Eternal Recurrence
About 40,000 years ago, during what is called the human 'Upper Palaeolithic Revolution', our predictive capacities developed to the point where we saw our inevitable death. A tiger jumping at us out of the bushes was not necessary to scare the hell out of us. Our minds did it, and we mobilized to act. The result - 40 millennia of social fantasies. Religions, spirits, tribal customs, afterworlds and legends, taboos, good and evils, social mores of conduct, superstitions. Delightful fantasies, stimulating mind chatter, lots of low-level entertainment, lifetimes of social worries and bickering. In the last two millennia we have become more organized, more global, more cluttered in our social fantasies. Nations, bibles, "history", "knowledge", universities, literature, science, ideologies, abstract big religions. It's time to realize the silliness of these fake worlds of "making believe you continue after death". We don't live on in heaven or hell or in God's lap or in a new body. We don't live on in our good works or our reputations or "making the world a little better". We don't live on in the memories of those who knew us or in an invention or idea named after us or a book we wrote.
We are not different from animals, only they're more awake while we spend most of our time head-dancing in our big frontal lobes.
The thought of eternal recurrence is a means for us to wake up.
A very, very, very long time.
How many years? We need a big number. A billion is 1000000000, a 1 with 9 zeros after it. A googol is a number with 100 zeros after the 1. A googolplex is a number with a googol amount of zeros after the 1. Too small. The mathematicians invented the "Graham number" which the Guinness World Records listed as the "World Champion largest number". It is too large to be written in scientific notation because even the digits in the exponent would exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe. Well, even this is much, much, much too small a number of years. We're not talking about shuffling a deck of cards or the sand pebbles of a beach. We're talking about shuffling the position and motion of every atom in the universe. However, eventually there is an incredibly large finite number of years when "the music box repeats it's tune".
This is a long time to wait. To handle the wait the universe gives us the "cheerful magic of death".
Luckily you are not a "ghost in a machine". The ghost would die forever and the machine would come back. You not only have a deep connection, at every instant, with your body, the earth and it's universe. Every instant you are your body, this earth, it's universe and nothing else.
When the exact same universe returns, you're there.
No choice, no chance, no different, no better . . . (and no worse).
Each time you return it's exactly the same you. If there were the slightest infinitesimal difference, the butterfly effect would not only radically change your entire life and the future course of human history but radically change the whole future of the universe such that at the incredibly large number of years after which you are supposed to return, you wouldn't be there since the universe would be radically different.
That's how well connected you are to the universe.
Nietzsche attacked the idea of "free will" repeatedly and mercilessly. For example, in the 'Twilight of the Idols', he says,
"Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of "free will": we know only too well what it is—the foulest of all theologians' artifices aimed at making mankind "responsible" in their sense, that is, dependent upon them . . . Here I simply supply the psychology of all making-responsible.— Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. . . . we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again." Part 5 Section 7, 'The Error of Free Will'
If we deny the moralist his sado-masochistic pleasure tool, is there any other use for this idea? Probably not.
University philosophers have long played entertaining mind games trying to prove free will true or false, but it was not much more than entertainment.
Any "what-if" statement applied to the past is absolutely silly. The butterfly-effect is not an observation but a mathematical aspect of complex systems, and "complex systems" encompasses everything in the universe outside of billiard tables and chemistry-lab test-tubes. It says that any one little "what if this were different" radically changes whatever follows. If I had not gotten that parking ticket in 1972, all four of my children would never have existed.
Seeing everything in your past as fate is wise. It's very close to having no regrets and no resentments.
Seeing your evolving present actions as fate is also wise. Experience, emotion and intelligence flow more smoothly, genuinely and gracefully. You're not plagued by sputtering "decisions". It's much easier to ride your spirit.
Seeing your future as fate is hardest and wisest of all. Decidiphobia, feeling that choosing one person or path over another will be letting the experience of that other person or path die forever, seeing and being paralyzed by this abyss-fantasy, is a comic situation. What makes you think you have such god-like powers to see and "save a world"? Life is awareness, experience and feelings, all with a spirit and flow of their own, obeying the iron laws of yin and yang, up and down. You can never know what that person or path would have been for you and certainly it would not have been all "wonderfulness".
