Thank you so much for clarifying this contradiction. Your wording is powerfully clear. This may be the very contradiction I struggle with. I do not want to be deluded into thinking that civilization is the cause of all our ills, and must embrace that life itself, to its very core, may be perceived (by itself) to be some kind of VIRUS.
"the thinking-animal DESPISES and is MORTIFIED by limitation. The Apollonian Nightmare."
Our consciousness allows us to detect that, through the process of birth, we are trapped in a predicament where we must eat food to survive. One thing that stuck with me from the Upanishads, the translation I read, that is, is that we are all Eaters-of-Food. This is not an enviable position to be in.
Your assessment is profound, Silenus:
If one were to take it so far, therein lies the contradiction and evolution seems to "defeat" itself in it's own created awareness. What is considered an example of evolutionary fitness really becomes a detriment (the refusal to create suffering and need i.e. procreation).
This actually helps me explain the contradiction rolling around in the Fire in my mind:
Suppose I were to flip the script of Colin Wilson's THE MIND PARASITES, and proclaim that Life Itself is the Original Virus/Mind_Parasite, and that the only real way to resist or escape the snare of Life would be to refuse to create suffering and need via procreation. It would require an abundance of reason, an impossible degree of reason! It is nightmarish, so intensely so as to be comical. And that, too, is a bit of a contradiction, that any of the sickest members of our species might dare to find anything to laugh about here … Not the inane laughter of sit-com TV, but the the laughter hinted at by what Kurt Vonnegut's sister, Alice, called "slapstick" --- "so cruelly absurd as to be funny."
There may even be some humor in the contradiction that one seems to have to go mad to see the truth, or to catch a glimpse of the depths …
There are those who wish to keep it simple. They want us to chill, to lighten up.
Lay down in the horizontal position and moan. Curl under blankets. Do not volunteer to join any armies. Vow to be the last living coward on earth, the last honest thinking man standing, or just laying down in horizontal position under blanket … seeking the unconscious depths … merging with the primal, the unknowable.