Uphill Climb

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
– Winston Churchill

This year has been exceptionally tough and I suppose I did hit rock-bottom due to the fact that I cannot come to terms with change. It’s as if life yanked me off of orbit. But that’s not the worst thing though. Because in the process of healing myself, I abandoned a lot of my ideals. And in doing so, I left behind a wake of poor decision after another wishing I should’ve done things differently.

But then again, we can never truly appreciate things if we only get to see sunshine. Besides, these past few months really put things in perspective – giving me a renewed sense of purpose. I came to the realization that to effectively live Life, one must face it head-on instead of evading and diverting one’s attention with transitory distractions.

With these things in mind, there is no better pursuit than that of unending self-overcoming; translating our multi-fractured self into a multi-functional being. And even if we dismiss the Ubermensch as an unattainable concept, we can still glean from its ideas that undergoing a certain share of pain, struggle and disillusionment is a prelude to a more liberated state – a freedom of the mind if you will.

On articulating the conception of human perfectibility

“Nobody is perfect” says the popular saying and hardly anyone stops to question the sentiment. Most go through life hanging on to the belief that nobody is perfect and it is perfectly normal to mess things up. They fail to grasp the meaning of life, that to transcend its limits, one must pursue perfection instead of letting himself be bounded by the accepted truth of his time.

As Nietzsche would put it, “Do not accept what almost two thousand years of history have taught you to call evil. The existence of the human race is justified only by the exceptional among us – the superman, the Übermensch, whose self-mastery, self-overcoming, sublimation, creativity, strong will to power and ultimately self perfection frees him from the common prejudices and assumptions of the day.

It is arrogant to suppose that we are at the end of our evolutionary chain. Our species is nothing more than a link on a long sequence of evolutionary events towards the Omega point where abstract notions of truth and perfection is manifested physically and realized in living systems. It is imperative that the ultimate goal of humanity, therefore, should be placed on the rearing of a race of Supermen instead of world domination and/or accumulation of riches. Only then can we get back to the metaphorical Eden or Heaven or achieve the state of Nirvana.

Within the total event – the evolutionary process, every subordinate event represents a contribution to the whole. And our contribution, should be something that can lead us to true sapience.