We all reach the world, and the same world, and it belongs wholly to each of us, without division or loss, because it is that which we think and perceive, the undivided object of all our thoughts. Its unity, if it is not the numerical unity, is not the specific unity either: it is that ideal unity or unity of signification that makes the triangle of the geometer be the same in Tokyo and in Paris, the same in the fifth century before Christ and now.

I no longer think I see with my eyes things exterior to myself who sees them: they are exterior only to my body, not to my thought, which soars over it as well as them…As soon as we cease thinking of perception as the action of the pure physical object on the human body, and the perceived as the “interior” result of this action, it seems that every distinction between the true and false, between methodic knowledge and phantasms, between science and the imagination, is ruined.

In Tristan’s vow, and in his refusal of his marriage, we find the basic flaw in romanticism: its partialness. It attempts to balance the one-sidedness of our Western psyche by restoring the experience of the gods, the inner world, the mysteries, and the divine love. But, like all collective attempts at balancing, it has become one-sided in the opposite direction. It embraces the opposite polarity, it idealizes the divine and ecstatic world but leaves no room for ordinary humanness. Ordinary human life, with its obligations, its ties, its commitments, its duties, its limitations, and its focus on ordinary human beings, is too earthbound, too dull and sordid for our romantic prejudices.

Romantic love, true to its paradoxical nature, fools us: It looks as thought it aims at making a human relationship to a person. After all, one is not meditating in a temple; one is “in love” with a human person. Or is one? It is difficult for us to see the difference — the vast difference — between relating to a human person and using that person as a vehicle for one’s projection.

Conversation is not that which fuses you to me; but the experience of Conversation induces, once again, the vertigo of expropriation. it is not only the case hat I am not identical to myself when I begin to converse with you, but more severely perhaps: you are no longer the one I have interiorized or memorized. Breaking the secret contract that sealed you with me, you, in Conversation, are no longer you, or the you at least of whom I have preserved an image…. Conversing with you, I no longer see you, i am not even looking for you: I am oriented toward you generously. This is the non-violent transitivity of my inclination toward you.

Debt is the perversion of a promise, a promise that has been perverted through mathematics and violence. I’m not saying mathematics is bad, but the combination of mathematics and violence is extremely bad. A debt is a promise to give a certain sum of money, in a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. It is a contract that is ultimately enforceable through the threat of force. The problem is that through a genuinely perverse historical alchemy, we’ve come to see such acts of violence as the very essence of morality.

Some near-death experiences may be a re-activation of birth memories or an actual re experiencing of parts of the process in symbolic form. Thus racing through tunnels towards the light may be a memory or symbolic re-experience of being born: a memory of “the near-birth experience.” Psychedelic experiences have led some people to conclude that birth and death are seen as the same process at the unconscious level. Thus Sigmund Freud’s “death instinct” may also involve a drive to return to the womb, to die by being “un-born.” If being born is experienced as dying by the baby, then we are already in the “after-life,” and the birth process will have formed our images of what progression to a “next life” is like. This may partially explain tunnels, the light, and an apparent “telepathic communion” with God or God-like beings who may represent those persons present at the birth. This may also explain some resurrection and reincarnation ideas: the apparent “death which is birth” being followed by a new life.

I think many New Age efforts at spirituality really fail because they’re so taken by the light, and so eager to hold up light and warmth in a world that can be cold and dark, that they don’t honor enough the darkness, the sinking, the suffering, and the Shadow.