Traditional Quotes and Symbols
The decay of the body, in all its crudity, is considered as helpful to progress because, rather than depress the mind, it should awaken a detached consciousness capable of imagining with perfect calm and dispassion the fate of one’s own body after death.
Contemplatio mortis: Here one has to imagine a corpse in all the phases of its decomposition: stiff, then swollen up and rotting, then stripped of flesh with only the tendons left, then without either flesh or tendons, then as scattered bones, as bones heaped up and mixed with others, and finally as bones rotting away and as bones crumbled to dust.
With this, one has to comprehend: ”My body, too, has a like nature, so will it become, it cannot avoid coming this fate.”
These similes should awaken particularly vivid feelings without, however, arousing Hamlet-like reflections nor those of the Semitic minstrel with vanitas vanitatum.
The decay of the body, in all its crudity, is here considered as helpful to progress because, rather than depress the mind, it should awaken a detached consciousness capable of imagining with perfect calm and dispassion the fate of one’s own body after death. It is, once again, a matter of consolidating the sidereal, extra-samsaric element.
Should these meditations result in a feeling of pessimistic depression, of desolation, then they have been quite wrongly carried out.
They are performed correctly when they result in a state of mind where one can consider a disaster overtaking one’s body, and even physical death itself, as though another’s body were concerned.
This state may even transform itself into a force capable, in certain circumstances, of acting positively on the organism.
Thus the texts speak of a sick ascetic who recovered his strength and overcame his disease at the moment of understanding and apprehending the teaching about the perfect meditation on the body.
It is said: “If the body is ill, the mind shall not be ill — thus have you to train yourselves. The Ariya are not obsessed by the idea: 'I am materiality, materiality is mine, materiality is myself’, and for this reason they do not change when the material body changes and grows old, or when the same fate overtakes the other constituents which make up the personality.”
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Julius Evola: The Doctrine of Awakening - Part II., Chapter 4. - Sidereal Awareness - The Wounds Close - The contemplation of the body (excerpt)
The decay of the body, in all its crudity, is considered as helpful to progress because, rather than depress the mind, it should awaken a detached consciousness capable of imagining with perfect calm and dispassion the fate of one’s own body after death.
Contemplatio mortis: Here one has to imagine a corpse in all the phases of its decomposition: stiff, then swollen up and rotting, then stripped of flesh with only the tendons left, then without either flesh or tendons, then as scattered bones, as bones heaped up and mixed with others, and finally as bones rotting away and as bones crumbled to dust.
With this, one has to comprehend: ”My body, too, has a like nature, so will it become, it cannot avoid coming this fate.”
These similes should awaken particularly vivid feelings without, however, arousing Hamlet-like reflections nor those of the Semitic minstrel with vanitas vanitatum.
The decay of the body, in all its crudity, is here considered as helpful to progress because, rather than depress the mind, it should awaken a detached consciousness capable of imagining with perfect calm and dispassion the fate of one’s own body after death. It is, once again, a matter of consolidating the sidereal, extra-samsaric element.
Should these meditations result in a feeling of pessimistic depression, of desolation, then they have been quite wrongly carried out.
They are performed correctly when they result in a state of mind where one can consider a disaster overtaking one’s body, and even physical death itself, as though another’s body were concerned.
This state may even transform itself into a force capable, in certain circumstances, of acting positively on the organism.
Thus the texts speak of a sick ascetic who recovered his strength and overcame his disease at the moment of understanding and apprehending the teaching about the perfect meditation on the body.
It is said: “If the body is ill, the mind shall not be ill — thus have you to train yourselves. The Ariya are not obsessed by the idea: 'I am materiality, materiality is mine, materiality is myself’, and for this reason they do not change when the material body changes and grows old, or when the same fate overtakes the other constituents which make up the personality.”
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Julius Evola: The Doctrine of Awakening - Part II., Chapter 4. - Sidereal Awareness - The Wounds Close - The contemplation of the body (excerpt)