The fundamental experience of my thinking since the preparation for Being and Time (1921) is the experience that being itself remains in oblivion, that this remaining is somehow proper to being itself, and the that the uncontemplated of the human is only a consequence. Cf. Parmenides, Ἀλήθεια, repetition, p. 11, among others.12
What the sacrificial victims give would never be bearable if that which is coming were not consecrated with each passing hour. Even the simple passing of days in undertakings is sacrilege.
The essence of the human is lost in the squinting consciousness with which the human gapes at and manipulates and persecutes and hunts himself down. The institution invented by this consciousness itself is called “psychology.” That is the case regardless of what kind of psychology one practices, whether as handiwork or in its ostentatious inflation to anthropology.
The most dangerous of all weapons, the most destructive of all instruments of annihilation is the will. For what will come to pass when the will to will appears as the being of all beings? Cf. p. 34.
“To remain” as a result of merely being left behind in complete annihilation, is that at all a being? Is it not rather the distorted essence of being? This being left behind as existent rootlessness and perplexity—and nothing more. Is not every either-or errancy itself?
Since beings are abandoned by being insofar as being has surrendered itself to the distorted essence, there is no way to bring beings into beyng through calculation and action. Beyng itself must first be preserved in its truth. The only thing that helps at such a time is: to drive the roots of the meditation of essential thinking deeper down and to hold still and wait. This lack of action is not a form of doing nothing. It prepares the space of play for the clearing of beyng.
To be without beings (without turning toward and away to what is objective), but not to be without that which is not a being.
The distorted essence of being, that is to say the will to will, corresponds to arming as the securing of the means and implements of security,
12. {Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, vol. 54 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 41; translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 27–28.}