Marcus Boon > Quotes

“There is a thin bright line between a sentient being and a Buddha, and this line is intrinsic to Dzogchen. Confusion just isn’t enlightenment. Yet the intrinsic nature of the confused mind is totally and already enlightened, always-already. There is a disturbing gap between this nature of mind (Tibetan, ngowo) and how it appears as confusion: disturbing because it seems so categorical, yet at the same time, I cannot locate it anywhere, since confused mind’s essence is totally enlightened.”
― Marcus Boon, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism

“Darwin’s argument in miniature is that there are no species as such, yet there are ducks and worms; yet it is next to impossible to specify exactly when a proto-duck evolves into a duck. Evolution pulsates with nothingness, riven from within by uncanny gaps that proliferate everywhere. In the same way, Marxian capital cannot be seen or touched directly, but rather it is a spectral “vampire” eating away at the seemingly solid world: “All that is solid melts into air.”39 In evolution and capitalism, nothingness gains a disturbing actuality. It can be exhilarating, refreshing, erotic, horrifying, strange.”
― Marcus Boon, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism

“Capital also highlights how capitalism produces a key ideology, which is not a false consciousness hiding the various machinations of the system and controlling the masses by cultivating and maintaining their stupidity, but by producing a rather clever working class that can criticize and even understand the complexities of capitalism. The crucial ideology of capitalism is not one that keeps the truth from the masses, but one that produces a situation in which the masses produce their own truth that functions to shape their desire in such a way that, although critical and angry, it contains little revolutionary expectation.”
― Marcus Boon, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism