Another Choice

Horrors or benefits?

Our ordinary physical individual consciousness is thoroughly convinced of being separate, of being in isolation: in fact, for it, to be separate is synonymous with being itself.

This separateness, which allows us to affirm ourselves, to conquer and to acquire, becomes a weight and a pain as soon as one experiences distress, abandon, loss, fatigue or need: then one is like an animal imprisoned in a closed space, deprived of direct communication with others – whoever they may be, human persons, a god, a space, or a force.

We then experience solitude.

Our isolation exposes us to fear and suffering, our separateness puts us at their mercy.

Fear, as suffering, can dominate us to the extent we are no longer aware of anything else: our personal space is invaded, there is no way out, no solution or recourse other than death, the extinction of all possibility to experience and feel anything.

Sometimes however, there remains a trace, a word, an image, a link – which becomes the one single thing in the world: this occurs when force of character has been cultivated.

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What remains of one’s moral development or of one’s spiritual experience when one is subjected to the skills of the torturer?

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We have been able to observe by now that, the more established is the relation between our physical consciousness and the inner axis and the more the quality of our responses to any external stimuli – whether a thought or a shock, an event or an attraction, a call or a sensation – changes its nature.

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