Meaning

by Jag Singh

Essential unmodified excerpts on Stoicism, Nihilism, Hedonism, Existentialism, and Absurdism from classical books and articles. These philosophies divide first over a single question: whether meaning is given. They divide again over how to respond to the answer. Stoicism aligns with meaning, nihilism declares its loss, hedonism purchases it in pleasure, existentialism creates it through choice, and absurdism rebels against its absence. Beyond them all, language itself reaches its limit. What remains cannot be argued, only lived:

Serenity (Resignation) of Stoicism

Meditations, AD 170, by Marcus Aurelius

Maximus
Self-control and resistance to distractions.
Optimism in adversity - especially illness.
A personality in balance: dignity and grace together.
Doing your job without whining.
Other people's certainty that what he said was what he thought, and what he did was done without malice.
Never taken aback or apprehensive. Neither rash nor hesitant - or bewildered, or at a loss. Not obsequious - but not aggressive or paranoid either.
Generosity, charity, honesty.
The sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it.
That no one could ever have felt patronized by him - or in a position to patronize him.
A sense of humor.

Body. Soul. Mind.
Sensations: the body.
Desires: the soul.
Reasoning: the mind.
To experience sensations: even grazing beasts do that. To let your desires control you: even wild animals do that - and rutting humans, and tyrants (from Phalaris to Nero...).
To make your mind your guide to what seems best: even people who deny the gods do that. Even people who betray their country. Even people who do <...> behind closed doors.
If all the rest is common coin, then what is unique to the good man?
To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of false beliefs. Instead, to preserve it faithfully, by calmly obeying God - saying nothing untrue, doing nothing unjust. And if the others don't acknowledge it - this life lived with simplicity, humility, cheerfulness - he doesn't resent them for it, and isn't deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.

The Serenity Prayer, 1933, by Reinhold Niebuhr

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters, 2014, by Ethan Kross et al.

During the summer of 2010, LeBron James, a future Hall-of- Fame basketball player, faced a tough decision. Should he stay with the small market team that nurtured his career from its inception, or move to a larger city market? Shortly after making his choice (he joined the larger market team), he described his decision-making process in an interview noting, “One thing I didn't want to do was make an emotional decision. I wanted to do what's best for LeBron James and to do what makes LeBron James happy” (Greenberg, 2010).

Immediately after James' infamous interview, Internet message boards were abuzz with people questioning his sanity. Although such reactions are understandable - we are not accustomed to people referring to themselves using their own name - the current findings suggest that doing so promotes self-distancing (Studies 1a and 1b); enhances people's ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under social stress (Studies 2 and 3); and leads them to appraise social-anxiety-provoking events in more challenging and less threatening terms (Studies 4 and 5). They also demonstrate that the self-regulatory effects of this process extend to people regardless of their dispositional vulnerability to social anxiety (Study 6).

Antecedent- and Response-Focused Emotion Regulation: Divergent Consequences for Experience, Expression, and Physiology, 1998, by James Gross

In the complex social world in which we live, strong emotions occasionally may be unwelcome (e.g., when they compromise task performance or betray secret preferences). At such times, we attempt to regulate our emotions, and I have suggested that we may do so in two quite different ways. The first is to reappraise our circumstances so as to alter their emotional impact. This study has shown that such reappraisals decrease expressive behavior and subjective experience. The second is to inhibit emotion-expressive behavior once the emotion is already under way. This study has shown that such emotional suppression decreases expressive behavior, but does not affect subjective experience, and actually increases certain aspects of physiological responding. With these divergent consequences in mind, I have speculated that certain forms of antecedent-foe used emotion regulation (e.g., reappraisal) often may be better for one's health than certain forms of response-focused emotion regulation (e.g., suppression).

Stoner, 1965, by John Williams

Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him - how many years ago? - by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

Mercilessly he saw his life as it must appear to another.

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that... He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality.

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure - as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.

There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

Freedom (Abyss) of Nihilism

The Gay Science, 1882, by Friedrich Nietzsche

The madman. - Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, "I'm looking for God! I'm looking for God!" Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? - Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where is God?" he cried; "I'll tell you! We have killed him - you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren't we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing at us? Hasn't it got colder? Isn't night and more night coming again and again? Don't lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? - Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!"

