the everyday sublime

stephen batchelor

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.

It means to embrace suffering and conflict, rather than to shy away from them, to cultivate the radical attention (yonisomanasikara) that contemplates the tragic, changing, empty, and impersonal dimensions of life, rather than succumbing to fantasies of self-glorification or self-loathing.

Stephen Batchelor, The Everyday Sublime