Welcome to the vita contemplativa

Dear Reader:

I welcome you here to a letting-go of your self, to an abandon of the pursuit of intentions, and to an attempt at a transfiguration of your relationship to the objective, which is the world you inhabit day to day in your striving. I welcome you to a place where you can hopefully abandon all hope, all ambition, all intent, all striving and all making, and rise instead to the pure contemplation of things without purpose, without your self in them. I welcome you to perceive and contemplate a painting, look at a photograph, read a poem, listen to a musical composition, in every case as if they were pure objects independent of your self, which is what they in fact are, thus releasing you from the world of will, strife and desire, to a state of total detachment, with no egoistic purpose. I invite you, in short, to abandon your will for the sake of the aesthetic. Come with me and walk towards this objective, and I shall have achieved my goal.