The Ouroboros Question

“All of this has happened before, and will happen again.”

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I was watching a discussion on social media a few days ago about modern myths that we all accept. The person who began the discussion started it off with a fun question that ran something like this: “What modern myths do we all accept as true, without much proof (or any proof) that they’re real?”

People gave lots of answers, some better, some worse. And then, one person responded with a bombshell that went something like this:

“That we can ‘get over’, or heal from, or ‘move past’ traumas and emotional injuries”.

I think this answer might have punched a bit deeper than the people participating in the conversation could comprehend. And it punched deeply into me, because as a former professional counselor and therapist, I was taught years worth of ways to help other people heal from traumas and injuries. More than that, I was taught to believe that healing from traumas and injuries was possible.

For one long, dark, and vacuous moment I let myself entertain the possibility that “healing”, as we all believe in it, might be an empty myth that we all accept; just another empty myth to stack alongside countless others that we’ve been raised to believe in.

And then my social self pushed back: “Hold on now, you’ve known people that healed”, it told me. “You know that the human organism, as with all organisms, is designed to heal. You’ve been hurt yourself in the past, and you’ve felt healing changes come over you, over time.”

But did I? Or was that just a thing I told myself later, a “re-story”, as my former therapeutic colleagues would have called it, after the initial pain of a hurt was dimmed enough that I could introduce new rationales for why it happened and how it had changed me? Wasn’t there still pain somewhere inside, and not just for myself but for everyone I ever knew who had been hurt somehow?

Surely emotional healing is a thing nearly everyone has experienced. We all have a memory of a time, long ago, when a bad thing happened and we got hurt, but months or years later, it didn’t feel so bad anymore. Is that not healing? Doesn’t “time heal all wounds” as the old saying goes? Surely healing is real, and we can move on or get over things?

* * *

If emotional healing was a myth, it would be a myth our society needed to invent, because we couldn’t live around other people, or face each day with its needful (and often difficult) labors and mind-numbing social duties, if we didn’t believe in healing.

Life is hard for many reasons. Interactions with others are hard at times, for many reasons. Having to face these hardships is made easier (and maybe even possible) by a sincere belief that we can heal, improve, overcome difficulties, and be stronger in the future.

But what’s real in all of this? Is healing real as we want to think? Does it exist like we (usually) think it does? Can we ever know? Have we somehow misunderstood or mis-worded our own feelings, or what happens to us over time?

We might wonder about the real existence or nature of “healing” where emotional injuries are concerned, but we can’t doubt the existence of pain, misery, and suffering. Those are certainly real, and tragically common. Is there a best response to them?

I don’t think the answer to that last question is a simple one because pain, misery, and suffering are not usually simple things. But I have long treasured one perspective (which came to me from the words of a very strange man) which I think can help some people, and so I’m going to share it.

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The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has a bit of a scandalous presence in certain circles of our world today, mostly because his wickedly clever, insightful, and idiosyncratic ideas are the social equivalent of a wild horse crashing through an upscale store full of delicate glasswear.

Nietzsche sometimes gets a poor reading, and has a dodgy reputation in many modern circles (and some not-so-modern). Some of his works presented direct challenges to our most cherished cultural beliefs and assumptions, and that seldom leads to a writer being remembered fondly in the mainstream.

His other works were rousing poetic studies of what it meant to be a strong person or individual in the face of the moronity of the collective. He was interested in the cycles of history, and how the end of religion (or culture) mattered, and what it meant.

Later associations of Nietzsche’s work with fascism or the like (which came decades after he died) were unfair and distorted, though you can seldom convince many people these days of that. It’s not Nietzsche’s fault that a few dark-minded people (like his sister) got thrills from their own malnourished takes on something he wrote; this is the fate of many writers who dare to leave behind their words for the uncertain future.

Nietzsche had one philosophical perspective which many people often associate with him, called “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same”, also called The Eternal Return. And that perspective has a lot to say to us about the questions I have asked above. If you can be patient with me for a few moments, you’ll see why.

Whether or not Nietzsche literally believed in The Eternal Return, or if he only pondered it as an existential thought-exercise in how we might understand life or live better lives, is not known. He appears to have gone back and forth with this at different times in his life.

* * *

Nietzsche thought that a truly strong or superior person (which he sometimes called an übermensch) would be the sort of person who accepted their life and their Fate completely. Nietzsche called this “Amor Fati”, the “Love of Fate”, and he meant to communicate that a strong person not only accepted their Fate, but went further and loved it. A strong person would not want a single thing to be different about their lives.

To determine whether or not a person could really accept or love their Fate, Nietzsche proposed a perilous thought experiment. He asked people to consider the idea that everything that happens in our lives doesn’t only happen once, but will happen again, and then again- for eternity.

