#dispassion

In the shade it is pleasant, in the sun it is scorching. We always have the freedom to turn within to see the light and thus enjoy the shade. When by force of old habit we wander out again, we say to Bhagavan, ‘That was only laya, I want nasa’, and he replies, ‘Turn again to the source and see if manyness exists there’. By repeatedly turning away consciously from the manyness in this way we come to see that it does not exist apart from us, and that it is therefore not something we need to fear. Some reach this realisation after just a few attempts, but for others it takes longer because their attention is not so sharp and clear.

HOW TO BECOME DISPASSIONATE?

This tradition [of Christian interpretation of dispassion/apatheia] reaches its most profoundly developed form in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, whose Chapters on Love is a virtual manual of instructions for the cultivation of apatheia, which is to say, for him, the cultivation of a spiritual vision that—having divested itself of all the fantasies summoned up by self-love, pride, the desire for power, and all other sins—can see all things with a pure heart, as images and reflections of the Logos who shaped them, and so love them without restraint, with a love so perfect that no perturbation or pathos can obviate its intensity. The mind’s life of illumination, he says, is born only of love, which is possible only for a mind purged of all hatred for others, because God is love itself and can be known and possessed only in love. Again, the attainment of this love is a refinement of the soul’s innate dynamisms, so that concupiscence is transformed into divine desire and irascibility into divine love, and this grants us a true delight in divine beauty. And this state of mind is, for Maximus, properly called apatheia. Obviously, at this point, one is not talking about the sort of austere impassivity or want of feeling one would ascribe to Aristotle’s or Plotinus’s “God,” much less some sort of pure and dispirited indifference.

“Salutations to that calm effulgence which is endless and unlimited by space, time etc., the pure consciousness which can be known by experience only.

Over the years, as I laboured on this book, the dispassionate compassion of Buddha had seemed to me the perfect ideal for students of history, though of course we would all fail disgracefully to live up to it, as the passions of our lives and the furies of our age knead and rework us continually on the slow wheel of time. As time reworks us, we rework history. “All works of [historiography] are interim reports,” said John Noble Wilford. “What people did in the past is not preserved in amber…. Each generation looks back and, drawing from its own experience, presumes to find patterns that illuminate both past and present.” The past [or what remains of it] is nearly as alive as the present, and it changes as the present changes, the historical past as much as our personal past. … [T]he way facts interlock is unique to each generation, indeed to each historian. …[T]he value of [historiography] depends on the felicitous catalysis of the personal vision into a universal vision. It is essentially a triumph of art.