marjoramblues wrote:The training and strengthening of will power and self-discipline, is a special topic worth pursuing ( cue new thread I think ? )...there must be many different philo perspectives to this.
How to be master/mistress of your own mind
To be brief:
Will is strengthened just as body is strengthened: with stress.
This stress might be controlled and willed purposefully or brought about and forced upon the individual due to circumstances beyond his control.
I wrote a short essay on it titled
Asceticism. It can be found on my Blog.
Basically it comes down to habituation with need.
Need being the sensation of existing, of being alive.
Nietzsche wrote:What does not kill me only serves to make me stronger.
When the mind/body is stressed and survives the stress it heals thicker, stronger, denser. Now it is capable of coping with a higher degree of stress, need, suffering.
Strength must be understood as a level of weakness.
We are all weak, but the difference in weakness is what makes some stronger than others.
All value judgments are comparisons.
When I say I am stronger or strong, or I am tall or taller, I mean in relation to an other or to an average otherness.
Similarly when I say "I know" I mean I know in relation to an other.
We are all ignorant but not equally so. The difference in ignorance, being superior or inferior, establishes who is more or less knowledgeable; hierarchy.
This is why the notions of omnipotence and omniscience are nonsensical: more metaphors describing the absent absolute, nowhere in evidence and totally contrary to living experience.
They are, in fact, indications of nihilism and self-hatred.
When you say "It is omniscient, omnipotent" you are imagining an entity which is forever above you and you forever below it.
This is the quintessential nature of slavishness, meekness, femininity, herd psychology, slave morality...Judaism and its outcrops Christianity, Islam...and its secular outcrops of Communism, Liberalism, Egalitarianism, Humanism.
Where nature and natural selection functions on disparity and on fitness in comparisons and within environmental conditions, always changing, the weakling, the womanly mind, the coward, the slave dreams of absolute positivity and uniformity it can escape and disappear within.
Let us provide some more definitions.
Nature: the sum of all nurturing.
ergo when someone is anti-nature, anti-world, anti-self (ego), feeling ashamed of himself and his own nature (his own past) he is someone who denies the past and its products: sexual roles, racial disparities.
