Have any of you read anything about the stoics? I've being very hate-filled and feeling overall frustrated these days, but the stoic philosophy really helped me out. I really recommend that you get into that.
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From my understanding the stoic view of suicide isn't against it at all. In fact I've read a few articles on stoics who have committed suicide, that being Cato and Seneca if I'm correct. The stoic view if not commit due to mere suffering, but to embrace death and know a door is always open to you.We needed to translate Senecas stoic texts from Latin to German and it was great to read about this idea of your mind and its strength and the fact to be not scared about death or dying itself. For me it really helped to understand myself and get some inspiration how to view things in normal life.
dreamsofdestruction
Everywhere I look is chaos
- May 9, 2019
- 340
I tried, several times. Last one not too long ago. But the pain is just too real and ever present to just will it away. If you get into it early enough and really make an effort to live your life like that, it might be a good thing and guide you through some rough patches in life.I try hard to apply a sort of zen or observant mindset....a watered down Eckhart Tolle sort of thing...and while in the moment it has definite benefits, long term fuck me if it doesn't just also make me existentially depressed since the idea of needing to work to BE, to apply some technique to LIVE, is frustrating. I know the idea is to get to a point where its natural and not forced...but I so long for the days I didn't need to and just lived well and naturally. It's too much work.
After The End
The lily whispers, “I wait.”
- Jul 31, 2019
- 135
I've read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I found it helpful. More so for dealing with death than for not wanting to die, but I guess there is some relation there.
Fragile
Broken
- Jul 7, 2019
- 1,496
stoicism is one of the few things that keeps my anxiety at manageable levels, but i feel that it just buys time before the inevitable, no amount of philosophy or different ways of thinking can change my reality.Short answer: only worry about what you can actually change, i.e. what is under your control.
Hobbes
Member
- Jun 12, 2019
- 34
So difficult to define that boundary, though. How much suffering in the world can I realistically alleviate? One person can't change the entire world, but I'm still having issues discovering where exactly the line ends - what is worth working towards and what is worth letting go.
Stoics thought that if one can't flourish/ live virtuous life in this life then it would be fine/wise to leave to next life.
For example Seneca told to look at our wrists to find the way out and Epictetus reminded that the door was always open if we wanted to leave. In a way we choose to suffer since we can end it anytime we wish.
I have always thought that the door is always open to leave suffering. In that way God (life force, light etc.) hasn't left us to suffer endlessly.
Only reason why Christians started to forbid suicide, even it is not forbidden in the Bible, was that so many Christians commited suicide that the church was afraid that the religion would perish and church authorities would loose their power. Augustine fed to religious people Plato's idea of suicide as forbidden since "our lives belong to society and God" (to Gods in philosophers texts).
In Bible it's said that Bible can't be changed so all Christians who teaches against it are wrong to do so. Bible condemns especially the people who twist God's word in Bible for their benefit.I never heard this idea that the church was anti suicide because so many were catching the midnight express.
My understanding is that suicide is a proof of despair, and despair is a great sin because it does not only mean despair of your own self, but also of god's plan for you.
Regarding the stoics, I have some vague recollections about them defining happiness as not wanting what you could not get. Such a simple idea, and yet, everything humans are unable to do.
Tom9999
I've suffered enough.
- Aug 27, 2019
- 124
I think consciously choosing not to suffer but to instead simply accept what is, is wise.
However, if your suffering is a product of repressed childhood trauma energy being triggered, and therefore the end result of an unconscious process, you don't have that choice. You can't choose to not feel it. You can choose to repress it, but that is destructive.
Stoicism works with suffering that is in and of the moment.
It does not work well with repressed unprocessed past sufferings that have been triggered out of their dormant state and thrust into consciousness.
One gains more by accepting, respecting, and working through this sort of suffering using some recovery process.Last edited:Yes, I agree with you, Tom. Some things need to be brought up to the surface so they can be dealt with. I can't speak from personal experience, but I can imagine it must be such a heavy burden to carry around unprocessed traumas. It probably casts a shadow over all aspects of life.
It's funny how we use the words "chose", "controll", "don't worry" as if they were actually a real possibility. I am beginning more and more to suspect that the idea of choice is an illusion. Not because I am a fatalist, but because so many of us seem uncapable of making seemingly right choices which stare us right in the eye.
I think many of us on this forum would love to stoicly accept our misfortunes. Just get on with life, find meaning, and not hang around talking about suicide all day. But somehow we do not have the strength to make that choice. I know I don't... and it's not for lack of trying.
IsadoraBeauxdraps
would like to follow that butterfly
- Aug 23, 2019
- 160
Hi,
I personally believe that free will is an illusion, that we just don't own our own consciousness.
