cyclical process

I have seen a lot of anger, men­tal an­guish, and de­feat on the many so­cial me­dia plat­forms as of late. Where­as I have no con­crete so­lu­tion to this I think many minds of the past have giv­en us a nice frame­work on how to con­quer our ex­is­ten­tial crises and I hope in some small way this helps.

Pre­pare for a long one. Ni­et­zsche in Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra laid out what he be­lieved to be a map of hu­man growth. The stages be­ing Sheep, Camel, Lion, and Child.

sheep
The sheep takes no risk for fear of dis­com­fort, many of us know peo­ple re­signed to live in such a state and of­ten it will al­le­vi­ate the bur­den of dis­com­fort but forces the life to be for­get­table and squan­dered in many re­gards.

camel
The sec­ond stage is that of the camel, evolv­ing into a beast of bur­den who is no longer afraid of dis­com­fort but bends the knee to the sense of ac­cept­ed so­cial norms in the form of things it is sup­posed to do, cursed to live in the cage of ‘thou shall.’ Thou shall get a high­er ed­u­ca­tion, thou shall have chil­dren by 25, thou shall get a real job, thou shall fol­low this re­li­gion, thou shall have man­ners. A strong crea­ture but it lives nev­er ques­tion­ing the rules and reg­u­la­tions that it has been told are uni­ver­sal and inar­guably true.

lion
Some camels even­tu­al­ly awak­en one day and see the ridicu­lous­ness that is this beau­ti­ful playpen it has been locked in­side of, and evolve to the next stage where it be­comes a lion. An­gered at the con­di­tions and rules, it now de­mands to fight, the ab­sur­di­ty of be­ing forced uni­ver­sal truths makes it crave true free­dom. It now knows that it has the will to pow­er to de­stroy the pen it has been locked in, to cre­ate its own tru­ly free ex­is­tence that only it can de­cide what is true and mean­ing­ful. Even­tu­al­ly af­ter slay­ing the beast known as ‘thou shall’ the lion has earned its free­dom and is tru­ly with­out ex­ter­nal bonds. This comes with a cri­sis of its own though, hav­ing de­stroyed every­thing it knew to be true it is left ut­ter­ly and tru­ly alone with noth­ing of pre­vi­ous mean­ing at­tached to it.

child
This brings us to the fi­nal stage, the child. Hav­ing crushed its en­tire pre­vi­ous world it is left to cre­ate one of its own lik­ing, one where life can be free and joy­ful. One where its own will is the ab­solute and its own dreams and pas­sions are the true guide through ex­is­tence. No longer does it care what the ex­ter­nal world tells it to be true, it knows its own truths and glee­ful­ly plays through life en­joy­ing every mo­ment and craft­ing a re­al­i­ty that was al­ways avail­able. Ex­is­tence is now per­son­al­ized and the true will to pow­er ex­ists only from with­in, no longer is it forced into a con­crete iden­ti­ty, it con­stant­ly lets bad ideas go in or­der to build new more pre­cious val­ues. Many ar­gue this con­cept is not a straight line, more of a cycli­cal process that we must be con­scious of and ac­cept­ing of.

All of this long state­ment just to get the point across that we are all grow­ing no mat­ter what stage we’re at, stop let­ting the ex­ter­nal world de­cide your in­ter­nal re­al­i­ty. Hope this is valu­able to some­one who has nev­er seen this con­cept be­fore.
 

—lo­gan shep­ard

Flom­mist Lo­gan Shep­ard is a philoso­pher at heart, an artist in spir­it, and a dic­ta­tor in thought. You can think of him like a mod­ern Dio­genes sans the whole be­ing home­less thing. Copy­right © 2018 Lo­gan Shep­ard.

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