Success Quote by Eugen Herrigel

Herrigel is trying to smuggle a paradox past the bouncer of Western common sense: presence depends on not fastening yourself to anything. The line turns on a deliberately slippery claim - that mind or spirit can be "anywhere" precisely because it is "nowhere" in particular. What sounds mystical is also practical. He is describing a kind of attention that doesn’t harden into possession, a consciousness that can meet an object without being captured by it.

The key word is "reflection". Herrigel isn’t condemning thought so much as the sticky self-consciousness that trails behind it: the moment you watch yourself watching, you’ve already lost the clean contact. "Cling" suggests not just distraction but identity: the ego latching onto an experience (a target, a performance, a feeling) and turning it into proof of self. His "original mobility" is the pre-ego freedom to move fluidly from thing to thing without leaving psychic residue.

Context matters. Herrigel, a German philosopher famous for interpreting Zen through practices like archery, wrote at a moment when Europeans were hungry for a spiritual technology that felt antidotal to mechanized modern life. The risk, of course, is that Zen becomes a Western self-optimization hack. This passage pushes back: the point isn’t a better, tighter self; it’s a self that stops grabbing. Presence becomes an ethic of non-attachment, a discipline of staying available - not vacant, not passive, just unowned.