Exist Koan

If you wish to see
the North Star, face south.

"Kirilov in the novel The Devils. "God," says Kirilov, "is necessary, and so must exist ... Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist." These lines, first spoken in 1873, will plague us for the next thousand years. They form the koan that cannot be walked away from. Cannot be walked away from because they are the walker, even in his attempt to walk away. That is what Kirilov meant when he said: "Any other thinks, and then at once thinks something else. I cannot think something else. I think one thing all my life. God has tormented me all my life." That is why Kirilov, having proclaimed, in the hour before his suicide: "God is necessary, and so must exist ... Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist," added, with his next breath: "But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?"