Michael Trup

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm – yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

“The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life

“Capgras syndrome is a condition in which sufferers become convinced that those they know well are imposters. In Klüver-Bucy syndrome the victim develops urges to eat and fornicate indiscriminately (to the understandable dismay of loved ones).46 Perhaps the most bizarre of all is Cotard delusion, in which the sufferer believes he is dead and cannot be convinced otherwise.47”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants