I am a mirage...

There is no difference between thought and mind. Thought arises from mind and mind is merely a bundle of thoughts. Without thoughts there is no mind. What is mind? ‘I’ is mind. Mind is past, it is clinging to past, present and future. It is clinging to time, clinging to objects. This is called mind. Now, where does the mind arise from? When the ‘I’ rises, mind rises, senses rise, the world rises. Now, find out where the ‘I’ rises from and then tell me if you are not quiet.

Papaji

Your whole body is
A glass of wine
Or sweetness destined for me.
When I raise my hand,
I find in every place a dove
Seeking for me,
As if, my love,
You were made of clay
For my very hands of a potter.
Your knees, your breasts,
Your waist,
Disappear in me like in a hollow
Of a thirsting earth
Where they lose
A form,
And together
We become like a single river,
Like a single grain of sand.

Pablo Neruda

‘I can’t say I feel relieved or satisfied, just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I have to know; I have understood all that has happened to me since January. The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.’

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“though your sorrows not
any tongue may name,
three i’ll give you sweet
joys for each of them
But it must be your”
whispers that flower

murmurs eager this
“i will give you five
hopes for any fear,
but it Must be your”
perfectly alive
blossom of a bliss

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To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We begin with our plurality. When I first spoke of the many ‘I’s in us, I said that new ‘I’s jump up every moment, control things for a brief time and disappear, and many of them never meet. When you realize that you are not one, that you are many, that you may know something for certain in the morning and know nothing about it in the afternoon, then this realization is the beginning. I do not mean that if we realize this plurality we can change it and become different; but this realization is the first step.

P. D. Ouspensky

Farewell, Letter of Love! farewell: it’s her desire.
How long did I delay! How long refused, in ire,
I to destroy the single joy of mine!…
Enough! The time has come. Burn, scripts of love divine.
I’m ready; nothing else can call for my sad soul…
Now the greedy flame is touching its form whole…
A minute!… it is flamed and blazing – smoke, light,
With my bitter laments, is flying of my sight.
And now the ring’s stamp forfeited its form previous –
It’s boiling – the seal wax… O, Providence of Heavens!
That’s all! The letter’s leaves are twisted, now black;
On their light ashes their well known track      
Is whitening… My heart is squeezed. Oh, dear ashes,
In my sad destiny, my poor consolations,
Forever lie on breast, so fully, fully wracked… 

Major themes
 

• The consequences of living alone
• The unfamiliarity and hostility of physical objects
• The unfamiliarity and hostility of other people
• The unfamiliarity and hostility of one’s own self
• The Nausea
• Unreality
• The nature of time
• Life in stories, compared to real life
• Intimations of reality
• After the realization

Literary significance and reception

La Nausée fits closely within several currents in the history of the French and the European novel, developing and continuing them.

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Don’t go to the past. The past is a problem, the past is mind. When you go to the past all will be problems so don’t go to the past. The mind is the past and the past is a graveyard. Don’t go the graveyard. 

Papaji

Rain flogs my face and collar-bones,
a thunderstorm roars over musts.
You thrust upon my flesh and soul,
like tempests upon ships do thrust.

I do not want, at all, to know,
what will befall to me the next –
would I be smashed against my woe,
or thrown into happiness.

In awe and gaiety elated,
like a ship, that’s going tempests through,
I am not sorry that I’ve met you,
and not afraid to love you, too.

Bella Ahmadulina



Translation: Yevgeny Bonver

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can’t describe it, it’s like the Nausea and yet it’s just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Nausea (orig. French La Nausée) is an epistolary novel by the existentialist* philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre. This is Sartre’s first novel and one of his best-known.
 

‘People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity… Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.’
—1964 edition, p 29

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