Being and its realm. This is the first determination of Being. It possesses an empire, whence its metamorphosis into a plurality of beings. This is the first birth of the plural, birth itself, the origin of number and progeniture. of course, the word “realm” already transfers the table of the commandments or the table of categories from Being to an evangelical ground.
11 And God said to him, “I am God Almighty[f]; be fruitful and increase in number.
For those who are completely absorbed in God-consciousness, the oblation is Brahman, the ladle with which it is offered is Brahman, the act of offering is Brahman, and the sacrificial fire is also Brahman. Such persons, who view everything as God, easily attain him.
14 Jacob set up a stone pillar at the place where God had talked with him, and he poured out a drink offering on it; he also poured oil on it. 15 Jacob called the place where God had talked with him Bethel (“House of God”)
Still others offer as sacrifice the outgoing breath in the incoming breath, while some offer the incoming breath into the outgoing breath. Some arduously practice prāṇāyām and restrain the incoming and outgoing breaths, purely absorbed in the regulation of the life-energy. Yet others curtail their food intake and offer the breath into the life-energy as sacrifice.
20 In that day the Lord will use a razor hired from beyond the Euphrates River—the king of Assyria—to shave your head and private parts, and to cut off your beard also. 21 In that day, a person will keep alive a young cow and two goats. 22 And because of the abundance of the milk they give, there will be curds to eat. All who remain in the land will eat curds and honey.
Following this path and having achieved enlightenment from a Guru, O Arjun, you will no longer fall into delusion. In the light of that knowledge, you will see that all living beings are but parts of the Supreme, and are within me.
As for intuitive understanding, a person may laboriously convince himself of the truth to be grasped by intuition, of its function and nature, but the actual intuition is more like feeling and requires practical and personal contact.
44 Then Jesus cried out, “Whoever believes in me does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. 45 The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me.
If every specter, as we have amply seen, is distinguished from spirit by an incorporation, by the phenomenal form of a quasi-incarnation, then Christ is the most spectral of specters. He tells us something about absolute spectrality … Jesus is at once the greatest and the most “incomprehensible of ghosts”
What use is the learning of those who do not seek to wipe
out the letters of destiny (from their brow) by enquiring:
‘Whence is the birth of us who know the letters?’ They have
sunk to the level of a gramophone. What else are they,
O Arunachala?
Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word? I have begun to answer this question. But this question is such, and such the nature of my answer, that the place of the one and of the other must constantly be in movement. If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can Justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation.
47 “If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. 48 There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day. 49 For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. 50 I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.”
Ashes or cinders are obviously traces – in general, the first figure of the trace one thinks of is that of the step, along a path, the step that lives a footprint, a trace, or a vestige; but “cinder” renders better what I meant to say with the name of trace, namely, something that remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder. That is, something which is not. To explain it in a consistent manner, one would have to undertake a meditation on Being, on “is,” on what “is” means, what “rest” means in the texts in which I distinguish “to remain” from “to be.” The cinder is not! The cinder is not: This means that it testifies without testifying. It testifies to the disappearance of the witness, if one can say that. It testifies to the disappearance of memory. When I keep a text for memory, what remains there is not cinders apparently. Cinders is the destruction of memory itself; it is an absolutely radical forgetting, not only forgetting in the sense of the philosophy of consciousness, or a psychology of consciousness; it is even forgetting in the economy of the unconscious by repression.
Whatever happens, I remain. At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its very nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time — effortlessly and spontaneously. As long as it is merely aware there are no problems.
Cinders, however, is an absolute non-memory, so to speak. Thus, it communicates with that which in the gift, for example, does not even seek to get recognized or kin every experience there is this incineration, this experience of incineration which is experience itself. Naturally, then, there are great, spectacular experiences of incineration – and I allude to them in the text – I’m thinking of the crematoria, of all the destruction by fire, but before even these great memorable experience of incineration, there is incineration as experience, as the elementary form of experience.
mark forshee 