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Alexander Kaplan's avatar

"The ultimate reality that saints and mystics perceive directly is that we are all one will. Your neighbor is yourself. Your enemy is you. As Schopenhauer puts it, 'Tormentor and tormented are one.' From this flows the will-denying, ascetic precepts in the Christian and Indian traditions."

It's funny, I am a very unenlightened person whose depression manifests as both despair and irritability. I often feel like a paper in the wind being whipped from one desire to the next. But there's one rather odd exception.

Traffic normally makes people furious, but when I'm driving alongside others, I think of us not as individuals in competition, but as participants on the same team. It's not "You cut me off" or "I wish I had a green light." Instead it's "We're all part of a single city-wide traffic pattern trying to get where we're going without being killed."

This is the closest I can come to "Your neighbor *is* yourself," ha. I've always read about Schopenhauer but never read him. I especially like the idea of art as representation without will: something, that, because it isn't reality, must be experienced only as an ends, never as a means.

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DANIEL RASHID's avatar

“You cannot win and you cannot lose if you do not play the game.” -Marla Daniels, from The Wire

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