Every pain, trauma, or devastation that has ever happened to you will happen again. And again. And this will never end: this is eternal. When you die, your life just repeats, forever. Further, by extension of this idea, All the horrible things that ever happened to you have happened many times before, too.

If you really believed that, could you still love your Fate, or your life? Every horrible thing that ever happened in the world, in history, will also repeat again eternally, and has been happening since forever. Can you accept that, and even find a way to love it?

It’s very easy to say that you accept your Fate (or even “love” it) if you believe that the harms you have suffered are all behind you, safely in the past. But what if they are not?

What if every harm you ever knew is not only behind you, but in front of you too? Not only moving away from you in the past, but towards you in the future, as well? And what if they’re going to keep coming to you, endlessly, for all eternity?

A person who can really consider this, really believe this, and still say “Yes, I’m on board. I accept this and don’t want to change it at all” is a person who might be able to Love their Fate. But as for the rest of us (who doubtless find this unacceptable in many ways) the situation is different.

* * *

The idea of time being an eternally-repeating and fixed thing is a very ancient idea. The just-as-ancient image of the Ouroboros Serpent, the snake eating its tail, is considered to be a symbol of cyling and re-cycling time; it is thought a symbol of eternity in this way.

“Eternity” is a strange concept, not easy to rationally embrace. The best the rational mind can do is think of it as a “thing without end”, but that “thing” generally must be an ordinary thing, like linear time.

Eternity might be a trans-rational experience, but we don’t have language for that. We can only imagine ourselves existing in a way that never ends, and with “ourselves” comes the things we are familiar with- living spaces, life-situations, our emotions, and all the like. Our lives repeating over and over forever is a conception of eternity, but one deeply enmeshed with a lot of ordinary ideas.

But that has value for us in terms of these thought experiments: it makes them personal and it connects them to our emotions. Our emotions are the point here; in this discussion we are talking about emotional pain and its healing. Can Nietzsche’s thought experiment help us at all? I believe that it can, but not for the reasons we might expect.

All of our Ancestors once believed that “time” was a repeating, cycling, renewing thing. The belief in linear time (with every discrete moment of time being unique and non-repeating) is a much later belief, and one of the beliefs which laid the foundations for the Western world as we know it now. But it is still just a belief, a story. It is a belief and a story that we never question, or that we find unquestionable, but that doesn’t change anything about what it is.

What if the older conception of time is the truer one? What if it has a real and eternal underlying reality? What if time isn’t what we’ve been taught that it is, and if it isn’t… what else isn’t what we’ve been taught it is?

There’s room here to ask the Ouroboros Question: what if the Eternal Return is real, and very personal to every one of us? What if eternity will be our lives repeating, forever?

If it was true, and every hurt or harm you ever suffered was not only behind you, but in front of you, forever, would that change how you lived your life tomorrow? If a God magically appeared before you now, and revealed that this was true to you, how would it change you?

* * *

Nietzsche’s thought experiment has something very powerful to say about the way deep emotional injuries work in our psyches. When you’ve suffered a bad enough emotional injury, it often affects you as though it’s happening to you again and again.

We don’t need a literally true story about eternally repeating time or endlessly-repeating lifelines to experience this aspect of the “eternal return”: if you’re suffering an emotional injury of sufficient strength, you already know what it’s like to have it happening again and again.

We sometimes put modern names like “PTSD” (post-traumatic stress disorder) on this experience, but it may not be a simple linear disorder; it may be the very rhizomic nature of strong emotional injuries. Real pain, soul-deep pain, might be Ouroboric in its nature. And further, despite what we want to think, we might not be able to change the nature of that pain.

The myth of healing might fail us in the face of such power. Much as with the grief of losing a loved one, some say that “healing” is only possible once we accept the way the grief has changed us, and find a way to live as those new kinds of beings we have become.

And I think there’s some wisdom to this; I don’t think anyone can really “get over” something like the loss of a child or a beloved other. They can only become comfortable with the new person such a grief will make them into, and integrate the lasting pain of that into their lives.

But let’s go back to the Serpent Eating Its Tail. If you discovered that your life was going to repeat, exactly as you have lived it, in every conceivable detail forever, how might this change you?

One answer to that question might be “If every bad thing that ever happened to me before is going to repeat forever, then when I wake up tomorrow I am going to go out and make very amazing, beautiful, good things happen. I’m going to create beautiful things, because they will be eternal, too. If my life fills with enough eternally beautiful things, that will offset the eternally painful things. That will tilt my eternally-repeating story into one that has far more positive in it, than negative. If I have to live it forever, over and over, that’s what I’ll do.”