No. That's silly.
Rare, random, playful, uncontrollable psychic glimpses of the future or deja-vu feelings might be possible, but they would come from the world you are living in now, not some cosmic memory that spans a multiple graham number of years.
Thank goodness we don't remember, for it would rob life of its freshness, excitement and surprise.
Animals dream and probably day-dream but most of the time, assuming they haven't been made neurotic by contact with humans, they are awake, the world appears before them and becomes the center stage of their lives. Humans live in an opposite manner. The center stage is their social fantasies while they flittingly and mechanically check in and act upon the world around them. By "social fantasies" I mean almost the whole of their thinking activity, mental conversation and imaginings. It's a low-level entertaining world. "Will my boss like my work?" "Will I get the girl?" "Does my hair look beautiful?" As Fritz Perls pointed out, it's mostly rehearsing and includes a wide variety of entertaining self-torture games. Perls invited us to live in the "here and now". Similarly Ancient Eastern wisdom is full of hopes and techniques for quieting the mind, for enlightenment, satori and awakening. But we are all still plagued by man's 40,000 year old project of avoiding personal death through the participation in social dreams, projects, plans, legends, good and evils.
A belief in Eternal Recurrence implies giving up social fantasies as the vital part of your life. You still deal with the social fantasy-world, playing social games to get enough food, but it's not important or exciting but silly and laughable. Awareness of the world around you is the one you prefer, the one that makes you alive.Awareness is the world's mystical experience.
Nietzsche thought that the basic "stuff" of the world was not atoms or love or survival or God but the "Will to Power". I have objected to his choice of words here. I accept power as the best candidate, but I propose a complimentary yin-yang partner. I call it the "Will to Laughter" (or just "laughter" if "power" is its partner) and it is intimately involved with Eternal Recurrence. It is the world's delight and happiness in it's own useless dance, the eternal laughable folly of power, the lightness of awareness.
Why the choice of the words "Will to Laughter" ? To emphasize the folly of using the words "Will to Power".
We humans waste life on a neurotic, futile, social fantasy flight from our personal death. We have lost the majestic awareness that animals have for their world. What we call "consciousness", a silly mish-mosh of awareness, thought, head-dancing and fantasy-world is laughable. Our knowledge, scientific and otherwise, deposited in university verbiage factories is pitifully cluttered, cowardly and blind. Chaos theory and Nassim Taleb's exposure of accademic pretentions are a good start for a healthy skepticism about universities, "knowledge" and "authorities" of all kinds.
We haven't even come close to seeing or accepting the first basic truth of our modern situation, that technology is life's way of making a species weaker. Every time we get in a car instead of walking or running or dancing . . . every time we cover symptoms with drugs or play it safe with shotgun antibiotic consumption . . . every time we apply university categories or theories to our local situation instead of waking up to look at it . . . every time we substitute the fake drama of movies and TV for the drama and play of those close to us . . . every day we live in those artificial, sterile, controllable, laboratory-like boxes called houses, offices and stores . . . - . . . our bodies get a little weaker, a little stupider. Human pretentions of power are an amazingly huge source of laughter. After many generations of this behavior the human body will become extremely weak and fragile. We will have squandered the 2 billion year strength that our bodies have accumulated without technology. It may be time for life to invent something new.
I am not proposing any new ideal to "save" or even "improve"
humanity. I am making a call to wake up from social fantasies to the
immediate world around you that you can see and touch.
Not empirically. There is no outside observer to take and compare notes during the double multiple Graham-years wait until two returns had passed. God, who might volunteer for the job, is too busy trying to prove that he exists.
Nietzsche made a couple of logical attempts at proofs in his notes. However, he was never so convinced of them as to publish them. Here are two of them from the book of tentative notes published by his sister (The titles are mine):
The Will to Power, note 1066
"If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of
force and as a certain definite number of centers of force--and every
other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless--it
follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through
a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible
combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would
be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every
combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations
would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the
entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement
of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a
circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and
plays its game in infinitum."
The butterfly effect says a butterfly flapping its wings will cause a hurricane in Florida. If it enjoys the sun instead of flapping its wings there will be no hurricane. The butterfly effect rules out any possibility of a slightly different life recurring. Either we are exactly the same or it's the abyss: eternal nothingness. Either the universe repeats itself or it is eternally, radically different.
My "proof" is "experiential". It comes from the sense and feeling of the non-neurotic solidity
of existence, of awareness.
It is indicated in the following paradox:
If death is real, why are we so calm?
If death is not real, why are we so nervous?
There is a yin-yang dynamic going on here. The abyss, the personal extinction that would last forever, if it were true, would be too devastating and paralyzing psychologically. Yes, death is very real. In a near car accident the adrenaline rush of our body tells us it's very real. But the extinction that our predictive minds first saw 40,000 years ago, is not eternal. Yes, a very, very, very big number of years, but not eternal. The world as it is now returns. Everything we are aware of, every wandering moment of awareness is not fleeting but eternal, repeating itself eternally and us with it.
In the end a rock solid proof of eternal recurrence is elusive, but this is the case for all "knowledge", theories and philosophies. The only solid rock certainty, put forward by Descartes, "I think, therefore I am" is almost true but not quite. Thinking is the most ghostly of activities and at bottom is always "trying to figure out how to survive my death", always propping up the belief, "I'm not going to die." Despite its wandering nature, awareness is the most solid of rocks. "I am aware of the sky, I am aware of that tree, I am aware of thinking, therefore I exist." You may be wrong about the words sky, tree or thinking but you are sure about being aware of something, about being aware. "I am aware, therefore I exist" or even more radically, "awareness is existence" or in simpler, more playful terms . . . "life is all you got". Even in day dreaming, thinking and sleeping, you are still aware, but the vitality of awareness is mostly inside your head (day dreaming, thinking) or body (sleeping). Animals are calmly aware, in tune with their bodies and their instincts. 40 millennia man, however, is desperately trying to think his way out of his situation, fleeing his body, his instincts and the world. Eternal personal recurrence, bridged by the magic of death, shuts off the tyrannic, psychotic aspect of thought. You still think - it's a fun game and sometimes useful for finding food - but your vitality is elsewhere.
What might be more important to ask than a "proof" of the theory of eternal recurrence is . . . what is the value of this theory ? Is it a gateway to a "new health"? . . . . . My answer: It's the only "projection-mind-game" with the possibility of waking up, of happily and playfully dissolving itself to allow the possibility of localizing yourself in your immediate world, to allow what Fritz Perls so elegantly expressed as "losing your mind, and coming to your senses".
Not as I see it.
You could say eternal recurrence implies a new "natural morality" which is close to "animal morality". "Animal morality" ?! The incongruity of "animal" and "morality" seen together reveals the scam. The incongruity says, "animals die but we don't". It's better to just dump the word.
Without morality, are we free to do anything we want ? No, there are always consequences. You can't walk through walls. You can't step on toes of others without them getting mad. You can't threaten someone without him defending himself in one way or another. But this isn't morality, it's intelligence.
What eternal recurrence does imply is a new "health", which
follows from an awakening from the social dream to the world around us. This world around us
of course includes our body, which contains all the "dos and don'ts" that animals have, a great wisdom and intelligence, subtle
and not-so-subtle messages, a "will to power" and a "will to laughter".
Nietzsche often said he was a foe of morality. However, in his last years he entertained the idea of eternal recurrence implying a new moral outlook, what he called a "revaluation of values". To me, he was still stuck in the 40,000 year project of social fantasies to save us from death. He never quite freed himself from the curse of university verbiage production. The following passage from Ecce Homo indicates this conflict within him:
The last thing I should promise would be to "improve" mankind. No new idols are erected by me; . . . One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world ... The "true world" and the "apparent world" - in plain language: the mendaciously invented world and reality ... The lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality, on account of which mankind itself has become mendacious and false down to its most fundamental instincts to the point of worshiping the opposite values of those which alone would guarantee its health, its future, the lofty right to its future.
