I read Gravity and Grace, and I must say I found her philosophy of "embracing the environment to the point of disappearing" to be going too far, to the point of willing her own death.
Here is the excerpt that made me feel most awkward, translated with Google:
"That I disappear so that these things that I see become, because they will no longer be things that I see, perfectly beautiful. I in no way desire that this created world should no longer be sensitive to me, but that it should be sensitive to something else than me. To me he cannot tell his secret which is too high. Let me go, and the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets. Seeing a landscape as it is when I'm not there...
When I am somewhere, I defile the silence of heaven and earth with my breathing and the beating of my heart."
This seems like a very Jansenist view of the world, and it seems very dark to me.
Anyone would interpret this excerpt differently, and help me understand it better?
Coming from a meditative practice, I would interpret it in line with her "attention is the purest form of prayer."
You can be so immersed in experiencing the world that you forget everything except the experience itself. And there is great beauty and love and freedom in that.
The flip side of viewing the self as "nonexistent" is to see the world as an extension of self: no-self and Big Self are the same phenomenological experience, in a way. Deep sense of connection.
I have not read Gravity and Grace, should start it by tomorrow! But that is the perspective that is drawing me to her work.
Here is the excerpt that made me feel most awkward, translated with Google: "That I disappear so that these things that I see become, because they will no longer be things that I see, perfectly beautiful. I in no way desire that this created world should no longer be sensitive to me, but that it should be sensitive to something else than me. To me he cannot tell his secret which is too high. Let me go, and the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets. Seeing a landscape as it is when I'm not there... When I am somewhere, I defile the silence of heaven and earth with my breathing and the beating of my heart."
This seems like a very Jansenist view of the world, and it seems very dark to me. Anyone would interpret this excerpt differently, and help me understand it better?