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ATARAXIA

There would never be any disruptions to mental stability if extended difficult situations and ways of coping with them were included in the general education curriculum before young people become warped and twisted by general expectations and the search for permanent happiness and safety.

The daily automatic, ritual-filled hustle and bustle denies us access to selfless things or keeps us away from them.

To see through the recurring patterns of perception, and to slip out of the deceptive traps of  the blind eye and the ear full of sounds means to deny the separateness of ego and of any aspect of being. Recognizing this entrenched cognitive bias, the illusion of the world and of thinking itself, could lead to the emergence of a completely new science and, consequently, to a new form of human civilization. This process, however, would require a thorough language reform, as it is not possible to eradicate a cognitive bias using a language founded on it.

The problem of language, its poverty and inadequacy is all too clear here. The language we need would need to have a more poetic and more ethereal grammar and a completely neutral syntax.

It’s high time we stopped contemplating the possible ways of searching for the truth. When our mind focuses on its own activity, it gains sharpness of vision, and its usual nourishment recedes.

This prescription seems to provide a firm foundation on which to build a sufficiently coherent whole. No doubt it is a great discovery that the cognitive apparatus itself becomes the object of cognition in the process.

The attitude of ataraxia, extolled by the Greek skeptics, is the archetype of man freed from human concerns. Those who succeed in developing it in themselves get off the ground, as it were, getting rid of all weight.

Photo by Jacek Dziubiński
Translated by Miron Rusek