Every philosopher fails. But the pieces are picked up and a new arrangement is tried. — plaque flag
I like to use 'gnostic' as a metaphor for a person with a vision of the fundamental amorality of the world (as if the product of a clumsy or apathetic demiurge). The world is not run by the wisest and kindest, not administered by dutiful guardian angels. But there a rebel/underdog god or principle that one can fall back on. Muted post horn, countercultural esoteric spiritual comforts, etc. Schopenhauer seems to fit into this group. He does not preach world conquest. His 'escapism' (as an earnest communist might call it) is akin to that of certain stoics or skeptics who focus on their own private interpretation of the world and the training of their heart toward serene detachment. — plaque flag
Sleep I would see is the ultimate ideal in this philosophy. It is the easiest route to escape. — schopenhauer1
Again, nirvāṇa is not non-existence or non-being or a dreamless sleep, or anything of the kind. — Wayfarer
Don't assume I don't know these things and also make me out to be a boogie-man. — schopenhauer1
I was claimed by the real world all day. — plaque flag
I'd say that sleep (including the sleep of death ) is fine, but this serene detachment is also a worthy goal. In my view, it's preferable to sleep/death --- while death is preferable to hopeless torment. — plaque flag
Before us there is certainly only nothingness. But that which resists this passing into nothing, our nature, is indeed just the will to live, which we ourselves are as it is our world. That we abhor annihilation so greatly, is simply another expression of the fact that we so strenuously will life, and are nothing but this will, and know nothing besides it. But if we turn our glance from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world, in whom the will, having attained to perfect self-knowledge, found itself again in all, and then freely denied itself, and who then merely wait to see the last trace of it vanish with the body which it animates; then, instead of the restless striving and effort, instead of the constant transition from wish to fruition, and from joy to sorrow, instead of the never-satisfied and never-dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which is above all reason, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance, as Raphael and Correggio have represented it, is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished. We look with deep and painful longing upon this state, beside which the misery and wretchedness of our own is brought out clearly by the contrast. Yet this is the only consideration which can afford us lasting consolation, when, on the one hand, we have recognised incurable suffering and endless misery as essential to the manifestation of will, the world; and, on the other hand, see the world pass away with the abolition of will, and retain before us only empty nothingness. Thus, in this way, by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of inner truth, by art, we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark;we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways—is nothing.
But calling it vapor and fog and emptiness creates a distance, transforms the passionate anguished submersion into a spectacle, a game, a view also above and not just from stage. Schopenhauer discusses the genius (surely a self-portrait) as hardly really there in the world, living mostly in a symbolic realm, finding Platonic structure (and therefore beauty!) is the otherwise empty spectacle --in the ambiguous vapor, blurry form without substance. No matter. (No matter as solid substance surviving the fire of time -- unless the fire of time itself be that 'substance' -- or we count the patterns that are destroyed and created again and again (a Finnegans Wake theme.) ) — plaque flag
Buddha was "enlightened" but he did not simply cease to exist. He was free of all attachments, so some sort of "ego death". But what is that really? — schopenhauer1
Who was the pessimist who hung himself by stepping off a stack of copies of his just-published suicidal opus ? There's a dark beauty in that. — plaque flag
When I was younger, I was occasionally gripped by intense depression -- to the point of almost continual suicidal ideation. — plaque flag
Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself. — E.M. Cioran
.If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself. — E.M. Cioran
Taoism, seems to want one to sort of glide through the surface of the struggle rather than fight it. There is a Way and it flows like a river. But you see, that is tolerance of the struggle, not escape. Sleep is escape par excellence. The Way is tolerance (meditate whilst doing the dishes, sweep the floor in a fluid motion, etc.). Sleep is escape. — schopenhauer1
We are forced up and out and engaged in this or that. All of this fuss. — schopenhauer1
We are forced to wake from the mud, but life is to some degree a choice. I've known suicides and half-suicides (junkies who overdosed.) I don't judge them. I don't think I'm better than them in some absolute sense. Our mortality threatens all such calculations. Does it matter that this boy got himself killed by messing around with the wrong girl or driving drunk ? Another plotline features him dying of ass cancer in Florida. It matters to a few other mortals while they last. Meaning is a function of the perishable flesh. — plaque flag
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