Here is the way in which I can, in practice, make progress…
““Here is the way in which I can, in practice, make progress in the annihilation of my absurd and deplorable ‘hopes’. I am not going to set myself to organise the failure of my enterprises; to hope to succeed in ruining myself instead of hoping to succeed in enriching myself would not change anything in any way. No, I let my instinctive and emotive life go on as usual. But my understanding, initiated into the reality of things, works in parallel. At the moment when I suffer because my hopes come up against the resistance of the world I remind myself that my old successes have never brought me that absolute accomplishment in which I had placed my hopes; all my surface satisfactions, sometimes so intense, were in the last instance deceptions in depth, that is to say in truth. Profiting by this experience, correctly interpreted, of my fallacious successes I think now of the new successes which I am in process of coveting; I imagine their concrete realisation, and feel afresh their vanity. The bad moments, the moments of anguish, are the best for this work; the suffering felt by the organism-as-a-totality curbs the illusions which show us satori in the opposite direction from that in which it awaits us. On””
About This Quote
This interpretation was drafted with AI assistance. It is one reading of the quote, not the author's own explanation.
Recognizing that past successes are fleeting, using suffering to reassess goals and pursue authentic fulfillment.
In simple terms: Success is temporary; pain reveals truth.
Reevaluate aims during hardship.
Themes
Mood
Type
When to use this quote
- career transition
- creative projects
- personal crisis
- spiritual practice
Key Concepts
Questions to Reflect On
- What illusions have you uncovered?
- How can pain guide future choices?
Suffering alone may not lead to clarity without deliberate reflection.