In follow up to the last post and discussion that I had with Aussiescribler, it seems that Nietzsche understood this deeper process of reconnection and wrote further about human kind having had lost touch with his nature through this separation. The slaves of ” modern ideas” are the children of a fragmented, pluralistic, sick weird period that had lost the capacity for true happiness.
Nietzsche defines the Dionysian experience as “A drive toward unity, reaching beyond personality, the quotidian, society, reality, across the chasm of transitoriness: an impassioned and painful overflowing into darker fuller, more buoyant states; an ecstatic affirmation of the toatality of life as what remains constant – not less potent, not less ecstatic – throughout all fluctuation; the great pantheistic sharing of joy and stress which blesses and endorses even the ghastliness, the most questionable elements of life; the eternal will for regeneration, fruitfulness, recurrence;the awareness that creation and destruction are inseparable.”
That’s a powerful quote. I’m yet to read Nietzsche, but I have a couple of his books on my shelf – On The Genealogy of Ethics and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
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He has a lot of wonderful things to say and it seems that he understood the risks. It may be that he succumbed to his efforts. I understand the difficulty involved in letting go of that armour of personality that seems, in the end, not to really serve us. He is quite contradictory at times seeming to have lost his way at times. I think that he was aware that this is a part of the risk. A slow process of unfolding has served me better. I don’t think that I could have tolerated a rapid unraveling. My sense is that Nietzsche was on to something that couldn’t be reflected or expressed or even understood in a conventional way. But his ability to explore and capture that in his writings is fascinating.
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