Are you going for recovery? I j
I wrote quite loosely the beginning of stigmatization.
During the early years of Christianity, many believers chose suicide over the difficult life of religious persecution and in faith for eternal life in heaven. Some early Christian writers maintained that a self-chosen death was a goal for the genuinely pious to aspire. The number of Christian martyrs and mass suicides rose so quickly that the ruling Jewish faction decided to forbid eulogies and public mourning for those who died by their own hand. This action began the stigmatization of suicide in Judeo-Christian culture. The first church-led condemnation of suicide occurred when Jewish leaders refused to allow the bodies of Christian suicide victims to be buried in hallowed ground.
Some estimates say that in 38 a.d -1299 a.d above 4 million Christians commited suicide.
Historians say that Augustine fed Christians the Plato's ideologies of suicides.
Have you watched nurture your soul: Is there such a thing as free will? (and 3 other videos) in YouTube?
I find that interesting. I also somehow believe that everything is predestined.
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Alucard
Wizard
- Feb 8, 2019
- 606
For my part, I believe in free will, but I think it is very difficult to get out of the biological and social influences that weigh on us.
White_Room293
rapid cycling gay guy
- Sep 13, 2019
- 155
I don't follow it because I think it's a bunch of bullshit that trivializes the constant suffering that life has to offer. If I am wrong I am open to being corrected though.@a.h
"Especially early Christians died joyfully to get to heaven with Jesus and God"
There is definitely a big discrepancy between how Jesus' followers understood death and suicide in the first few hundred years a.d., and how the modern church views these questions.
I do not have enough knowledge about the early christian communities, but your explanation reminded me of Henryk Sinkiewicz's Quo Vadis, where newly converted believers were embracing death in the name of their faith.
woxihuanni
Illuminated
- Aug 19, 2019
- 3,298
It's incredible how much social conditioning has an effect on you, even you are very skeptic, stubborn and creative. You only see the extent of it once you have lost everything. And I mean everything.
IsadoraBeauxdraps
would like to follow that butterfly
- Aug 23, 2019
- 160
In our world, all consequence comes from a cause, even in consciousness.
When you simply choose between a doll with blond hair and brown hair, you're determined. Neurosciences tell us that the brain took its decisions before it reach consciousness.
Unconscious, subconscious, genetic and the environment that activated specific genes in childhood, all of that are causes.
In order to have freewill, we should be external to this world, beyond any limits, we should be a finite consciousness, we should be god.
I think that consciousness is one, we don't own it.
We form in crystals.Last edited:
Alucard
Wizard
- Feb 8, 2019
- 606
You expose very rigorously and very clearly the deterministic theory. Philosophers like Spinoza or Schopenhauer share it.
But when you say that "we are determined", do you say it freely, or are you determined to say it ? ...
IsadoraBeauxdraps
would like to follow that butterfly
- Aug 23, 2019
- 160
Of course I'm determined to say it, It exists causes that crystallize in me and allow me to think that way
Alucard
Wizard
- Feb 8, 2019
- 606
Of course I'm determined to say it, It exists causes that crystallize in me and allow me to think that way
Haha, not sure ^^.
IsadoraBeauxdraps
would like to follow that butterfly
- Aug 23, 2019
- 160
I would have liked that way more.
Also the professional translation of the first surviving Bible makes lot more sense than the ones that people have. For example word Gehenna really means a place in Israel where people's trash was burned. There was big hole in ground and everyone brought their trash there to be burned.
For example in Bible there is metaphorically said that bad people are burned away like trash in Gehenna
Later it was translated that bad people (including even good people who don't believe in same God) are burned forever in eternal flames of Hell (word from Ancient mythology Hades, place for the dead, which was not bad place either).
After reading the original Bible and the ones sold to people today shows how corrupt the church has always been. Discovery of hell helped for the people working in churches to get money from everyone with a promise that they would be saved from hellfire then.
I think that if there is all-powerful God the only explanation for suffering that makes any sense to me is that we have come to suffer to learn something valuable of it and from our suffering something good might result as in butterfly effect. That is what nearly all who have had nde and have gotten to ask about it has said.
I don't believe that God stops the suffering if we ask for it. But when we don't want to suffer we can go back home and end it right away.
I personally believe that our life was predestined and deaths too including the way we die.
But sometimes I prefer to think that there is no God or afterlife and we stop existing. It's so frustrating to think someone could do anything to help out but don't even for a very good reason we can't understand yet. Not even the child victims of abuse. At least most grown ups are free to end suffering.Last edited:
