We are a part that must imitate the whole. The atman. Let the soul of a man take the entire universe as its body. Let it have with the entire universe the same relationship as that of a collector to his collection, of one of those soldiers who died crying "Long live the Emperor!" to Napoleon. The soul transports itself, outside the body proper, into something else. Let it therefore transport itself into the entire universe.
To identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything less than the universe is subject to suffering.
I may well die, but the universe goes on. This does not console me if I am other than the universe. But if the universe is to my soul as another body, my death ceases to have more importance for me than that of a stranger. Likewise my sufferings.
Let the entire universe be for me, in relation to my body, what a blind man's stick is in relation to his hand. He truly no longer has his sensitivity in his hand, but at the tip of the stick. An apprenticeship is needed for this.
To restrict one's love to the pure subject and to extend it to the entire universe is the same thing.
To change the relationship between oneself and the world as, through apprenticeship, the worker changes the relationship between himself and his tool. Injury: it is the trade entering the body. Let all suffering make the universe enter the body.
Habit, skill: the transport of consciousness into an object other than the body proper.
Let that object be the universe, the seasons, the sun, the stars.
The relationship between the body and the tool changes through apprenticeship. The relationship between the body and the world must be changed.
One does not detach oneself; one changes one's attachment. To attach oneself to everything.
Through each sensation, to feel the universe. What does it matter then whether it is pleasure or pain? If one's hand is clasped by a beloved person, seen again after a long time, what does it matter if the grip is tight and hurts?
A degree of pain at which one loses the world. But afterward, relief comes. And if the paroxysm returns, the relief returns afterward too. That very degree, if one knows it, becomes expectation of relief, and consequently does not break contact with the world.
Two limiting tendencies: to destroy the self for the sake of the universe, or to destroy the universe for the sake of the self.
He who has not learned to become nothing runs the risk of reaching a moment when all things other than himself cease to exist.
External necessity or imperious inner need, like breathing. "Let us become the central breath." Even if a chest pain makes breathing difficult, one breathes; one cannot do otherwise.
To associate the rhythm of the body's life with that of the world, to feel this association constantly and to feel also the perpetual exchange of matter by which the human being is bathed in the world.
What nothing can take from a human being as long as he lives: as movement where the will has purchase, breathing; as perception, space (even in a dungeon, even with eyes and eardrums pierced, as long as one lives, one perceives space).
To attach to these things the thoughts one wishes no circumstance to take away.
To love one's neighbor as oneself does not mean loving all beings equally, for I do not love all modes of my own existence equally. Nor does it mean never making them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer. But to have with each one the relationship of one way of thinking the universe to another way of thinking the universe, and not to a part of the universe.
Not to accept an event of the world is to desire that the world not be. Now that is in my power concerning myself; if I desire it, I obtain it. I am then an abscess of the world.
Wishes in folklore: desires have this danger, that they are granted.
To desire that the world not be is to desire that I, as I am, be everything.
May the entire universe, from this pebble at my feet to the most distant stars, exist for me at every moment as much as Agnes for Arnolphe or the cashbox for Harpagon. If I will it, the world can belong to me like the treasure to the miser. But it is a treasure that does not grow. This irreducible "I" that is the irreducible ground of my suffering -- to make it universal. What does it matter that there is never joy in me, since there is perpetual perfect joy in God! And likewise for beauty, intelligence, and all things. To desire one's salvation is bad, not because it is selfish (it is not in man's power to be selfish), but because it directs the soul toward a mere particular and contingent possibility, instead of toward the fullness of being, instead of toward the good which is unconditionally. Everything I desire exists, or has existed, or will exist somewhere. For I cannot invent completely. How then can I not be fulfilled? Br. I could not help imagining him alive, imagining his house as a possible place, for me, of his gentle conversations. Then the awareness of the fact of his death made a dreadful desert. Cold of metal. What did it matter to me that there were other people to love? The love I directed toward him, accompanied by interior sketches, by exchanges that could take place only with him, was without an object. Now I no longer imagine him as alive, and his death is no longer intolerable to me. His memory is sweet to me. But there are others, whom I did not know then, whose death would have the same effect on me.
D... is not dead, but the friendship I bore him is dead, accompanied by a similar pain. He is no more than a shadow.
But I cannot imagine the same transformation for X... Y... Z..., who nevertheless did not exist in my awareness so short a time ago.
Just as parents cannot conceive that a child was nothingness three years before, so one cannot conceive that one has not always known the beings one loves.
I love badly, it seems to me: otherwise things would not happen this way for me. My love would not be attached to a few beings. It would be available for everything that deserves to be loved.
"Be perfect as your heavenly father..." Love as the sun gives light. One must draw one's love back to oneself in order to spread it over all things. God alone loves all things and he loves only himself.
To love in God is far more difficult than one thinks.
I can sully the entire universe with my misery and not feel it, or gather it into myself.
To bear the discord between imagination and fact.
"I am suffering." That is better than "this landscape is ugly."
Not to want to change one's own weight in the balance of the world -- the golden scales of Zeus. The whole cow gives milk, although one draws milk only from the udders. In the same way, the world is productive of holiness.