If you're trying to be good, very good at what you do, or if you love someone with all your heart, or if you want to learn something with all your heart ... you are witnessing the start up of a transcendence engine.
It is automatic. And seems universal.
This brings to mind the 'Beyond Good and Evil' of Nietzsche -
Where he suggests that the strongest people are marked by a cruelty to themselves, according to which they mercilessly expose their every prejudice and assumption in order to dig further into themselves.
"Free spirits are investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible".
(A few years ago - before I read Nietzsche, I used to wonder - why is it that we as a species enjoy cutting off the reproductive paraphernalia (flowers) of another species (plants and trees) ... even for purposes like 'offering' them to constructs like 'Gods'. (and people still thought that I was religious, while I was trying to understand the -nature- of religion.) This would perhaps make Nietzsche put me in the 'free spirit' category.)
Now the question is - is being a free spirit cruel to ones self? and what does cruel mean anyway? and what is this 'self' other than code passed on from media (friends, books, school ... ), DNA from parents... this 'self' to which a free spirit is cruel?
What I feel: Like all dual-memes, cruel/kind dual-meme ends up being transcended as well, it has no easy resolution.
(consider this - every time you breathe, you 'kill' millions of micro-beings as you suck them into your lungs. Every time you eat, some form, some being, some structure has 'sacrificed' itself, for another structure to be created. You are massively violent at a micro scale. Scale, not quality.) How 'kind or cruel' can you be?
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