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A Balanced and a Tragic Vision of Humankind

In a chaotic universe history has been preaching how to subdue the complex and to organise it under different layers that constitute the way we understand time and co-exist with its archaeology. These concepts were managed by Walter Benjamin and Foucault theoretic practice in a kind of theatre of knowledge and history and are some of the basis of the paradigms of modern thought, at least for the XXth century.

Both authors Walter Benjamin (mainly in his unfinished project The Arcades Project) and Foucault, in different ways, reflected upon the way time and history creates layers through the way mankind manages the perception of things and thinking. Thus time and history are part of an archaeology that ultimately plays with memory and different processes of remembering or forgetting, the values that are kept through history and its relation with the present.

The tragic vision of humankind, involves someone, normally a person of virtue and strong values, ethics who experiences a reversal of fortune and gets in the middle of a critical crossroad where his / her seriousness and dignity array of values, that are the basis of his / her premisses is questioned. This individual than goes through a state of total stress, that seems ultimately irreversible and thus provokes a loose for hope and believes.

This tragic view results in the concept of Tragedy, a catharsis or can we call it now an emotional (dis)orders or cleansing, healing or escape from the world, the reality through the experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the characters in one own drama, stage of life. Also these are not the absolute concepts of the burden of history but some of the nuances that make the burden of history. Nuances that are made of tragic moments sometimes.

Independently of what each one believes, mankind lives an existence of inherent limitations and flaw’s and this concept of tragic and non tragic, mostly present in the western world, in essence is based in the fact of the fear of being able to reach or not the principles of inner peace and balance. These limitations, fears based on past experiences, on the weight of judgment and conflict are ultimately the drivers of the tragic and what makes us have a memory.

That makes one think what might be the best formula to understand that if one wants to get some kind of inner peace to work in so a complex world without values but with a huge perception of memory. To reach this knowledge and balance it requires an acknowledgment of the necessity of transformation and an emotional intelligence for going in the way of connectedness with the environment around you more than to create any kind of conflict with it.

The best way to do that implies that each person urge its acts towards a point where any individual and collective action derives from an energy that has the power to transform and balance the wired complexity of the mind versus the instinct and animalistic of the body in a systematic controlled ability to think and act spontaneously rather than on prejudice towards the affects of fortune.

There is a fragile line between raw emotional intelligence and emotional competency. One kind of plays with an invisible fire, where the rules are rewritten by forces of education, tradition and vulnerability inside the wires of the brain cells, mirror neuron mind and its neuroscience factors. What can one believe in the end is that we are in a body with limitation and in a mind with huge capacities but with powerful black holes. And one can think about working with the flow of the river of the snap social decisions and the personal myths and fictions one constructs through the elements of culture, education and each own physical bodies.

There are no official intellectual definitive “answers” and I think that no one in his own mind might be actually confident that he knows anything with certainty. Everyone tries to get their own how-to-reach-happiness-in-a-number-of-steps in a kind of post-structuralism simplistic vision of the utopian vision, associated with Thomas More, Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, and Thomas Paine… Still the truth is that we are a “lost” species in a world / universe that no one of us can completely understand.

Mankind is indeed a species of chaos and instinct, with a sense of understanding both the move another person is about to make and their feelings, and instantaneously preparation to imitate that movement and feel it. Daniel Goleman, in his books Emotional Intelligence and afterwards Social Intelligence, the New Science of Human Relationships mentions that as a part of “social brain”, a neural circuitry operates while each of us interacts something which explores how emotions are manages in the brain.

But the old question that is the matrix for the tragic (that the Greek literature synthetise in its biggest three writers singers of the tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) or non tragic view of the mankind is what are the ingredients of life success. This is the electric question that everyone at a certain moment has to answer.  How can we synthesize the broad range of topics that keep us focus and balanced? And this questions one needs to do it whether if one looks deep in the broad scientific findings, or whether one tries to draw together the separate strands of research between theory and practice?

And the challenge is how to conduct a way through the believe and not believe. How to drive to a personal transformation that gets a balance between the tragic of mankind (its memory, layers of complexity and negative fears) and my own mankind, the way I live with myself each day. This is the biggest challenge for anyone of us to be willingness to fly beyond the scarcity of consciousness and prejudice. And of course the challenge that can makes us believe and get out of that state of tragic export – how to get absence and live out of judgment and negativity.

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