The ideal world, the "true world", is invented. The world that appears, the "apparent world", is reality. Nietzsche had a fleeting call to wake up from the dream, to silence and looking, before being pulled back into the verbiage machine.
It doesn't seem heavy to me.
Section 341 of the Gay Science is called "The Greatest Weight" and it contains Nietzsche's best description of eternal recurrence. The first half is at the top of this knol. It continues as follows:Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
This "greatest weight" that Nietzsche mentions as one possible reaction does not refer directly to eternal recurrence itself but to paralyzing "decisions". This is the weight of morality intruding itself again. Let's have, let's repeat the "good stuff", only joy or pleasure or happiness or "good works" rather then having, repeating fear or pain or suffering or "evil" deeds. But making our life truly "better" (not just looking better) is not so simple, indeed it is eternally problematic. The universe is playing a joke on us.
Let's take joy as an example. True deep thunderous joy, not the posed joy seen on faces in advertising or "positive thinkers", is always preceded by its yin-yang partner, by a period, long or short, of fear. The patient receiving a lab report ruling out cancer, the successful flight from a war zone, victory in battle, getting a good mark on a final exam in college, the landing of a good job . . . all these joys are preceded by fear of one sort or another - the more fear, the deeper the joy. Smaller joys are surrounded by smaller fears. So trying to fill your life with joy (and the other good things) is a stage for comedy. Life is both giving us it's greatest imperatives (for example, the essence of our pain, distress and suffering is to fight or run away from them) and joking with us . . . but we don't get the joke.
No, the paralyzing weight of decision is the moral game revisited: "will this save me from death?" Forget it. Ride your spirit instead.
All my life I have loved periods and moments of sadness. It seemed to me to be a noble emotion, both hurtful and sweet. However, I'm not quite sure where it fits in the belief of eternal personal recurrence . . . because . . . you never really say "goodbye" to your loved ones, you say, "see you in 30 years" or just "see you soon".
Perhaps animals are right. They never cry. Their periods of mourning seem very short or
not there at all.
Morals are silly and poisonous. You will not "save" your children in any way. Your "responsibilities" to them are physical protection (food and basic shelter), making their childhood childlike (90% of which is leaving them alone) and enjoying their company as much as your spirit can (since you will be spending eternity with them). Until the rest of your neighbors and fellow citizens give up their religious and/or self-realization moral crusades (which may be never) you'll also have to gently protect them from your neighbors.
Social and moral pretensions dissolve and you are left watching these wonder-ous, miraculous beings. If there is an ounce of play left in your spirit you can interact with these play-teachers and you're in the best heaven that life can give.
The life you live continues uninterrupted for eternity, repeating itself. Knowing this, a long life does not seem so important as it used to be. Your body naturally strives for a full and fruitful life. However the higher spirit of your body knows that whether you live 40 or 80 or 20 or even 5 years, it is not too important. You can take risks.
Awareness is the world's mystical experience. Give the world a thrill. Become a spiritual adventurer.
All the wasted energy of making believe you continue after death evaporates. The world appears. Adventures can begin. Of course your world contains numerous people who will not like anyone exposing, mocking or even ignoring their social fantasies. You still play the social games - only they're not important anymore. Those close to you, family and friends, probably won't understand. It doesn't matter. They are more real and more lovely to look at than ever. You respond as you always have, but without the fear, without the edge. Laughter is always very close . . . but unseen.
Urges to preach "The New Awareness" to yourself or others give you a hearty laugh. It is as self-contradictory as a zen koan.
Nietzsche's "love of fate", "that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity" becomes more real to you.
There's no one to save, no one to bring to self-realization, no one even to awaken. Either you're destined to have the thought of eternal recurrence hit you or you're not.
What kind of adventures will you have? No one can tell you. It's in your spirit and only you can ride your spirit.