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Ataraxia: Imperturbability of the Mind

  

  Breathing the depth of the starry night is stimulus enough to feel ataraxia. The whirlpool of movement and change in which my thoughts about the apeiron take shape in flowing words and metaphors detains when it encounters its silence. The concept is in Epicurus: mental imperturbability, a general desire for strifeless existence, a deep longing for a permanent homeostasis. I find particularly interesting the poetic and active dimensions of ataraxia, for the passive ones are also produce by morphine, or by any random process which ends up in a discharge of internal opiates, a mere blind experience in which there is not a symbolic creation which pushes life towards new frontiers.
  In its endless negantropic fight, life looks for equilibria. To stop mental perturbation is to detain its energy demands: existence’s unceasing fire is temporally mitigated and we feel endorphinic peace. Such a negative liberation- mistaken by a road to immortality- if pursued by itself, generates only nihilistic values for our existence, which becomes then a mere being for death, or a bad night at a bad inn. The concept of imperturbability as an ethical end produces only absurd behavior and pathologies, like the ones that we find in the ascetic mystical traditions. Take for instance the idea that a realized being, according to the vedanta and yogic traditions of India, can hear the news of the death of a son in complete ataraxia, a behavior which expresses only a serious pathology or dysfunction of the neural systems of pain, self-induced by hypnotic meditation. The ataraxia proposed by these mystical traditions show a desire of involution to life forms previous to the development of a nervous system. The liminal character of ataraxia has to be tempered with eudaimonic actions: the normal and moderate use of our biological functions. Ataraxia per se implies the destruction of the ethical person and the end of any project for improving our human groups, but when led by eudaimonia it becomes a solid ground for the construction of our social personae.

  Human immortality is not an endless continuation of our petty personalities, the feeble constructions that we make combining a few social personae inherited from our tradition. Our concept of immortality is a symbolic construction which expresses the deep longing force of life-intelligence. It is meaningless if it is not completed by the human ethical action of liberty and by the autonomy of our symbolical constructions: immortality has only meaning in the symbolic context of human freedom as an emergence of life-intelligence. Both finitude and infinite are concepts which form a semantic operator for the mythical rendering of our intuitions of space-time: our personae, our masks, our psychological dimension is neither finite nor infinite, but liminal autopoietical action, communication… canto.

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