The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that love reveals the illusory nature of existence and ourselves, highlighting the shadows we inhabit.
Adolfo Bioy Casares reflects on the idea that our physical forms and the world around us are merely illusions, and it is through love that we gain insight into this unreality. Love, being described as a privileged perception, allows us to understand not only the ephemeral nature of the world but also the impermanent quality of our own identities. In this sense, both love and reality are connections to a deeper understanding of existence as we navigate through shadows, indicating that much of what we perceive is an illusion.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality, one might cite this quote to emphasize the importance of love in understanding our existence.
Some individuals may perceive their losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in their back, others as the unflattering contour of their body, others as constant fatigue, yet others as an unrelentingly threatening environment. Those over forty may call it old age. And yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structure, as well as others, that it has been ignored: they are off balance, they are at war with gravity.
You don't 'have' a life, you 'are' life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
The test of Ahimsa is absence of jealousy.
The evils of the body are murder, theft, and adultery; of the tongue, lying, slander, abuse and idle talk; of the mind, covetousness, hatred and error.
Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.