It is because we have for thousands of years looked into the world with moral, aesthetic, and religious predispositions, with blind prejudice, passion or fear, and surfeited ourselves with indulgence in the follies of illogical thought, that the world has gradually become so wondrously motley, frightful, significant, soulful: it has taken on tints, but we have been the colourists. Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)
Homer, besides being a poet, seems to knew many other useful things. For example, the undiluted wine we drink is probably a mistake, not to say dangerous. In certain parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, he shows us that they used to dilute wine up to twenty times.
Worry:
- The source of anxiety
- Habitual thinking about possible negative events
- “A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work”
- Involve thoughts and images
- Basically thoughts about negative outcomes that could potentially occur
- Worry circuit – People preoccupied with solving potential problems, they haven’t developed
- Healthy response – Replaying information back and forth between cortex and amygdala – shifting smoothly from one idea to another
Only before the battle, he proposed plenty of food and wine (without clarifying if it was diluted), so that the men could endure the whole day in war without feeling weakness in the knees. He also praises sweet wine that gives courage to the heart. (Homer, Iliad 9.167-170 )
The human intellect, upon the foundation of human needs, and human passions, has reared all these “Phenomena” and injected its own erroneous fundamental conceptions into things. Late, very late, the human intellect checks itself: and now the world of experience and the thing-in-itself seem to it so severed and so antithetical that it denies the possibility of one’s hinging upon the other Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)
Or else summons us to surrender our intellect, our personal will, to the secret and the awe-inspiring in order that thereby we may attain certainty of certainty hereafter. Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)
In case of serious injury, he talks about extracting an arrow from the thigh, washing it with warm water, and applying soothing drugs to the wound. And all this was done by Patroclus, who had learned it from Achilles, who had learned it from the centaur Chiron many years before Hippocrates. (Homer, Iliad 11.829-832)
Anxiety
- Essentially to recognize that perfectionistic expectations are a source of anxiety
- Placing unrealistically high standards on self or others
- Shame – Feeling that other people will perceive in a negative way
- Guilt – Focused on self-evaluation
- Involve a feeling of unacceptable behaviour
- Emotions from the frontal and temporal lobes of the cortex
- Catastrophizing activation
- Tenderncy to see minor problems or small set-backs as a huge disaster
In another passage (Odyssey 2.376, Home talks about weeping. Excessive weeping affects the complexion, at least women’s. Be careful, weep in moderation!
From this world of conception, it is in the power of science to release us only to a slight extent – and this is all that could be wished- inasmuch as it cannot eradicate the influence of hereditary habits of feelings, but it can light up degrees the stages of the development of that world of conception, and lift us, at least for a time, above the whole spectacle. Perhaps we may then perceive the thing-in-itself is a meet subject for Homeric laughter: That it seemed so much, everything, indeed, and is really a void – a void, that is to say, of meaning. Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)