Nietzschean striving vs. the sinkhole of indifference

[Asolsutsesvyl]

That's both nice and connected to what I had in mind, but at a distance from it.

The personal "itch" is old -- at least 15 years or so -- and changing and growing in the years thereafter, going through various stages until what also came to mind for you is more clearly in sight, and it remains to see what happens next. But earlier on, that nice new beginning is not close, but instead at the end of a long and dreary tunnel. The "itch" is something that makes it impossible to fully relax, to fully feel at home in any way of life, until reaching the other end of that tunnel.

Life cannot really be good on the wrong end of it, but while it is so, it is subtly maddening how it is usually impossible to communicate any of the deep question and sense of something vaguely not quite being right, with others in general, as it seems like almost nobody is able to feel anything connected to it. But all hope and fear tied to the value of existence can seem related to it.

I read on Wikipedia about Nietzsche's word play, lost in the English translation, which may be related to this. Related to the metaphor of life as a rope or bridge, he juxtaposed a word usually associated with downfall and doom with a word usually associated with (successful) crossing and transition. (That particular word play is straightforward for me, as I can see that it works exactly the same in Swedish.)

That kind of tension between opposites, and vague sense of not knowing what is what, has to do with it. And in earlier stages, the more I learned years ago from an external "authoritative" source, the stronger the tension between opposites became, instead of lesser, and the greater the subconscious confusion, until something happened like "The Tower" in the Tarot. That was not the middle in time, but it was roughly the middle in archetypal patterns, I think. Afterwards I seem to be closer to the good end, the doom is gone, even when life is confusing or feels hopelessly stuck in the moment. Something much lighter often breaks forth, without the old sad weight that used to hang on to what was more lighthearted.

Another sci-fi metaphor comes to mind, related to this tension between opposites (down vs. up). A bit silly perhaps, but a poignant cover image:

(And of course, there's the point that the original title was "Successors of Time", those who succeed time and take its place at its end, but the English translators found that too weird and replaced it, hence: doom.)

Though there I make something meaningful of the staircase, as a different variation on the theme which Nietzsche's "rope" or "bridge" was also used for, a journey to a different stage. In Mouravieff's Gnosis books, a staircase symbolizes a 7-note journey across an octave of development. (Related to the work on the 7 rays in the Ra material -- no detailed comparing yet done that I know of.) The staircase is formed so that steps would crumble if people stop climbing for too long. Not many climb it, but having crossed a first threshold into beginning to do so, there is no way back, and the journey goes up (and possibly down again) until a second threshold is finally reached, and a new beginning with it, or time runs out for humanity to develop further.

Why can people only go forward from the first threshold, and not back to before it? Because the value of everything changes when a deeper learning takes place. Happy or not, successful or not, what remains then is a striving, until it reaches success or failure in some definite way, and the personal fate and its relation to all else no longer seems as if hanging shakily over an abyss being crossed... And that first-stage deeper learning can take place early in life -- maybe the mysterious time/space self decides everything about when such learning can "click", in one person at age 15, in another at age 51, etc. The nature of further deeper learning after that, after the center of meaning shifts away from the essence of "ordinary life" in social and material aspects, is far more mysterious and the kind of stuff having to do with the real meaning of how people develop and what they do, and so also the law of confusion in full force.

Well, that's both long and the best -- but, rather "textbook" -- answer I have so far, but it's possible others may have some fresh angle to it, perhaps short and simple.