Lucretius

Lucretius

On the Nature of Things

Notes from class and reading.

This one spoke to me! Viable options here! The absence of religion can be spiritual!

Epicurian philosophy
Physical being and contentment
Rational self awareness
Social world and friendship

Epicurian “intervention” therapeutic, freedom from pain from body and anxiety of soul.

No next life, no divine beings

Necessities of life should be and are easy to get when limited to fundamentals.
Peace of Mind: requires 1. avoiding unpleasantness with people
2. escape conscience
3. avoid worry towards future (live in the moment!)
4. restrict value to the attainable
5. accept immortality

Some key ideas about the universe;

Atoms and Infinity
Swerve of the atom, a formal principle of the individual consciousness – choice

Combining physical and metaphysical to be at peace with temporary life.

Male/female equality in “the garden”.

Passion to further ideas, self interest, public domain
Does this contradict the life of “sage” or the message?

Utopian philosophy. The “Garden”.

The therapy of desire?

Notes and quotes on book

Science/universal

12. “There is then, intangible space, void and vacuity. Otherwise, movement would be absolutely impossible.”
18 “moreover, even on the supposition that no limit to the division of matter has been established, it must be admitted that particles corresponding to every kind of thing have survived to this day from time everlasting”

36 “Therefore, since neither riches nor rank nor the pomp of power have any beneficial effect upon our bodies, we must assume that they are useless to our minds.”

76 on soul and body
-“Now, the substance of the soul is encased by the whole body and is in its turn the custodian of the body and the cause of its safety, for the two are twined together by common roots and evidently cannot be disentangled without being destroyed.”

79/80 “we are aware that mind is born with the body, develops with it, and declines with it.
“just as the body suffers dreadful diseases and pitiless pain, so the mind manifestly experiences the gripe of cares, grief, and fear; so the natural inference is that it has an equal share in death”
“pain and disease are architects of death –a lesson that the fate of millions in the past has inculcated upon us”

90 on death and afterlife
-“so when we are no more, when body and soul, upon whose union our being depends”
-“and even supposing that the mind and spirit retain their power of sensation after they have been wrenched from our body, it is nothing to us, whose being is dependent upon the conjunction and marriage of body of soul”
93 “you had full use of all the precious things of life before you reached this senile state. But because you continually crave what is not present and scorn what is, your life has slipped away from you incomplete and unenjoyed”

I LOVE THIS BUT WHO THE HELL CAN ACTUALLY MASTER IT?

These ideas are most exciting to me in light of my own struggle to stop regretting past, or fearing future … the happiest moments have always been those where caution is thrown to the wind and I have been fully absorbed in a moment or event without painfully excessive consideration. So rare!

As well as hard as it is to wean oneself of the culturally prevalent narrative of a life after death – one I cling to when I lose someone or a little pet! – for myself I imagine only that I would like to replenish the earth with my leftovers and free the energy that accumulated to make up myself so that it can rearrange itself back into the universe as new potential. I want my body to be thrown into the woods or buried without encasement and a seed of a tree up my nose. Hurrah!