Quick blurb while i’m doing studying and doing my readings.
It’s crazy when studying the great minds of the past, that all the time everything I’ve been thinking is what they’ve thought and written down. The great philosophers and writers of history, all that knowledge. Even though I had never actually studied it, it is unconsciously ingrained into my mind. And all my philosophies are essentially an amalgam from their thoughts. It reminds me of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious of all of humankind. I am in total agreement with everything that I’ve been studying. In fact I had come to epiphanies and realizations about these things before I read about it.
From Plato’s philosophies about the hierarchy of important aspects of human life (i.e. transient temporal things like food, a person’s physical beauty, emotions etc are on a scale on which the highest worth and permanence are – inserting my own beliefs: dreams, ambitions, desire to impact the world, etc – and at the top, the most abstract eternal ideas, concepts, knowledge, philosophy and so forth) and Socratic idea of love in three aspects (1) Physical attraction 2) Interest in person’s activities 3) Interesting in someone’s thoughts/mind/philosophies and beyond, which make a true romantic relationship, and there’s so much more, onwards.
But now I come to a study on Henry David Thoreau and within the first few pages this is what I find: “How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life… But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost… It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before… Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labours of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them… He has no time to be any thing but a machine…The mass of men leads lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation… A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work… What are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left… But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge what he can do by any precedents.” Which is pretty much a lot of the stuff I’ve been saying about our system and mankind’s focus on the menial mundane labor just to ever work for physical necessities. But there is so much more we are supposed to do, and we are capable of. Yet, people delude themselves into thinking this is the end and labor for the “games/amusements”, vacations etc.
Continuing to read through this is an eye-opener. Confirming all that I’ve been thinking. It’s crazy. There’s so much good stuff in historical thoughts. I can’t wait to absorb all this stuff…