"How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed - and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!"

Crime and Punishment, 1866, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I simply hinted that an 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).

I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.

The Causes and Consequences of a Need for Self-Esteem, 1986, by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski and Sheldon Solomon

Becker (1962) proposed that the need for self-esteem is uniquely human, and exists because of our capacities for symbolic, temporal, and self-reflective thought. Although these attributes have greatly enhanced our ability to survive in a wide variety of environments, they have also led to some uniquely human problems (see M. B. Smith, 1978). Specifically, we have the capacity to wonder why we exist and to consider the possibility that the universe is an uncontrollable, absurd setting in which the only inevitability is our own ongoing decay toward absolute annihilation, which, to make matters worse, could occur at any moment because of any one of a variety of chance events.

A Farewell to Arms, 1929, by Ernest Hemingway

I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a doll's eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn't there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation. Although that ceased when the carabiniere put his hands on my collar. I would like to have had the uniform off although I did not care much about the outward forms. I had taken off the stars, but that was for convenience. It was no point of honor. I was not against them. I was through. I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they deserved it. But it was not my show any more and I wished this bloody train would get to Mestre and I would eat and stop thinking. I would have to stop.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

So that was it. The baby was dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way they did in the room with him? They supposed he would come around and start breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized. But what if he never breathed at all. He hadn't. He had never been alive. Except in Catherine. I'd felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn't for a week. Maybe he was choked all the time. Poor little kid. I wished the hell I'd been choked like that. No I didn't. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

I sat outside in the hail. Everything was gone inside of me. I did not think. I could not think. I knew she was going to die and I prayed that she would not. Don't let her die. Oh, God, please don't let her die. I'll do anything for you if you won't let her die. Please, please, please, dear God, don't let her die. Dear God, don't let her die. Please, please, please don't let her die. God please make her not die. I'll do anything you say if you don't let her die. You took the baby but don't let her die. That was all right but don't let her die. Please, please, dear God, don't let her die.

It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Pleasure (Ennui) of Hedonism

Letter to Menoeceus: Avoid Pain, 300 BC, by Epicurus

Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we always come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.

Crime and Punishment, 1866, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In this vice at least there is something permanent, founded indeed upon nature and not dependent on fantasy, something present in the blood like an ever-burning ember, for ever setting one on fire and maybe, not to be quickly extinguished, even with years. You'll agree it's an occupation of a sort.

I agree, that it is a disease like everything that exceeds moderation. And, of course, in this one must exceed moderation. But in the first place, everybody does so in one way or another, and in the second place, of course, one ought to be moderate and prudent, however mean it may be, but what am I to do? If I hadn't this, I might have to shoot myself. I am ready to admit that a decent man ought to put up with being bored, but yet...

An Opponent-Process Theory of Motivation, 1974, by Richard Solomon and John Corbit

Selected Examples of Hedonic-Affective phenomena

After repeated dosages of opiates over several weeks, State A begins to weaken, and at the same time State B begins to intensify and takes longer to return to baseline. State A' is called "normal" rather than euphoric. The rush is no longer experienced. Yet, State B' is more physiologically disturbing than B was, and lasts much longer than did State B. The craving aspect of State B' is now extremely intense, aversive, and enduring. It is called abstinence agony. It can be months before B' returns to baseline. Perhaps it never really does. It is a ghastly experience.

The repeated use of some drugs results in the behavioral phenomenon of addiction. People find themselves craving a substance in which they previously had little interest.

Addiction is not viewed as an abnormality. Instead, it is the inevitable consequence of a normally functioning system which opposes affective or hedonic states. We assume, for example, that love is an addiction phenomenon characterized by habituation to the presence of the loved one and intensified aversion in the absence of the loved one. In the same vein, we assume that imprinting in precocial birds is an addiction phenomenon. In the case of aversive stimulation, we assume that masochistic phenomena are the consequence of a normally functioning system which opposes affect. These phenomena are characterized by habituation to the presence of the feared or unpleasant event and intensified pleasure after the termination of that event.

