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RE-INCARNATION.
871
it is then that our actions are truly free. Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more the feeling is deep and the coincidence complote, the more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intellectu. ality by transcending it. The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious of our progress in pure duration, the more we feel the different parts of our being enter into each other, and our whole personality concentrate in a point, or rather a sharp edge, pressed against the future and cutting into it unceasingly. It is in this that life and action are free."
This is further confirmed by Schopenhauer whu observes The World as Will and Idea) :
“All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. ... Therefore so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we can never have lasting happiness nor peace. But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives, Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will ; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.... Whenever it discloses itself suddenly to our view, it almost always succeeds in delivering us, though it may be only for a moment, from subjectivity, from the slavery of the will, and in raising us to the state of pure knowing. This is why the man who is tormented by passion, or want, or caro, is so suddenly revived, cheered, and restored by a single free glance into nature: the storm of passion, the pressure of desire and fear, and all the miseries of willing aro then at once, and in a marvellous manner, calmed and appeased. For at the moment at which, freed from will, we give
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