Nanamoli Thera > Quotes

“As electricity is made up of positive and negative current - so is human life a system of attraction and repulsion. - Turn off the current if you want quiet. - Yes, but where is the switch?”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Dhamma has no conflict with Science proper. Its methods are much the same (i. e. investigation of experience, remembering what has been investigated and forming a true view to accord with the factuality of experience investigated): but the material is different. Reputable science (Physics) confines itself to the outside world and all science restricts itself (or should do) to publicly observable behaviour. Dhamma is concerned with investigating subjective mind, recognizing the outside material sphere, but leaving it to those who are interested in it. The purposes are different. Science is or should be guided by curiosity only and has no ethics; any ethics it employs are unfounded in it or borrowed from religions or philosophies which it rejects. It has no techniques for handling the subjective (pain, etc.) and can only handle behaviour illegitimately equatedwith pain (illegitimately because a scientist only knows of the existence of pain (inhimself) by taking an unauthorized look into his own subjective unscientific experience). Dhamrna is concerned solely with the elimination of pain, to which all else is subordinated.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“I was the future and shall be the past - I am a timeless, everlasting Now, so short I have no end, so long I have no duration.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Authoritative people bore me: but what bores me even more are those swarms of little people who love authority and in virtue of whom the authority of the authoritative can be exercised.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Odd how people interested in religion spend so much time trying to convert the obvious meaning of their texts that are their authority.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“People tend to fall into two main types: those dominated by feeling and those dominated by intellect. (It is a common notion that women belong to the former and men to the latter). The former being guided by feeling, use intellect as a subordinate means to justify the impulsive feeling, and so tend to be inconsistent logically, self-contradictory and adaptable. Those dominated by intellect tend to use the subordinated feeling as a means to justify choice guided by logical formalism, and so they tend to be ambivalent to things and persons, being more interested in principles than in things. Just as the former try and convince others and themselves that their impulsive choice is right by isolated logical argument, so do the latter by trying to force what their line of argument had led to upon others and themselves.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”

To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“It is most difficult to be natural. It is most unnatural to be normal.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Much of what is asserted as true is so asserted, not as a declaration of what the speaker knows but rather as a defence against doubt in the hope that the opposite proposition may be thereby excluded.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“One of the most remarkable facts of this age is the negligible direct personal power which scientists have in the control of the world's affairs. The marvelous means they so successfully produce are always used by non-scientists against whom the scientists themselves seem to be powerless and even purposeless. What clever sheep they are.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“All the questions asked about death are wrongly put.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“So long as one assumes death as an absolute fact, one must have, as an assumed absolute value based on it, the decision either to kill or to be killed in the last extreme (and this includes attitudes to suicide and to 'natural death'). This alternative ultimately divides all people (who make that assumption about death) into two types. With a proper understanding of death, the decision (dialectic) must collapse on the laying bare of the assumption. Freud has remarked, that death is inconceivable to the Unconscious, a statement which, though open to the usual criticisms of F's mechanistic assumptions about consciousness, does point to a very important factual dialectic in assumptions about death.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“A man’s life is like a day’s journey travelled, westwards and facing always the way one has come. In the morning the field of experience is bright, simple and—dazzling. Shadows are thrown by the sun from things already past and known and they need no interpreting—and there is nothing to hinder fancying the future. But after midday the sun gets ahead and there begin to fall—into the field of vision shadows of things before they are seen, some of which can be recognized as similar to things already known, but others not. And now the future journey depends on how these shadows are interpreted before the things which cast them—are encountered. And as the day draws on the shadows get longer and more intricate. And meanwhile, as when looking back from a car travelling down a long avenue of trees that are slipping by, the trees appear to get rapidly smaller as they recede, but distant hills behind in the background, though receding too, seem, by contrast with the shrinking trees, to be getting larger and larger.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“The concept of nutriment depends (a) upon association and (a) upon impermanence and (c) upon hunger. Hunger, seeking for satisfaction, devours x, which is associated with y that gives it satisfaction; but the satisfaction given is impermanent and thereby renews the hunger. "I" hungering for satisfaction, devour (x) food (eye object, taste, smell, touch object), the contact of which is associated with (y) pleasant feeling that gives satisfaction; but the satisfaction given by pleasant feeling is impermanent and by changing renews the pain of hunger.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Everyone knows that border across which he cannot go, even in thought, and it is that, not the former, that people automatically shut out and cannot face. Yet one knows at times (in the middle of the night, perhaps, when one is sleepless, or on encountering some revolting experience) that this horror haunts every form of experience (always and ever), and hastily one readjusts the blinkers that had slipped. Put the beautiful before you and the horror behind you. Yes, but then I shall not dare to turn round.

The world is a bad place. Is it? But it seems that this haunting, this self-delusion by wearing blinkers, is not an attribute of the world. The haunting is in consciousness itself, in its very nature. Just as when I set up any object in the sunlight a shadow is cast (because it is the nature of sunlight to cast shadows), so anything that comes into the light of consciousness casts a shadow of the unknown. It is in the unknown that the horror resides in the dark of knowledge where the patterns can no longer be traced, where chaos resides, and whence utterly hostile systems may emerge, devour, and digest us.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“The so-called seven colours of the spectrum together go to make up what is known as light — what, in other words, the scientists say is no more than a mere fractional band in the whole range of electro-magnetic waves— the only section of the wave-range which the visual sense can directly grasp. Indeed each colour is experienced as a particular limitation of light: light itself appears to be a particular limitation of the electro- magnetic wave-range. So would the five senses seem to be five specific limitations of the infinite— five exclusive ways of screening off, of shutting out the rest. In fact, the "outer world", as known through the senses, seems to be conditioned by — shall one say our knowledge of it depends on —the limiting and sifting qualities of our five senses. By means of sifting and excluding, form could be said to be created from Chaos and thus our five senses are at the same time five creators and five ways of being partially blind. We live, as it were, in a cathedral with stained windows whose, to us, magnificent colour patterns let in a little of the light which the sun sheds indiscriminately outside. (1947)

(Later addition:) But the "sun" would then stand for Chaos in our simile and how would that be wrong?”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Now let us consider the structure of the paticca-samuppāda for a moment. Firstly, it is not a logical proposition, nor is it a temporal cause-result chain. Such an approach makes an understanding of it impossible. It is not symbolic since, if we look, we can find each member in ourselves by introspection. The interpretations of European scholars have been, perhaps without exception, wild and bad guesses.

