Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and the Satya Yuga cycle change
Nietzsche, acknowledged by the West as one of its world-historical philosophers, described the “Eternal Recurrence” as his most important thought.
A philosopher deeply influential AND deeply misunderstood, many thought-leaders in the West have assumed Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence was simply a thought exercise by a troubled man who described himself as a “free spirit” and wrote evocative, hard to fathom but intuitively beautiful works like Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Simply a thought exercise to help people “imagine” better lives, and that’s it! One gets the intuition the Eternal Recurrence is a bit more than that!
What is the Eternal Recurrence?
Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his most important thought, but that has not made it any easier for commentators to understand. Nietzsche’s articulations of the doctrine all involve hypothesizing—(or inducing the reader to imagine, or depicting a character considering)—the idea that all events in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through an eternal series of cycles. But the texts are difficult to interpret. All Nietzsche’s official presentations of the thought in published work are either presented in hypothetical terms (GS 341), or extremely elliptical and allusive (e.g., GS 109), or highly metaphorical and quasi-hermetic (Z III, 2, 13), or all three together. Most allusions to the idea, in fact, assume that one already knows what it means—even the claims in Ecce Homo that it is the “fundamental conception” or “basic idea” of Zarathustra have this character. In the early reception, most readers took Nietzsche to be offering a cosmological hypothesis about the structure of time or of fate (see Simmel [1907] 1920; Heidegger 1961; Löwith [1935] 1997; Jaspers [1936] 1965), and various problems have been posed for the thesis, so understood (Simmel [1907] 1920: 250–1n; Soll 1973; Anderson 2005: 217 n28). Many later commentators have focused instead on the existential or practical significance of the thought (Magnus 1978; Nehamas 1980, 1985), or its “mythological” import (Hatab 2005).
In the aftermath of Nehamas (1985), an influential line of readings has argued that the thought to which Nietzsche attributed such “fundamental” significance was never a cosmological or theoretical claim at all—whether about time, or fate, or the world, or the self—but instead a practical thought experiment designed to test whether one’s life has been good. The broad idea is that one imagines the endless return of life, and one’s emotional reaction to the prospect reveals something about how valuable one’s life has been.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy How interesting that the Eternal Recurrence lines up neatly with the Satya Yuga.
According to Bibhu Dev, an independent researcher based in India, in conversation with American spiritual leader Heather Ensworth, the Satya Yuga is a concept from Hinduism that divides time into 4 cycles defined by periods of low consciousness and other periods of high consciousness. It goes against Western assumptions of time as something linear.
Cycles alternate between “golden ages” where humans connect on a much deeper level with the “cosmic consciousness” (who might that be?) while the low period is defined by war, violence, greed, environmental destruction, etc. Pray tell me which period we are in now?
Alluringly, Bibhu Dev states, echoing a contention that’s becoming dominant among vanguard spiritual thinkers, that the Earth is entering a new golden age of heightened consciousness. The evidence for this is extensive, from his own research and textual analysis to the extraordinary archeological findings turning up everywhere demonstrating ancient societies much more advanced than once assumed. There’s also the extraordinary cosmological events currently ongoing.
Satya Yuga is a widely accepted and understood concept in India, at least in spiritual circles, but there’s disagreement about the timing among scholars and texts. Some scholars claim the cycle will not change for another 400,000 years but Bibhu Dev, supported by some classical texts, argues the change is happening now.
Let us look around and see if there’s any evidence of a transition period. Do you see anything? Is time linear or cyclical?
Might we find out soon?
Prophet Nietzsche back in the late 1880s:
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.—
Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None