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03/19/12(Mon)16:48 No. 8728286 >>8728248 "The
greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal
after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as
you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and
innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same
succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between
the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of
existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck
of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and
curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have
to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than
this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?" Nietzsche concept
of the eternal return is, I believe, a much more frightening since it is
directly accessible to the modern empirico-scientific mind that at its
core at odds with the mysticism of the formulation of reincarnation,
even though I should stress that they are distinct concepts, the only
thing linking them being the shared concept of repetition and identity. His
reasoning is based on the axioms that a.) time is infinite and b.)
there is a finite amount of matter. Given enough time then, you would
form and reform an infinite number of times, the same things would
happen to you as well as the same things you would do would be eternally
repeated. Of course, there's entropy, which is where it departs from strict science, but the impact of the idea remains unchanged.