Letter to Menoeceus: Avoid Pain, 300 BC, by Epicurus

When we say, therefore, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883, by Friedrich Nietzsche

Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star.
Alas, the time of the most contemptible man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself.
Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small.
His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink.
They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth.
One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.
Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds with caution.
A fool who still stumbles over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams.
And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death.
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment.
But one is careful lest the entertainment be too strenuous.
One no longer becomes poor or rich: both are too burdensome.
Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink.
One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision.
One still quarrels, but is soon reconciled - otherwise it upsets the stomach.
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink.

Responsibility (Angst) of Existentialism

Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946, by Jean-Paul Sartre

...if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence - a being whose existence comes before its essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept of it. That being is man, or, as Heidegger put it, the human reality. What do we mean here by "existence precedes essence"? We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism.

Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject to choose what he will be, and, on the other, man's inability to transcend human subjectivity. The fundamental meaning of existentialism resides in the latter. When we say that man chooses himself, not only do we mean that each of us must choose himself, but also that in choosing himself, he is choosing for all men. In fact, in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for our whole era. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we might have supposed, because it concerns all mankind.

This allows us to understand the meaning behind some rather lofty-sounding words such as "anguish," "abandonment," and "despair." As you are about to see, it is all quite simple. First, what do we mean by anguish? Existentialists like to say that man is in anguish. This is what they mean: a man who commits himself, and who realizes that he is not only the individual that he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility. True, many people do not appear especially anguished, but we maintain that they are merely hiding their anguish or trying not to face it. Certainly, many believe that their actions involve no one but themselves, and were we to ask them, "But what if everyone acted that way?" they would shrug their shoulders and reply, "But everyone does not act that way." In truth, however, one should always ask oneself, "What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?" The only way to evade that disturbing thought is through some kind of bad faith. Someone who lies to himself and excuses himself by saying "Everyone does not act that way" is struggling with a bad conscience, for the act of lying implies attributing a universal value to lies.

This is what "abandonment" implies: it is we, ourselves, who decide who we are to be. Such abandonment entails anguish. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

As for "despair," it has a very simple meaning. It means that we must limit ourselves to reckoning only with those things that depend on our will, or on the set of probabilities that enable action. From the moment that the possibilities I am considering cease to be rigorously engaged by my action, I must no longer take interest in them, for no God or greater design can bend the world and its possibilities to my will. In the final analysis, when Descartes said "Conquer yourself rather than the world," he actually meant the same thing: we should act without hope.

Behavioral Study of Obedience, 1963, by Stanley Milgram

The experimenter instructs the subject to,
start from 15 volts and increase the shock level one step each time the learner gives a wrong answer.

DISTRIBUTION OF BREAKOFF POINTS

Verbal designation and voltage indication Number of subjects for whom this was maximum shock
Slight Shock
15
30
45
60
0
0
0
0
Moderate Shock
75
90
105
120
0
0
0
0
Strong Shock
135
150
165
180
0
0
0
0
Very Strong Shock
195
210
225
240
0
0
0
0
Intense Shock
255
270
285
300
0
0
0
5
Extreme Intensity Shock
315
330
345
360
4
2
1
1
Danger: Severe Shock
375
390
405
420
1
0
0
0
XXX
435
450
0
26

... a mature and initially poised businessman entered the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: "Oh God, let's stop it." And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.

Nausea, 1938, by Jean-Paul Sartre

Now when I say "I," it seems hollow to me. I can't manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one.

There is knowledge of the consciousness. It sees through itself, peaceful and empty between the walls, freed from the man who inhabited it, monstrous because empty.

To think that there are idiots who get consolation from the fine arts. Like my Aunt Bigeois: "Chopin's Preludes were such a help to me when your poor uncle died." And the concert halls overflow with humiliated, outraged people who close their eyes and try to turn their pale faces into receiving antennas. They imagine that the sounds flow into them, sweet, nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like Werther; they think that beauty is compassionate to them. Mugs.

Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally, I'd like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity.

Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I wait, stooping, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: "That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started." And I might succeed - in the past, nothing but the past - in accepting myself.

