2 thoughts on “Luis de Miranda”

1. I’m loving your book! I carry it with me like a treasure. I have so many questions and I’m only on page 35 doing my best to savor every page.

   I am wondering if you could explain Bardo’s notion of ‘self-sabotage’ and why does desire/urges disrupt ‘grace’. And what is grace to Bardo? Thank you for touching my soul with this work. I feel you rose to what Kafka alluded to, that authentic literature is like a pick ax to our frozen souls.

   Affably yours,

   Robert

   Reply

   1. Thanks Robert for the luminous comment.

      Your questions are extremely interesting. Let me ponder them before I answer in more depth. What I can already say, in the meantime, is that “Self-sabotage” is a translation from the French “çabotage”, which is a portmanteau word between sabotage and “ça”, which is how the French translate the Freudian concept of id (as opposed to ego and super-ego). But in Bardo’s view, this goes beyond psychoanalysis and the dangerous idea that desire and grace are antinomic. Grace is the result of a personal and experiential narrative of integrity, and integrity the result of a faithfulness to a personally authored and desired set of axioms. This is ethics, if you will, but in the Nietzschean sense. Bardo himself wrote (in Tina Kover’s translation):

      Beautiful madness, aware of the world around it,
      will make suggestions which, given free rein,
      will come to the surface and unravel
      in excesses too healthy for their time,
      like a bet made by a non-rational universe.
      A dangerous game, that will be won someday
      by more than one person and be the ruin of society.
      Life plays endlessly on our desires.
      I see humans as arenas from which will
      emerge — defying censures and stays,
      rising up against self-sabotage — certain attractors,
      strange angels who,
      by the power of their endurance,
      hostile to the principle of reality,
      will create folds in time…

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