82 overcoming the worldthrough indiff erence will sometimes work. However, it will work only
at the cost of dimming vitality. It deals with death by anticipating it in
contained and reassuring form.
Sometimes the spell will fail to work. Life embodied within us, in
the individual self and the dying organism, not in universal and death-
less mind, reasserts itself. We experience boredom: the weight of un-
used capacity, the intimation of undeveloped life. We fi nd the spell de-
generating into crankiness, under the principle of addiction: the
fi xation on par tic u lar formulas or routines from which, in vain, we try
to win a defi nitive serenity. Such is the futile attempt that shadows all
existence but appears here, in concentrated form, as an eff ort to make
the limited yield the unlimited.
Th e followers of the overcoming of the world will deny that they wage
a war against life. Th ey will claim, in accordance with their vision, that
their road to salvation enables us to get off the treadmill of insatiable
and frustrated desire and allows us to live in the present, open to the
world and to the people around us. If each moment and each experi-
ence are to be valued as steps to what could or should succeed them,
then we shall never live for now. We shall postpone the fuller posses-
sion of life. Our anxious striving will make us less receptive to the
people as well as the phenomena within reach. We shall have denied
ourselves the self- possession that is the condition for the enhancement
of vitality.
However, we cannot be fully alive without engaging the world. We
cannot engage it without struggling with it, in imagination as well as in
practice. We cannot wage this struggle with conviction unless we have
reason to take our phenomenal and historical experience seriously
rather than to discount the reality of its sources and objects.
Th e overcoming of the world confl icts with these requirements at
two decisive points. It confl icts with them, fi rst, in its vision: the denial
of the ultimate reality of time and therefore of history as well as of phe-
nomenal and individual distinction. It contradicts them, second, in its
proposal for how we should live our lives by urging on us a search for
serenity through invulnerability. Such a search turns us away from the
engagements required for the enhancement of life. It promises serenity,
but delivers a foretaste of death.