve got all the answers. It’s a vicious world out there, and I’ve got to fight it. I’ve got to protect myself from it” – and get this for the maximum of neurotic psychopathery – “I’ve got to correct that sick world out there, that world with all its neurotic vibrations, I have got to do something, I’ve got to become a leader of society, I’ve got to write best-selling books that’ll straighten people out.” I, I, I.

No wonder you live from one anxiety to the next. And I am going to give you something awful simple, but you had better take it as profound: If you don’t continue to hear more about what you are hearing today, if you go out of here and neglect it, or refuse it, you will simply have guaranteed for yourself a life of horror. And I’ll tell you something worse than that: if you don’t listen, absorb, and want to come here, yes here – you’re not going to hear it anywhere else; they are all going to lie to you out there, they are all going to lie to you, and if you prefer lies you can go there and be lied to – unless you come here, you will never never ever really truly know what it means to have communion with God, you will never know what it means to have an authentic spiritual life.

You don’t like to be cheated out of money, do you? You don’t like anyone to cheat you in repairing your car, or repairing your home. You don’t like to be cheated in anyway at all. You want to get work for the money you paid, right? And yet you are seated here in this room on a Saturday afternoon without the slightest realization of how you have just sat back and dozed in the chair of life and allowed yourself to be cheated out of everlasting life.

It is really incredible that you have settled. Now you will snap out of it!

You are not going to snap out of it on your own, you don’t want to snap out of it. You want to go out of here and find reasons why you shouldn’t pay attention to what you are hearing in this talk. I know you. I know everything, I know absolutely everything everyone of you is going to do when you go out of there. To one degree or another. Some of you are more receptive than others. But if you have been fighting for your vicious vibrations, loving them, when you go out of here, that is what you have chosen for yourself for the future and really you will never ever know what you could have had.

How could know what a peaceful land is like when you have deliberately chosen to live in the hurricane country, when you like the excitement, the movement, you even like to get wounded, and picked up and carried away, cause then you can say to yourself, “Isn’t life exciting.” That is a very sick statement to make. It is not exciting, it is tragic. You are allowing yourself to be carried away by the flood waters, dreaming that you are being carried to the top of the mountain, where you are going to be happy.

Only the complete replacement of all your delusions are going to put inside of you a new desire, a new way, a new nature, which is a lot smarter, a thousand times more smarter, than what has been putting things over on you. You know something? You don’t know something. What you don’t know is that evil magician on the stage has been playing all sorts of skilled tricks on you, entertaining you, while picking your pocket, and you thought it was a lot of fun. Just wait. After spending an evening in the horror theatre, with all those wicked magicians, which is life, just wait ‘til you get home and take a look at your wallet, and your purse, ladies. It’s going to be empty. It’s empty now. It’s empty because you have been very careless.

Would you please, right now, as a work project for yourself, define, each of you – c’mon this is something I want you to do now – I want you each to yourself to define the word, two words, ‘stupid arrogance.’ Would you respond, you can do it and still listen to me, define, explain, what you think the phrase ‘stupid arrogance’ means. OK? Now, second part, do you think by one chance in a billion it might be referring to you? Now that part you don’t like so much. You don’t like truth to get personal with you. That’s why you love error and falsehood because it never gets personal, that is, it always gives you the stage performance that you prefer. You think any wicked magician is going to tell you that he is picking your pocket while he putting on the act? No, he is going to divert your attention. Your attention has been diverted by stupid arrogance.

Oh, how many of you have a best friend? How many have a worst friend? Either one of them knows a load of things about you that you don’t know about yourself. And you know one thing that they know? They can define your stupid arrogance. Not that they even want to think about it, having lived with it for thirty years. See, I think the word ‘stupid’ alone should get special attention, don’t you?

How many of you have ever had an experience, I hope I can see a few hands on this, where you – c’mon be very careful now and don’t be tricked by your interpretation of this – how many of you have ever understood something, really, that you thought you had already understood? Ever have that? I’ll tell you, that’s spiritual. Even if it’s only mental, it’s a spiritual start. You trusted that friend, you trusted that plan, that set of aggressive ideas, you trusted that dream. Something came along and tripped you, and you fell down, and it hurt bad and your cried, right? You were aware of your stupidity, which is intelligence. And isn’t life, come to think of it, just a series of one awkward sprawling painful trips over something, one after another? Guess – easy question. You are head of me, I know. Guess who trip over. Yourself, trip over your own feet, walking along, thinking you are dancing! Crash. And the music stops and you look around and go into your usual sad act.

You’re uncomfortable because you are like a spy. You’ve seen good spy stories, haven’t you? What’s a spy do? You’re a spy. Your outer behavior, even the way you dress, is different from the kind of a person you are inside. You want people to believe in the outside, don’t you. But you know you are different inside, up and down, the distance between the two states. A spy puts on fancy clothes, he is going to steal the secrets of another country, and he is getting paid for it. You think that you are going to get paid for being a spy. No no, you are going to be betrayed by the people who hired you.

