Don’t Take Your Life Personally — Ajahn Sumedho
There is not one self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. — Henri Michaux, Plume 1938
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. — Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 1951
Nothing is more real than nothing. – Samuel Beckett Malone Meurt/Malone Dies – 1951
A verb without a subject… — Alan Watts
The clamor is everywhere: BE SOMEBODY… but we are building a fiction!
Beyond our names and our affiliations lies the same eternal nobody that we were when we were born – and that we will be when we die.
What surrounds us – all the stuff, the concepts… – blinds us and entraps us into a fortress, a coffin.
No reason to become pessimistic, merely realistic. And freer.
In a culture where “something” is always better than nothing, “nothing” is bound to be misrepresented.
No-thing is also related to no-self: a false sense of self, or is any sense of self is false?
Not unlike the Buddhist warning about everything being “maya“- a form of illusion, it is clear that much of what surrounds us (the concepts, the busyness… ) stands on wobbly foundations.
Kafka said it loud and clear: “I have hardly anything in common with myself ” – “My People! My People! If only I had one“…
and many others, like Guy Debord, Alejandro Jodorowski & U.G. Krishnamurti, have expanded on that topic.
From School of No Media on Vimeo.
You can also view the brilliant film “The Other Son“ or visit Adalberto Abbate‘s Selfportrait Series (cf. picture below).
To be continued… [This is related to an in-progress text called: .(point) – and to the BrainBleed site)
Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation. Oscar Wilde
By Rimma & Valery Gerlovin: “Be-LIE-ve”
By Adalberto Abbate
The poet has no identity. — John Keats