To the question: “What are these sets of terms intended to describe?” we may answer tentatively that they are intended to describe experience of any possible kind where ignorance (that is lack of personal realization of the Truths) is present.

But being (bhava)* is a member of the paticca-samuppāda as arising which contains ignorance. Being is only invertible by ignorance.
The destruction of ignorance destroys the illusion of being. When ignorance is no more, then consciousness no longer can attribute being (pahoti) at all. But that is not all; for when consciousness is predicated of one who has no more ignorance then it is no more indicatable
(as it was indicated in MN 22). **

*to translate (even to interpret to oneself) bhava by ‘becoming’ is an opiate that leaves the illusion of ‘being’ untreated.

**"When a monk's mind is thus freed, O monks, neither the gods with Indra, nor the gods with Brahma, nor the gods with the Lord of Creatures (Pajaapati), when searching will find on what the consciousness of one thus gone (tathagata) is based. Why is that? One who has thus gone is not to be found# here and now, so I say.

#The reason why the Tathāgata is not to be found (even here and now) is that he is rūpa-, vedanā-, saññā-, sankhāra-, and viññāna-sankhāya vimutto (ibid. 1 ), i.e. free from reckoning as matter, feeling, perception, determinations, or consciousness. This is precisely not the case with the puthujjana, who, in this sense, actually and in truth is to be found: With ignorance as condition ... being.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain — shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom?”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .”
― Nanamoli Thera

“That is mere escapism” they say—but if they were suddenly to believe there really was an escape, are we to suppose they would not take it?”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Two demons: one who insists that what is to be inferred by verbal processes must correspond to experience; and one who 'insists that what cannot be arrived at by verbal processes cannot correspond to experience.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“What we are not at all interested in may be what we are.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“The more I examine and observe experience (What else can one do? Build castles?), the more I find that I can only say of consciousness (and in this I find a notable confirmation in the Pali Suttas) that it seems only describable (knowable) “in terms of what it arises dependent upon” (i.e. seeing-cum-seen … mind-knowing-cum-mind, known or mind cum-ideas), that is, negatively as to itself. And so, instead of being said to appear, it should rather be called that negativeness or “decompression of being” which makes the appearance of life, movement, behaviour, etc., and their opposites, possible in things and persons. But while life, etc. cannot be or not be without the cooperation of the negative presence of consciousness, which gives room for them (and itself) to “come to be” in this way (gaining its own peculiar form of negative being, perhaps from them)—the only possible way of being—they are, by ignorance, simultaneously individualized in actual experience. Unindividualized experience cannot, I think, be called experience at all. Thus there appears the positive illusion also of individual consciousness: “illusion” because its individuality is borrowed from the individualness of (1) its percepts, and (2) the body seen as its perceiving instrument.

Unindividualized perception cannot, any more, I think, be called perception at all. The supposed individuality of consciousness (without which it is properly inconceivable) is derived from that of its concomitants. This illusory individualization of consciousness, this mirage, manifests itself in the sense both of “my consciousness” and of “consciousness that is not mine” (as e.g. in the sensation of being seen when one fancies or actually finds one is caught, say, peeping through a keyhole, and from which the abstract notion of universal consciousness develops). The example shows that the experience of being seen does not necessarily mean that another’s consciousness is seeing one, as one may have been mistaken in one’s fancy owing to a guilty sense (though the experience was just as real at the time), before one found no one was there. To repeat: my supposed consciousness seems only distinguishable from the supposed consciousness that is not mine on the basis of the particular non-consciousness (i.e. material body, etc.) through which its negativity is manifested and with which it is always and inevitably associated in some way. It is impossible, I think, to overemphasize the importance of this fact.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Forgetting is a very useful kind of ignorance: it wipes the bad sums off our slates.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“To be is to be contingent: nothing of which it can be said that "it is" can be alone and independent. But being is a member of paticca-samuppada as arising which contains ignorance. Being is only invertible by ignorance.

Destruction of ignorance destroys the illusion of being. When ignorance is no more, than consciousness no longer can attribute being (pahoti) at all. But that is not all for when consciousness is predicated of one who has no ignorance than it is no more indicatable (as it was indicated in M Sutta 22).”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Sati—sampajanna ("Mindfulness and clear comprehension") should be examined carefully from the point of view of the centipede who could not walk when she thought about how she moved her limbs. And also from the point of view of absorption in, say artistic creation and detached observation of it. Absorption in piano playing or painting seems to be "successful" but detached observation or enjoyment of "my playing" or "my painting" seems to have the centipede effect. What are the facts here and what is the lesson to be drawn?”
― Nanamoli Thera

“If you are not master of the facts they will beat you down with opinions. If you are not master of the void they will beat you down with facts.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Odd that „now and here” is „nowhere”.”
― Nanamoli Thera

“Where would I be (and what would happen to me), if I could see all round me and above and below at once ?”
― Nanamoli Thera