Astride the grave

Death is not the opposite of life. It’s the opposite of birth. We’re born astride the grave, as that hard-nosed existentialist Samuel Beckett put it. Anyway, life is non-dual. It has no opposite.

Who are you? What time is it?

We prevent ourselves from knowing ourselves with thoughts of who we think we are. ‘I am this. I am that.’ Self-concepts are entirely time-bound. Nothing more effectively obscures the real than the clock. Freedom is the recognition of our timelessness. Never born. Never died.

The full catastrophe

The real calamity is not that we die but that we are born. There is no school of truth. We are fated to find out the hard way that life has no opposite.

Everything

Everything begins and ends. We’re good with beginnings, not so good with endings.

Vincent’s boots

Facts are simple, essential and indifferent. Opinions are clamorous, contradictory and attention-seeking.