Havel - Mere Spirituality 4

"Orientation towards Being as a state of mind can also be understood as faith: a person oriented toward Being intrinsically believes in life, in the world, in morality, in the meaning of things and in himself.  His relationship to life is informed by hope, wonder, humility and a spontaneous respect for its mysteries.  He does not judge the meaning of his efforts merely by their manifest successes, but first of all by their 'worth in themselves' (i.e. by their worth against the background of the absolute horizon).  In this general sense, however, believers are all those who do not surrender to their existence-in-the-world, regardless of whether they acknowledge a God, a religion or an ideology, and even regardless of whether they admit or deny that there is a transcendental dimension to their way of existence-in-the-world.  The state of mind that has given into existence-in-the-world is, on the contrary, a state of  total resignation (regardless of how it disguises itself).  Somewhere in the depths of his spirit, man feels that nothing matters.  He is concerned for nothing but his purely 'worldly' interests, which are his sole responsibility, and he behaves morally only insofar as, and only when and where, it is expedient to do so, when his actions are visible, for instance."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel - Mere Spirituality 3

"The experience of Being is not merely an idea or an opinion: it is a state of the spirit and of the heart, the key to life and to one's orientation of life, to one's way of existence; it is not merely one experience among many: it is the experience of all experiences, their veiled starting point and their veiled end.  It is a genuinely human journey, arduous and beautiful for what it entails - all the way from the injunction to pay attention to the incorruptible voice that is everywhere calling us to responsibility...to that highest delight, as we experience it fully and completely in those fleeting moments when the meaning of Being is brought home to us, when we find ourselves on the very 'edge of finitude' - face-to-face with the miracle of the world and the miracle of our own 'I.'"

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Restraint

I fear a Man of frugal speech -
I fear a Silent Man -
Haranguer - I can overtake -
Or Babbler - entertain -

But He who weigheth - while the Rest -
Expend their furthest pound -
Of this Man - I am wary -
I fear that He is Grand -



 Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 663

Havel - Mere Spirituality 2

"Perhaps it is sufficiently clear that the experience of Being, as I mean it here, is not just a philosophical thesis that can be accepted or rejected with no further existential implications....By this experience I mean something essentially different and more profound: an intrinsic longing to arouse, through the conduct of one's existence in the world, one's own hidden, slumbering, forgotten and betrayed being and through this being - which is anchored in the integrity of 'absolute Being' and separated from the 'I' that is constituted from it, and to which that 'I' is intrinsically oriented - to touch once again that fullness and integrity of Being, at a distance, perhaps, but fully aware this time; through that "counterpoint" of one's own being and that of the world, to reach toward the principle unity of Being; to accept this unity and this 'uniqueness' as a binding system of order and the final vanishing point of all of its existence in the world, and to relate to it as the absolute horizon of all one's horizons."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel - Mere Spirituality 1

Some attempt by Havel to put his mystical experience into words -

"But what is, this rather cryptic 'Being'?  I've been using the term for too long now not to feel that the time has come to throw a little light on it....First of all, then: my only truly certain and indisputable experience is the experience of Being in the simplest sense of the word, that is, the experience that something is….The first layer...includes all my direct experience of the world and myself as they manifest themselves to me on various levels of perception.  The second layer - far less direct and vivid, yet incomparably more profound and essential - is the experience of "Being" in the sense that I am using it here....Essentially it is an assumption (or a feeling? a conviction? a certainty? a faith?) that everything I experience on the first level is not, somehow, exhausted by itself, is not 'just that' with 'nothing more to it,' but rather is...expressions of something infinitely more consistent, absolute and absolutely self-defining.  There is here an undeniable intimation not only that 'there is something behind it all,' but also that somewhere in the fathomless depths...of everything that exists there is something beyond which there are no more 'beyonds'...."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Much Madness is Divinest Sense

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightway dangerous -
and handled with a Chain


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 620