psychology

Day 3001, your old room.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Also Sprach Zarathustra
Of the Three Metamorphoses

I name you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit shall become a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.
There are many heavy things for the spirit, for the strong, weight-bearing spirit in which dwell respect and awe: its strength longs for the heavy, for the heaviest.
What is heavy? thus asks the weight-bearing spirit, thus it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well laden.
What is the heaviest thing, you heroes? so asks the weight – bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.
Is it not this: to debase yourself in order to injure your pride? To let your folly shine out in order to mock your wisdom?
Or is it this: to desert our cause when it is celebrating its victory? To climb high mountains in order to tempt the tempter?
Or is it this: to feed upon the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of the soul?
Or is it this: to be sick and to send away comforters and make friends with the deaf, who never hear what you ask?
Or is it this: to wade into dirty water when it is the water of truth, and not to disdain cold frogs and hot toads?
Or is it this: to love those who despise us and to offer our hand to the ghost when it wants to frighten us?
The weight-bearing spirit takes upon itself all these heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert, thus it hurries into its desert.
But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert.
It seeks here its ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him and to its ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon.
What is the great dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call lord and God? The great dragon is called ‘Thou shalt’. But the spirit of the lion says ‘I will!’
‘Thou shalt’ lies in its path, sparkling with gold, a scale-covered beast, and on every scale glitters golden ‘Thou shalt’.
Values of a thousand years glitter on the scales, and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: ‘All the values of things – glitter on me.
‘All values have already been created, and all created values – are in me. Truly, there shall be no more “I will”!’ Thus speaks the dragon.
My brothers, why is the lion needed in the spirit? Why does the beast of burden, that renounces and is reverent, not suffice?
To create new values – even the lion is incapable of that: but to create itself freedom for new creation – that the might of the lion can do.
To create freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty: the lion is needed for that, my brothers.
To seize the right to new values – that is the most terrible proceeding for a weight-bearing and reverential spirit Truly, to this spirit it is a theft and a work for an animal of prey.
Once it loved this ‘Thou shalt’ as its holiest thing: now it has to find illusion and caprice even in the holiest, that it may steal freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this theft.
But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion cannot? Why must the preying lion still become a child?
The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.
Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.
I have named you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit became a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.
Thus spoke Zarathustra. And at that time he was living in the town called The Pied Cow.

Day 2995, what alone.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols
The Four Great Errors

8 What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself ( – the nonsensical idea here last rejected was propounded, as ‘intelligible freedom’, by Kant, and perhaps also by Plato before him). No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an ‘ideal of man’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality’ – it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking .… One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole.… But nothing exists apart from the whole! – That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as ‘spirit’, this alone is the great liberation – thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored.… The concept ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence.… We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.

Day 2991, Munch.

Daily picture, Quotes

I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Edvard Munch’s Diary, January 22, 1892.
 
 

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Day 2988, and goodwill.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book I

13 Towards the re-education of the human race. – Men of application and goodwill assist in this one work: to take the concept of punishment which has overrun the whole world and root it out! There exists no more noxious weed! Not only has it been implanted into the consequences of our actions- and how dreadful and repugnant to reason even this is, to conceive cause and effect as cause and punishment! – but they have gone further and, through this infamous mode of interpretation with the aid of the concept of punishment, robbed of its innocence the whole purely chance character of events. Indeed, they have gone so far in their madness as to demand that we feel our very existence to be a punishment- it is as though the education of the human race had hitherto been directed by the fantasies of jailers and hangmen!

Day 2987, DOS.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Ever since the invention of computers, we have started to compare how we function with that new invention using analogies.

The brain is the hardware with short and long-term memory, and the processor speed determines how fast we can calculate.  You can have all kinds of critiques of this comparison, but that’s nitpicking. Simplifying difficult concepts makes it easier to spread the word, so to speak.

I made this short intro because I read in an old post of mine about the idea that we have to reboot our fleshy internal computer. The idea is that our brain has hardly evolved in the last 100,000 years or so. The way we think, feel, love, solve problems, and go through our daily ups and downs is still the same as the people who lived in makeshift shelters and were hunting for their food. Our brain has evolved over millions of years and still changes, but our modern society exists only in the smallest fraction and at the end of that long timescale. We feel all modern and clever with our fancy phones, but in 100,000 years, they will look back at us like we look at an ape that got hold of a phone in a zoo.

If you use the analogy of computers, then we are a late seventies computer running DOS. It can do most of the things we do now; the difference is that it was made for smaller packages, meaning less input and less demand for results. People look, on average, at hundreds of small videos and posts on social media each day, but studies show that we only “compute” a fraction of what we see. The rest clogs up the computer and prevents valuable processing time from doing other tasks. Now we see a hundred pictures and remember two; in the seventies, we could only download two pictures in the same time, and the excitement after a long wait made you remember both of them for sure. I made these numbers up, but I am 51, and when I was 16, we had no cable TV or computer and only two TV channels to watch. I know for sure that I have more input of information now than when I was younger. The internet can satisfy most of our (knowledge) needs, back then I had to wait till I could go to the library in the hope of finding what I wanted to know.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet, but if I could snap my fingers, I would change all the phones into nineties Nokias, and the internet was only Wikipedia, text-based homepages of institutions, and ad-free YouTube.

 Human societies are complex, and we all feel the need to simplify our lives and understand the world around us. The attraction of leaders who speak understandable “truths” that are easy to digest is still strong, even though our history shows that easy truths almost always end up in misery. The truth is complex, and the solutions to the problems in our society are also difficult. Simplifying helps, as  I stated in the beginning, but only in the first school day at school.

In my old post, I wrote, “Our mind needs a reboot and an upgrade to version 2.0, and throw in some better memory and dust it off.” Of course, I have no clue how you could upgrade us, but maybe it is a good thing to realize that we all are not up to speed for the time we live in.

Day 2986, Goku.

Daily picture, My thoughts

What do I think? What do we do when we think? The thinking I am talking about here are your deepest thoughts, the unthinkable thoughts. Not in the sense that they are immoral or need to be kept away from the outside world, there are just no words to express them. What’s going on in your mind when you feel and have these deep thoughts, the thoughts you can’t hear because there are no words attached, yet. What’s going on inside us has more to do with an abstract painting or music that moves around in your mind. It’s like a rhythmless rhythm that dictates you the words you know from your past and are in your language. The rhythm looks strange, and we try to interpret it, but we are forced to call the parts anger, jealousy, fear, regret, or sadness, all the things that stop us in our tracks of a deeper investigation and understanding. These descriptions of what you seem to feel come and go and mold for you the answer you most need, want. But if you don’t want them, you will be speechless, but your feelings will still be, just that.

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Day 2985, change.

Daily picture, My thoughts

History rushes forward, and we like to point at the boulders that seem to cause the most turbulence. We call these disturbers Martin Luther, Albert Einstein, Stalin, or any other famous person from history who left a mark big enough that most of us still know them. These big boulders cause turbulence, but the riverbed, all the little stones, cause the real diversion by being swept up by rushing water and the turbulence, thus changing the direction of what flows forward.  A great boulder lying in a dry lake will move nothing, let alone disturb history, and a river without strong currents and disturbing boulders will flow forever with little change.