et les anciens sages instruisaient leurs disciples sur le bord des précipices... - René Daumal

I went for him, shook him by the shoulders with nothing better to shout at him but 'Why? Why?'
He answered me gravely, 'It's true. But you must begin to think of *how*.

The angst of paramnesia — the sense of “deja vu” — is not purely and simply erased in poetic feeling; it is overcome by a contact made by consciousness with the universal, it becomes the feeling of a reminiscence of something that has existed for all eternity, that the poet has not created, but unveiled, and that we recognize immediately.

"In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death, the “most nothing of all.” In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any “I.” What is it after all, “I”? ...Then one night, a marvelous idea came to me: Instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was
connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat...I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared ... when I tried again to think about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope."
-Mount Analogue, Rene Daumal