NOEMAYA

The grandeur of the world comes from the grandeur of the man who experiences that world. World is rooted in man’s consciousness.

Tree is symbolic of the relation between the inward and the outward, the outward being the reflection of the inward. The roots of a tree look like its branches. The ground is the ground of reflection. The root of a tree is reflected in the outward form of the tree, and the outward form reflects the inward root. The outward is the mirror image of the inward, as the tree is the mirror image of its root. The deeper and the wider the roots penetrate, the higher the tree reaches.

A man of depth is the highest of all men. Depth does not come by accumulation of information, as if information were the same thing as knowledge. A knife can both save and kill. Books do the same; the avid reader is more likely to turn ignorant than wise.

Truth dwells in the depths of the self; it demands inward attention rather than outward distraction. Reading of someone else’s ideas and opinions should only have a negative function; it should only show us that “this, too, is not it.”

Everything we find in the world we ourselves put there in the first place.

One who is lost in the ideas and opinions of great men cannot see himself becoming one.

The heart of a man is the root of the world in which he lives; the outward courage and nobility reflects the inward strength and purity. The noble man is detached yet sensitive to aesthetic and intellectual subtleties. Detachment and objectivity is the highest virtue: “Objectivity is the prerogative of the human state.”

The garden of the self is to be treated with utmost care and respect, for the self is a gift, not a possession. Presence is a present; to accept it is to be present.

Modern science merely restates things with a sophisticated diction; it puts them differently only with a new lure as if it had really explained things. But it is nonetheless an alternative description, pure interpretation, one which acquiring modern tone and linguistic sophistication lacks intellectual depth and rigor: It is an empty shrine with no sense of the sacred, only inviting in in virtue of its transitory lure; but it is in essence a trap for one’s transcendental dignity and integrity.

Man is not something; he is something missing.

Thought is the course of a narrative that is trying to situate man, to localize him, and thus define him one way or another; for ego must have a sense of its location so to protect itself and its comfort zone; without this sense of location, or interested situatedness, which is provided from within the narrative of thought, the ego will fall prey to vertigo, the vertigo of ego.