Day 3828, good for us.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry

In my mind
most bridges can either open
or are high enough to let good ideas through


but looking around me
most people seem to live
where no ideas float
or bridges are too low
unable to open

Some of my notes from today that somehow belong together. 

We live in a strange world. For 2000 years, the Christian churches have tried to sell their story, backed by mighty institutions, governments, and armies that did their bidding, and still most people don’t believe their story, while the rest made it into one of their own. And what about the real thinkers, the philosophers? Yes, they have their institutes, the universities that are dwindling away. Their truths come closer to what that might be, but who still believes them these days?

Once, we apes just lived our lives, and from child to child we learned our place. Not only where we were, but also what these hands can do and who the others are. We started to see the world and became aware that we did. We became aware of our thoughts, not in words but in emotions, and somehow connected them to our drives. We lived, as a species, much longer with our consciousness expressed through emotions, drives, and feelings than with the words we now often misconstrue for our consciousness.

We often know what is good for us. That’s what you tell yourself, but these little words are no match for the part of us that is much older, has had much more practice, and is also cemented much deeper in society at large. We vote for the baboon who ruins our country because it didn’t speak with words, but with emotions.

Some people are ruled more by their words than by their emotions, even if only slightly. Or their emotions better understand the blindness of their goals and also remember that no one is the same person in the morning or evening or on a Wednesday as on a Sunday.

All of this goes on between our two ears, and no matter what story we hear and feel, it is our story, and for some reason it seems to be taken for real. I do believe that there are ways to live a life where you believe less of what you feel and think. The reason why I think that is, is because we do make progress living together as 8 billion egocentric prisoners on a big world but so close together.

Day 3827, and.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

550 Knowledge and beauty. – If, as they still do, people as it were reserve their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling, we ought not to wonder if the opposite of imagination and dissembling makes them feel cold and disconsolate. The delight produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge, which science as it is now bestows so abundantly and already upon so many – this delight is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depths of appearance. These believe reality is ugly: but they do not reflect that knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful, nor that he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything ‘beautiful in itself? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things- may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition! In the meantime let us recall an experience of olden time: two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods
of the highest empyrean: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind (not, that is to say, in ‘intuition’, as German theologians and semi-theologians do; not in visions, as mystics do; and likewise not in creating, as all practical people do). Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion: how they must all have enjoyed knowledge! And what a danger their honesty faced of becoming a panegyrist of things! –

Day 3820, the constant tension.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

546 Slave and idealist. – The human being after the model of Epictetus would certainly not be to the taste of those who strive after the ideal nowadays. The constant tension of his being, the unwearied glance turned inward, the reserve, caution, uncommunicativeness of his eye if it should even turn to view the outer world; not to speak of his silence or near-silence: all signs of the most resolute bravery- what could this mean to our idealists, who are above all greedy for expansion! In addition to all this, he is not fanatical, he hates the display and vainglory of our idealists: his arrogance, great though it is, has nonetheless no desire to disturb others, it admits a certain mild intimacy and wants to spoil no one’s good humour- it can, indeed, even smile! There is very much of the humanity of antiquity in this ideal! The fairest thing about it is, however, that it lacks all fear of God, that it believes strictly in reason, that it is no penitential preacher. Epictetus was a slave: his ideal human being is without class and possible in every class, but is to be sought above all in the depths of the masses as the silent, self-sufficient man within a universal enslavement who defends himself against the outside world and lives in a constant state of supreme bravery. He differs from the Christian, above all in that the Christian lives in hope, in the promise of’inexpressible glories’, in that he accepts gifts and expects and receives the best he knows at the hands ofdivine love and grace and not at his own hands: while Epictetus does not hope and does not accept the best he knows as a gift- he possesses it, he holds it bravely in his own hand, he defends it against the whole world if the world wants to rob him of it. Christianity was made for a different species of antique slave, for those weak in will and mind, that is to say for the great mass of slaves.

Day 3813, I know you.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

543 Do not make passion an argument for truth!– O you good-natured and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You want to win your argument against us, but also against yourself, and above all against yourself!- and a subtle and tender bad conscience so often incites you against your enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in the outwitting and deadening of this conscience! How you hate the honest, the simple, the pure, how you avoid their innocent eyes! That knowing better whose representatives they are and whose voice you hear all too loudly within you, how it casts doubt on your belief- how you seek to make it suspect as a bad habit, as a sickness of the age, as neglect and infection of your own spiritual health! You drive yourself to the point of hating criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history so that it may bear witness for you, you have to deny virtues so that they shall not cast into the shade those of your idols and ideals! Coloured pictures where what is needed is rational grounds! Ardour and power of expression! Silvery mists! Ambrosial nights! You understand how to illuminate and how to obscure, and how to obscure with light! And truly, when your passion rises to the point of frenzy, there comes a moment when you say to yourself: now I have conquered the good conscience, now I am light of heart, courageous, self-denying, magnificent, now I am honest! How you thirst for those moments when your passion bestows on you perfect self-justification and as it were innocence; when in struggle, intoxication, courage, hope, you are beside yourself and beyond all doubting; when you decree: ‘he who is not beside himself as we are can in no way know what and where truth is!’ How you thirst to discover people of your belief in this condition – it is that of intellectual vice – and ignite your flame at their torch! Oh your deplorable martyrdom! Oh your deplorable victory of the sanctified lie! Must you inflict so much suffering upon yourself? – Must you?