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Friday, June 24, 2011

What If You Have to Live Your Life Innumerable Times?

"If I were to live my life innumerable times, I just know that I can no longer live it in exactly the same way because my faith in God has become stronger and this faith has taught me to accept and carry out God's plan for me. The same events may occur but I won't be dealing with them in the same manner. My thoughts and choices will be different."
Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher and poet, contemplates the idea of eternal recurrence as potentially "horrifying and paralyzing", and says that its burden is “the heaviest weight” (The Gay Science, section 341) imaginable.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you – all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again – and you with it, speck of dust! 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 power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie upon your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”


What if you have to live your life innumerable times? Would eternal recurrence be your "heaviest weight"?


In my
loneliest loneliness, I wish that I will soon wake up from a nightmare.

I committed a lot of mistakes in my life that hurt me and the people that I truly care about. I wished that I can undo the wrong things I have done. I sighed the “
if only” phrase so many times. I lived my life not knowing what results my actions will have. If I were to live my life innumerables times, I would like to live it differently each time until I get the best results. But what are the best results? Will I ever see the big picture of my life if I were to live it innumerable times? I wonder if I would be a better and happier person if I were spared of all my sad and painful experiences. Thinking about having to live my life innumerable times is excruciating when I focus on my sufferings and afflictions. However, it is my sufferings and afflictions that fortified my character.

In
Nietzsche's thoughts, the wish for the eternal recurrence of all events embraces “amor fati”, a Latin phrase often translated as “love of fate”. Love of fate is an attitude described as accepting everything in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good. In his writings, Nietzsche repeatedly used amor fati as acceptance and choice of his fate. He wrote (The Gay Science, section 276):
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

Nietzsche sees the world as web-like structure of interconnectedness that necessitates fate. He articulated that
“One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole.”

Simone Weil explains “love of fate” as the duty of accepting God's will, whatever it may be. For Weil, affliction was associated both with necessity and with chance. It is a necessity because it is hard-wired into existence itself, and thus inescapable. The element of chance, also an inescapable part of the nature of existence, is essential to the unjust character of affliction, that is, our afflictions are not usually results or outcome of what we did but they just happened to us for no special reason. In her letter to Father Perrin that was published in "Waiting for God", Weil wrote:
The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment...is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.”

Does this mean that we do not really have freewill? Did Judas Escariot have a choice on whether or not to betray Jesus? Is Satan God's double agent tasked to tempt us so that His will prevails upon us? If our fate pre-destines each of us, what is the reason to plan our lives, to dream, to strive for anything?

Fate, I believe, is
a power beyond our control that decides what happens.

Weil saw that we have natural law and freewill at work in the world. She wrote:
God causes this universe to exist, but he consents not to command it, although he has the power to do so. Instead he leaves two other forces to rule in his place. On the one hand there is blind necessity attaching to matter, and on the other the autonomy essential to thinking persons”.

It is undeniable that each of us experienced freedom of choice in our daily lives. We choose to speak or remain silent. We choose to leave or stay. We choose to accept or resent. We choose to think or not and what to think about. We choose to believe or not. We also decide about values – to lie or tell the truth, to take what is not ours or not, to forgive or avenge. That we are free to think and decide is freewill. Freewill is the ability to choose and act according to the dictates of our own will.

It is also a reality that there are events in life that we cannot control. No matter how much we plan, we can never know how things are going to turnout. We use our freewill to accept and deal with the unexpected events in our lives or to resent what we think is our fate and go through life in misery.

The Lord says, “I alone know the plans I have for you, plans to bring you prosperity and not disaster, plans to bring about the future you hope for.” (Jeremiah 29:11).

God has a plan for us. We have the freewill to carry out this plan or not.

If I were to live my life innumerable times, I just know that I can no longer live it in exactly the same way because my faith in God has become stronger and this faith has taught me to accept and carry out God's plan for me. The same events may occur but I won't be dealing with them in the same manner. My thoughts and choices will be different.


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