Transcend yourself — descend into yourself.

In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening . . . In the process of digitalization, . . . information acquires an altogether different status. Reality itself takes on the form of information and data. For the most part, we perceive reality in terms of information or through the lens of information. Information is an idea—that is, a re-representation. When reality takes the form of information, the immediate experience of presence withers. When digitalization gives everything the form of information, reality is flattened.

If what we are is a "project towards the world", then the Cartesian cogito ("I think") becomes I act; my existence as a self is not that of a single continuing "consciousness", or a series of such consciousnesses, but a single "experience" in which I, as an embodied human being, engage with the world. My body is not, as objectivists might have it, an instrument loosely attached to me that I can use, but is me myself as involved with the world and as expressing myself in its movements. If I am an embodied subject, then the thoughts, feelings, intentions, wishes and so on that I have necessarily find expression in my body, not only in my actions and the objects I manipulate in them or the environment that I change by them, but even in the very characteristics of the body itself. Conversely, my body for me, or what Merleau-Ponty calls le corps propre, is not some kind of mechanistic system loosely attached to me, but is my mode of expression of my thoughts, feelings, intentions, and so on. A person's body can become what Merleau-Ponty beautifully describes as "the eloquent relic of an existence."

“I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.”

I possess the mysticism of the shadows of a remote past.

There was no action or desire which, emanating from the present, reached out to the future, spanning the dull, similar days. As a result, each day kept an unusual independence, failing to be immersed in the perception of any life continuity; each day life began anew, like a solitary island in a gray sea of passing time. What had been done, lived, and spoken no longer played the same role as in our life because there seemed to be no wish to go further; every day was an exasperating monotony of the same words, the same complaints, until one felt that this being had lost all sense of necessary continuity. Such was the march of time for him.