When you drop all ideas about pleasure causing happiness and pain causing suffering, then you can find happiness where you might expect to feel pain and you can see how certain pleasures can lead to certain suffering. When you pay attention to your actual feelings rather than what you might expect to feel, you will surprise yourself.
Source: Pleasure, Pain and Happiness
[Nietzsche] accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external circumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions. [Emphasis mine.]
Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle, the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values.
From: Eternal Return via Hermit's Thatch
Once again I've been thinking about eternal return (heh).
Once again I find myself circling, hovering around the periphery of action.
Once again I find myself going through all of the motions and preparations leading up to an actual change. I make the run up closer than I ever have.
Yet still the gulf remains. The gap. The canyon between me and It.
I have been at this point so many times before.
I just need a better approach, I say. So I retreat back. I plan the route. I clear the path. I wait for favorable weather. The wheel turns again; I set off running. It's easier this time, I am gaining speed. I see the Other Side. I see where I can land. I just need to jump, and...
And I skid to a stop, right at the edge. Again.
It is easy to get lost in that. Here I am making the same old mistakes. Here I am again, not doing the thing I claim I want to do.
The gravity of my goal, my task, has no doubt captured me. But I can't come into land. I simply spiral tighter and tighter around it. And sometimes I drift away and maybe that's what I need – to let it go and float off somewhere else – but no, at the farthest reaches, the arch of orbit tugs at my back, my retreat slows, and my path bends and I am on the approach again.
How many times will I do this?
But to think that this isn't yet another repeat of every other failed attempt... to realize that I am not being cursed with another frustrating iteration, but blessed with another chance to get it right...
...that despite how many times I have found myself here, the only thing that exists is this present moment...
”...the person, the self, must change perception.”
Sometimes, alone, I feel like a ghost. Unmasked, I walk through the world as if I’m embodying impressions. I channel the wind, the sadness the rain brings, the spring gloom. My identity is composed of memories, of spirits of places, of things I tell myself, and of things others tell me. I know it’s all in flux. The masks are shifting.
…this reminds me of:
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.
from Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d With The Ocean of Life”
In times of crisis, we set out to find ourselves. Perhaps we will find whatever it is that constitutes us out there in the Himalayas, or somewhere out west. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another person who teaches us to see, or in the sun that sets over the Pacific ocean. Often we’ll gain access to another part of ourselves through a story that inspires us.
But this quest to “find yourself” is somewhat self-defeating when the more precise goal ought to be “to create yourself,”
Discovery: Searching for a fixed point; you can miss it, never find it
Creation: Always happening, and especially when you realize it, and do with intention. Never has to end. Is complete when you say so…
In Hinduism, the ego is a trapping of the physical world. The body is often likened to a flesh tomb, and the ego is like the glass that contains our true self and shapes it. The true self—the atman —is a silent, conscious witness. It exists within every creature at its core.
I really enjoyed this piece, and find myself returning to it. I’ve read it two or three times already, and though it doesn’t necessarily contain any revolutionary, knock-me-off-my-chair epiphanies, it does that amazing and crucial task of giving form and structure to the kind of wordless questions and wonderings I often have, and allows me to re-engage with them, chew on them in more tangible forms than when they are swimming in my head…
Source: Who Are We Really?
from: Year End: On moving to the woods
Something I'm coming to know in my bones is this: I've come back to what matters over and over again, even when the timescale exceeds my limited perspective. I have every reason to have faith in myself.
Lucy Bellwood in Winter Bottleship, 2022/2023
[…] realising, properly, for the first time, that one day in the future I would no longer be here on earth, existing as the small but very definite and palpable thing I had become.
Tom Cox in Old Photos
Quotes from Steinbeck's journals:
never temper a word to a reader’s prejudice, but bend it like putty for his understanding.
...and:
I have tried to keep diaries before but they don’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.
Source: How Steinbeck Used the Diary as a Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work via The Marginalian