Thoughts on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. If the world had a goal it must have been reached — Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche posited the eternal recurrence, the will to relive every moment of a life, exactly as it has been lived, over and over again. Did Nietzsche mean that what eternally returns is exactly the same every time? What returns is pure difference, becoming. Being is static, an image, complete. Becoming is a never-ending return of the new, the open. There is no world goal, no perfect state of being. Nietzsche urges us to open our lives to that which is the genesis of life itself: a process of evolving to something new, over and over again. What must return in us is the will to pure difference — transformation of what exists, what was, into the creation of something that has never existed before. For life is the affirmation of the new, … [Read more...]
To Create Reality not Observe
Bergson, Deleuze and time as duration: the possibilities for radical freedom in a universe alive with creativity. To grasp meaning in our lives, and enjoy that meaning, we require a new sense of time. Time is our most precious commodity. But our common understanding of time, scientific time, marches forward with or without us, and runs us down in the process. We require a theory of time that accounts for our most important moments in life: life changing moments, when common time stands still, becomes irrelevant. Armed with a new sense of time, we can immerse in the pure bliss of life, and access the force of creativity and love that we know intuitively is the stuff of which we are made. Time as Duration An immanent philosophy of difference, as put forward by Gilles Deleuze, is a process philosophy, a temporal philosophy. It requires a revitalized theory of time. … [Read more...]
Time as Pure Creativity
To transform our lives we require a new understanding of time. Time as a Straight Line We think of time as a linear progression of moments. We have inherited our sense of time from science. In all scientific pursuits, time is the independent variable. Time is the dimension over which we have no control. Time is a straight line marching forward, with or without us. Scientific time measures changes in space, but it fails to capture movement itself. Think of an old-fashioned reel of film. Each image is a moment in time. But each image in scientific time fails to capture the movement in between. No matter how thinly you slice up scientific time, actual movement is never captured. But our lives are all about movement, change. We measure our lives in terms of change. Our memories and plans hinge on significant moments when change occurs. We run after the clock daily, but … [Read more...]
To Live Fulfillment We Must Embrace Creativity and Release Judgement
What judge of art could ever create art? What judge of life could ever create life? Life as Art Despite the limitations society might press on us, life is limitless, creative, and our deepest urge is to express ourselves in our own way and be heard. Our deepest desire is to think of, conceive of, and act out, our lives as a work of art. This natural desire is central to the question of leading a fulfilling life, and central to our satisfaction in life. And it is so very fragile, that if we lose sight of our sense of life as creativity, our own invention and expression of what is important, then we are prone to losing all sense of the value of life itself. We become zombie-like, or worse, resentful of all others who are busy on their own personal arc to creating themselves. We become dominated by fear and seek comfort in conformity, secretly wishing all others to be just … [Read more...]