Aponia & Ataraxia
Experienced
- Jun 24, 2018
- 233
Situations and circumstance will vary widely from individual to individual. However, one who has made a firm decision to leave their human experience behind always has the option to drop their complexities cold:
A popular description of human world lines was given by J.C. Fields at the University of Toronto in the early days of relativity. As described by Toronto lawyer Norman Robertson:
I remember [Fields] lecturing at one of the Saturday evening lectures at the Royal Canadian Institute. It was advertised to be a "Mathematical Fantasy"—and it was! The substance of the exercise was as follows: He postulated that, commencing with his birth, every human being had some kind of spiritual aura with a long filament or thread attached, that traveled behind him throughout his life. He then proceeded in imagination to describe the complicated entanglement every individual became involved in his relationship to other individuals, comparing the simple entanglements of youth to those complicated knots that develop in later life.
Once one has acquired all the critical substances / equipment / money and has done their due diligence to ensure high confidence in their method, the final act is within physical actualization. The only question to ask is which loose-ends are really worth the effort of tying up? --Tragically, there isn't any objective answer to this question. I am however going out on a limb and speculating that the majority of the loose-ends we think need to be tied before our subjective departures, are relatively insignificant in the face of our own final moment.
"To be human is to be suspended between danger and opportunity. ...The challenge of life is to choose wisely, from the enormous number of possible dangers, what's worth worrying about. It is also about choosing, from all the opportunities... always in the face of incomplete knowledge of the consequences." --Lee Smolin
It's not in the remembering, but in the deletion that minimizes both: preference frustration, and, the need for preference satisfaction
Side Note: I have always had a purely subjective affinity for melancholy, cuteness, and innocence in this world. I make a distinction though, between higher values & abstractions v.s. what is tangible & concrete in this world. Reminding myself that although there are good things in this world, in some sense I think of those good things as being very isolated instances of those higher values poking through the chaotic messiness/ugliness of this "lower plane" (in a metaphorical sense).
A popular description of human world lines was given by J.C. Fields at the University of Toronto in the early days of relativity. As described by Toronto lawyer Norman Robertson:
I remember [Fields] lecturing at one of the Saturday evening lectures at the Royal Canadian Institute. It was advertised to be a "Mathematical Fantasy"—and it was! The substance of the exercise was as follows: He postulated that, commencing with his birth, every human being had some kind of spiritual aura with a long filament or thread attached, that traveled behind him throughout his life. He then proceeded in imagination to describe the complicated entanglement every individual became involved in his relationship to other individuals, comparing the simple entanglements of youth to those complicated knots that develop in later life.
Once one has acquired all the critical substances / equipment / money and has done their due diligence to ensure high confidence in their method, the final act is within physical actualization. The only question to ask is which loose-ends are really worth the effort of tying up? --Tragically, there isn't any objective answer to this question. I am however going out on a limb and speculating that the majority of the loose-ends we think need to be tied before our subjective departures, are relatively insignificant in the face of our own final moment.
"To be human is to be suspended between danger and opportunity. ...The challenge of life is to choose wisely, from the enormous number of possible dangers, what's worth worrying about. It is also about choosing, from all the opportunities... always in the face of incomplete knowledge of the consequences." --Lee Smolin
It's not in the remembering, but in the deletion that minimizes both: preference frustration, and, the need for preference satisfaction
Side Note: I have always had a purely subjective affinity for melancholy, cuteness, and innocence in this world. I make a distinction though, between higher values & abstractions v.s. what is tangible & concrete in this world. Reminding myself that although there are good things in this world, in some sense I think of those good things as being very isolated instances of those higher values poking through the chaotic messiness/ugliness of this "lower plane" (in a metaphorical sense).
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