Do you know? Maybe you don’t know whose been hiring you and who is going to give you counterfeit money at the end of your arduous painful miserable service. You are going to get paid by hell. There’s no better word than that. Hell is symbolic of everything that is hot and undesirable, that’s condemning. That’s what you’ve been paid for, that’s why you get hot all the time, cause that’s where you are living. You can rise at least one foot above the floor of hell during this talk.

But the spy, he goes to the foreign country and of course the minute his airplane lands there and he starts walking around, oh, you come into the room here, you go to work, you go anywhere, you go to the party, when you go into the room, aren’t you conscious of everyone looking at you? A lot of people look at you, you come in, and then you interpret what they look like, “I got my rose on upside down, shoes on the wrong feet.” No wonder you fall down you’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet. So he goes to the country – we’ll make this a good story, a revealing story, I’m talking about you, you’re the spy, your spouse sees through you of course, and you know it’s a conspiracy between the two of you to keep it between the two of you. You have got, listen, when you stand before judgment day you stand all alone. And judgment day is every second, every second in this room that you have been here is judgment day for you. Anyway, the spy goes to the embassy and to his great dismay he is placed at the big dining table, big fancy embassy – the government they can spend all the money they want for their big fancy balls and banquets – and the spy is set between to colonels. Uh oh.

I am giving you symbolism of your daily excursion into the world. And while he is chatting amiably, one side and then then other, and smiling, playing his role to perfection – he’s been briefed, briefed? he’s gone to spy school, and some people have their own inner-built spy school, in which they plan what they are going to say, how they are going to appear to someone else. Have I hit home on that one? Yes I have. He comes, and he is sitting between the two men and he plays his role. All the time he is nervous, he is nervous because he is a fake.

You are uncomfortable because you are unreal. And sometimes the situation gets out of hand, worse than that, gets out of foot, gets out of everything. You flop. Here’s what happens – this is symbolic, but you know what happens – the moustache begins to slip, didn’t put enough glue on it, so he’s pretending he’s rubbing it a little bit, he’s pushing it back, finally gets it on a little, crooked moustache, a moustache doesn’t grow that way. Oh and this will hit home, he says something in a casual conversation that he shouldn’t have said. He’s gives away a little bit of information about his home country that only the country that he is in now understood and knew about and therefore how would he a citizen of this country even know about that. He slipped. He gave himself away.

And oh have you had this experience, as a matter of fact most of you have had it while this talk is going on, if you could have seen it. He makes the slip, and he freezes with horror at what he heard himself say. How many have had that experience? Could I have done that? It may have been so awful, so utterly stupid, that you didn’t even want to see it at the time, you wanted to put your hands over year head and sink through the floor and get away, right? But it persisted all the way home from the party you were at and finally when you get home it hit you with all the magnitude of its horror. How could a nice, dignified, pleasant, cultured person like me have ever blurted that out? That self-questioning could be used. Did you? It’s up to you to answer whether you used it or not. But you get home and you suddenly remember what you said.

Now I am going to go in a certain direction at this point, because I know how you are tormented by thoughts like that. And I am going to tell you how to be free of them. I could tell you 50 ways how to get free of them, but we have time for only just a couple.

The next time you blurt out something that only a dignified person would say, I don’t want you to do what I explained much earlier in the talk about getting an emotion, a disastrous feeling of wounded thought and mood, I don’t want you to have a painful experience inside and then bring yourself into it. It didn’t happen when you get home, it happened back there. You have to understand what it means to leave the experience back there and not take it home with you. But you want to take it home with you and suffer from it and have a sleepless night because now you can be the center of your own life and the center of your own life is the center of the entire universe! How marvelous! Look who I am, surrounded by myself. Surrounded by as many mangling moods as I want to enter in, I can always believe in myself. You are not believing in yourself. You are believing in something that has no existence at all.

And oh what a dangerous enemy the word ‘belief’ is. You put that down somewhere and consider the grief you had because you believed in something. You don’t have to believe in anything. You just have to get the facts, such as you are doing right now.

But the spy is there, jittery – oh here we go again, we are going to bring you into the talk again – jittery and wondering when he is going to get exposed as the faker, as the spy that he is. You are worried, aren’t you? The reason you are worried is because you are a spy. The reason you are a spy is because you are spiritually infantile. And the reason you stay spiritual infantile is because you won’t dedicate yourself to understanding yourself, your mind. You can understand why every single disaster happens to you. If you don’t understand it they will continue to happen. If you do understand them, that begins to break, shatter, their power. And what takes the place of their false power is the true power of your true nature.

Then you can go anywhere, not as a spy anymore, but as someone who is real. You don’t have to try to get things from other people, you don’t have to impress them, you don’t have to figure out just how should I talk and behave in order to make a good impression on them, you don’t have to do that at all. You can just relax and be real, because you’ve got everything you want from the heavenly world, you don’t need a single thing from that world. That is what it means to be in command of the whole world. Because God is in command of himself. God is in command of heaven. He sends a bit of that heaven down to you and you become in command of yourself. Nothing lower than that heavenly command can come up and thwart you or hurt you anymore.

Be who you really are. There is a way to do that. Spend all the next days and months and years in discovering your real nature. That’s all you have to do. It can be done.

Good afternoon.