markings

DIARY FRAGMENT

‘There is not history but that of the soul, no peace but that of the soul.’

Clad in this self, the creation of irresponsible and ignorant persons, meaningless honours and catalogued acts – strapped into the straitjacket of the immediate. To step out of all this, and stand naked on the precipice of dawn – acceptable, invulnerable, free: in the Light, with the Light, of the Light. Whole, real in the Whole. Out of myself as a stumbling block, into myself as ful lment.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, 28-04-‘57

You are not the oil, you are not the air – merely the point of combustion, the ash point where the light is born. You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as a lens does. If you seek yourself, ‘your rights’, you prevent the oil and air from meeting in the ame, you rob the lens of its transparency. Sanctity – either to be the Light or to be self-e aced in the Light, so that it may be born, self-e aced so that it may be focused or spread wider.

You will know Life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, 28-07-‘57