To attain total detachment, misfortune is not enough. One needs a misfortune without consolation. One must have no consolation. No representable consolation. Then ineffable consolation descends.
To forgive debts. To accept the past without demanding compensation from the future. To halt time at the present moment. This is also the acceptance of death.
"He emptied himself of his divinity." To empty oneself of the world. To put on the nature of a slave. To reduce oneself to the point one occupies in space and time. To nothing.
To strip oneself of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then one possesses the truth of the world.
Two ways of renouncing material goods:
To deprive oneself of them in view of a spiritual good.
To conceive of and feel them as conditions of spiritual goods (for example: hunger, fatigue, humiliation cloud the intelligence and hinder meditation) and nevertheless to renounce them.
Only this second kind of renunciation is nakedness of spirit.
Moreover, material goods would scarcely be dangerous if they appeared alone and not linked to spiritual goods.
To renounce all that is not grace and not to desire grace. The extinction of desire (Buddhism)—or detachment—or amor fati—or the desire for the absolute good—are always the same thing: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without wishing. To detach our desire from all goods and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is fulfilled. One then touches the absolute good. In everything, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, to will in the void, to will the void. For it is a void for us, this good that we can neither represent to ourselves nor define. But this void is fuller than all fullness. If one reaches that point, one is saved, for God fills the void. This is in no way an intellectual process, in the sense we understand it today. The intelligence has nothing to find; it has only to clear the way. It is fit only for servile tasks. The good is for us a nothingness, since no thing is good. But this nothingness is not unreal. Everything that exists, compared to it, is unreal. To set aside beliefs that fill voids and sweeten bitterness. Belief in immortality. Belief in the usefulness of sins: etiam peccata. Belief in the providential ordering of events—in short, the "consolations" ordinarily sought in religion. To love God through the destruction of Troy and of Carthage, and without consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.
The reality of the world is made by us from our attachment. It is the reality of the self transported by us into things. It is in no way external reality. That is perceptible only through total detachment. Should even a single thread remain, there is still attachment.
Misfortune that forces one to attach oneself to wretched objects lays bare the wretched character of attachment. Thereby the necessity of detachment becomes clearer.
Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions, and whoever wants reality must be detached.
As soon as one knows that something is real, one can no longer be attached to it.
Attachment is nothing other than an insufficiency in the sense of reality. One is attached to the possession of a thing because one believes that if one ceases to possess it, it ceases to exist. Many people do not feel with their whole soul that there is a world of difference between the annihilation of a city and their irremediable exile from that city.
Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time.
Prevent it from being diluted so that it may be intolerable.
"And when they had sated themselves with tears" (Iliad)—another way of making the worst suffering tolerable.
One must not weep so as not to be consoled.
All pain that does not detach is wasted pain. Nothing more dreadful: a cold desert, the soul shriveled up. Ovid. Slaves in Plautus. Never think of a thing or a being one loves without having before one's eyes the thought that perhaps this thing is destroyed or that this being is dead. Let this thought not dissolve the sense of reality, but make it more intense. Each time one says: "Thy will be done," picture to oneself all possible misfortunes taken together. Two ways of killing oneself: suicide or detachment. To kill by thought everything one loves: the only way to die. But only what one loves. (He who does not hate his father, his mother... But: love your enemies...) Not to desire that what one loves be immortal. Before a human being, whoever he may be, desire him neither immortal nor dead. The miser, through desire for his treasure, deprives himself of it. If one can place all one's good in a thing hidden in the earth, why not in God? But when God has become as full of meaning as the treasure for the miser, one must repeat forcefully to oneself that he does not exist. To feel that one loves him even if he does not exist. It is he who, through the working of the dark night, withdraws so as not to be loved like a treasure by a miser. Electra weeping for Orestes dead. If one loves God while thinking he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.