Revolt (Futility) of Absurdism

The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942, by Albert Camus

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

A Commentary on The Stranger, 1947, by Jean-Paul Sartre

The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusion and without resignation, either. The absurd man asserts himself by revolting. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the "divine irresponsibility" of a man sentenced to die. Since God does not exist and we all must die, everything is permissible. One experience is as good as another, so what matters is simply to acquire as many of them as possible. "For the absurd man, the ideal is the ever-conscious spirit." Confronted with this "quantitative ethic," all values collapse. Projected into this world, the absurd man, rebellious and irresponsible, has "nothing to prove." He is innocent, as innocent as Somerset Maugham's primitive tribesmen before the clergyman comes to teach them Good and Evil, what is permitted and what is forbidden. For this man, everything is permissible. He is as innocent as Prince Mishkin, who "lives in a perpetual present, tinged with smiles and indifference." Innocent in every sense of the word, an "idiot," too, if you like.

Man's Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos, 2008, by Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Drazen Prelec

In the Meaningful condition, after the subject would build each Bionicle, he would place it on the desk in front of him, and the experimenter would give him a new box with new Bionicle pieces. Hence, as the session progressed, the completed Bionicles would accumulate on the desk.

In the Sisyphus condition, there were only two boxes. After the subject completed the first Bionicle and began working on the second, the experimenter would disassemble the first Bionicle into pieces and place the pieces back into the box. Hence, the Bionicles could not accumulate; after the second Bionicle, the subject was always rebuilding previously assembled pieces that had been taken apart by the experimenter.

Despite the fact that the physical task requirements and the wage schedule were identical in the two conditions, the subjects in the Meaningful condition built significantly more Bionicles than those in the Sisyphus condition.

The Trial, 1925, by Franz Kafka

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

"Don't deceive yourself," said the priest. "How am I deceiving myself?" asked K. "You're deceiving yourself about the court," said the priest, "in the introductory texts to the Law it says of this deception: Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can't grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he'll be allowed to enter later. 'It's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not now.' Since the gate to the Law stands open as always, and the doorkeeper steps aside, the man bends down to look through the gate into the interior. When the doorkeeper sees this he laughs and says: 'If you're so drawn to it, go ahead and try to enter, even though I've forbidden it. But bear this in mind: I'm powerful. And I'm only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, however, stand doorkeepers each more powerful than the one before. The mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear.' The man from the country has not anticipated such difficulties; the Law should be accessible to anyone at any time, he thinks, but as he now examines the doorkeeper in his fur coat more closely, his large, sharply pointed nose, his long, thin, black tartar's beard, he decides he would prefer to wait until he receives permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. He sits there for days and years. He asks time and again to be admitted and wearies the doorkeeper with his entreaties. The doorkeeper often conducts brief interrogations, inquiring about his home and many other matters, but he asks such questions indifferently, as great men do, and in the end he always tells him he still can't admit him. The man, who has equipped himself well for his journey, uses everything he has, no matter how valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. And the doorkeeper accepts everything, but as he does so he says: 'I'm taking this just so you won't think you've neglected something.' Over the many years, the man observes the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets the other doorkeepers and this first one seems to him the only obstacle to his admittance to the Law. He curses his unhappy fate, loudly during the first years, later, as he grows older, merely grumbling to himself. He turns childish, and since he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's collar over his years of study, he asks the fleas too to help him change the doorkeeper's mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he no longer knows whether it's really getting darker around him or if his eyes are merely deceiving him. And yet in the darkness he now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law. He doesn't have much longer to live now. Before he dies, everything he has experienced over the years coalesces in his mind into a single question he has never asked the doorkeeper. He motions to him, since he can no longer straighten his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend down to him, for the difference in size between them has altered greatly to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now,' asks the doorkeeper, 'you're insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to reach the Law,' says the man, 'how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one but me has requested admittance.' The doorkeeper sees that the man is nearing his end, and in order to reach his failing hearing, he roars at him: 'No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I'm going to go and shut it now.'"

Conclusion

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974, by Robert M. Pirsig

"Well, you talked all night about it. You said at the top of the mountain we'd see everything. You said you were going to meet me there."

I think he's been dreaming. "How could I meet you there when I'm already with you?"

This is not a direct excerpt from the book:
The only Zen you find on top of the mountain is the Zen you bring up there.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921, by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.