Meditation 12: The Most Terrible Thought

What are the worst things that can happen to a human being after dying? An afterlife in Hell?  Repeatedly coming back to a painful earthly existence through reincarnation?  Pure Extinction?  With the possible exception of Pure Extinction, the other alternatives do seem quite terrible, but not as terrible, perhaps, as Friedrich Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of our lives. 

The theory that our lives repeat endlessly is based in cosmological speculation.  Imagine that the universe starts out from the Big Bang.  Later, gravity overcomes the force of the explosion and the universe contracts to a point where we have another Big Bang.  This next universe expands, contracts, and the pattern is repeated to infinity.  One time, the initial conditions a big bang will exactly resemble those that produced our present universe.  Since the same causes have the same effects, everything will unfold just as it did before, and the universe will produce you and me just as we are now, with our personal histories intact.  The result is that we will always live exactly the same life we led the other times this universe materialized.  From birth to death we will repeat the life we live, and live it over and over without end and without relief. 

Of course you will never remember the last time you read this meditation, but that is not the point.  This Aphorism is really an exhortation to live our lives in such an inexhaustible way that we could bear to live it over again forever.  The goal is to live and be able to say "Yes" to one's life in the face of its infinite repetition.  I read this as a challenge for each of us to turn our lives into something like a complex work of art that not even an eternity of repetition can exhaust.  As Nietzsche puts it at the end of Aphorism 341, "The question in each and every thing, "Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. 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?"