And that would be very sensible. In fact, this solution does several remarkable things: it doesn’t tangle itself in unchangeable past events, and it avoids the whole debate over whether or not healing is possible at all. Even if healing wasn’t possible, the future feels full of possibilities, and we all typically agree that good things can happen in the future if we’re lucky enough, or if we set our minds to it. The future is something we can work with.

Often, in therapy, people make it a goal to break the power they feel the past has over them. They want to live for the present and the future, and stop being so hung in past hurts. That’s not a bad goal to have, from the therapeutic perspective: the more people focus on their present situations, their presently-existing strengths and resources, and what good things are possible for the future, the better their therapeutic outcomes tend to be.

It’s not that insight can’t be gained from exploring past situations; some insight of that sort can be very helpful. But the perspective I learned in school was that “insight therapy”, largely born from the old Freudian institution of psychotherapy, has large limitations on its power to make good or lasting outcomes.

And I have found this to be true in my own life, as well as in the lives of many clients and patients. The past can become a dangerous kind of “dream life” that we re-live over and over, and it can steal power from emotional strength in the present. It can steal power from attention to the present, and from the good things that might be around us right now. It can limit our imaginations about what the future could be.

* * *

If the Fates let me wake up tomorrow, I’ll make it a point to get up, and do something very pleasurable and good for myself. The bad may be eternally bad on some level, but the good is eternally good, too. This forever-repeating story of my life (if that’s what it is) will not only be a horror show; it will have comedy elements, passionate elements, proud elements, pleasurable elements, and outrageously beautiful ones, too.

And every time I tune in (as I will be doing forever) I’ll have those, too. Forever. In the midst of my darkness, there will be comic relief, the relief of love found or cherished, the relief of joys celebrated. Forever.

Hurts have a way of possessing our minds. If we are not careful, the whole stories of our lives can become defined by what hurt us, and that hardly seems balanced or fair. The problem is that neither life nor emotions are “fair”; we are the kinds of creatures who tend to focus on the dangers and miseries more than safeties and joys.

There could be something biological compelling this fact; dangers are, after all, things that might bring this whole life to an end, so maybe they deserve extra focus. And real pains and traumas are like that, too.

And yet, if we don’t find a way to recognize this in ourselves, we may plunge into defining our beings and our lives by nothing but the worst things that ever happened to us. And that would be the final victory of our pains over us.

Some of the clever devils reading this blog may be saying “hold up- if the Eternal Return is real, then how can this prescription of yours be real? Even if I did get inspired by this talk to get up tomorrow and do something great, I’m not changing anything. If I do something great tomorrow (by this theory) this wouldn’t be the first time the great thing happened. The great thing would have happened before to me, many times.”

Those clever devils might be taking this analysis a bit far- or at least, by taking it to its logical conclusion, they are missing my point. But Nietzsche (I think at times anyway) would have applauded them.

He would have said “Right- you can’t change anything except maybe how you feel about reality, or how you react to it in ways. And the übermensch doesn’t want to change it (because it can’t be changed) and the übermensch loves unchangeable reality, on its own terms and for what it is.”

That’s all very fair. But what if, also in a clever-devil way, Nietzsche’s thought experiments were intended to make people consider deeper acceptance from a novel, imaginative, and potent angle? What if these experiments were (consciously or not) intended to inspire some people to get out and make something great with their lives?

* * *

The Eternal Return can be understood as an existential laboratory of thought, or as a metaphysical/ontological reality. To the extent that it is existential, it isn’t making a cosmological declaration that everyone is trapped in some eternally repeating system of endless re-plays; it only wants us to honestly imagine that we might be, and see how that might affect us.

We can’t haphazardly blend the existential with the ontological in this case without destroying (to a large degree) what good things the existential exercise might do for us and our lives. And I personally think it can do great things. It can inspire real therapeutic changes in people, and implant them with real motivations towards greatness.

And it does it in a way that isn’t suffering-centered, but beauty, achievement, and pleasure-centered, and maybe even redemption-centered in terms of a life. It does it in a way that isn’t unduly or harmfully obsessed with any past, but focused on filling life with a lot of positive present moments, knowing that they each can (and somehow will) become deeply impactful, too. And believe me, all of this is permeated with real healing power and potential.

Here’s a clever devil addition: I’m about to post this blog- but if these Ouroboric ideas have their way, it can’t be the first time this blog was ever posted, right? This blog has happened before and will happen again, forever. I consider this blog a message of hope, and so it’s an honor to have been the vessel for messages of hope many times before. It’s also a joy to know this message of hope will continue to happen, forever. And if it helps only one person in that eternity, that’s more than enough.