Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...
Post a Comment
Read more

What do we marry?

  The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories ), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale. Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they ca...
Post a Comment
Read more