Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
2 - Contrary states
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
Summary
But what is the sense of the question, how should we live? – where am I supposed to place the emphasis, find the intonation which reveals the fragments of the conversation? The only echo I can find: ‘then how should we live?’ But where does it come from? What has already been said or argued? ‘If we shouldn't live like this, then how?’ The question arises out of conflict: how should we live? how should we live? – Not out of serene reflection on the good life, but out of a frustration with our own conduct that gives us reason to explore, to explore what? – the sources of the frustration. How can we live so that we no longer go on doing this or this? (And how am I going to fill in these markers?) But it is also a challenge, come on, then, so what's the answer? What do you really know? Who are you?
We bring about unsatisfactory states of affairs which, under other circumstances, present themselves as the objects of dismay or sympathy, the causes of which we might otherwise seek to remove: but we were the cause … and sins of omission … we do not will the good with the energy that the good requires. Leave aside, what is the good? Even by our own lights. Energy and unsatisfactoriness, virya and dukkha, an adjustment between insight and response. We have to realise how terrible it all is without being overwhelmed by it.
We should not live like this, incapable, unable to possess ourselves of the energy that the good requires. We are sleepwalkers.
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- Information
- Transformations of MindPhilosophy as Spiritual Practice, pp. 26 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000