Friday, March 6, 2009

Circle of Life

In Thursday's class we talked about the motions of change, which were either linear or cyclical.  In the cyclical sense of discussion we talked about how you are always going back to where you started without diverging.  We have always heard the circle of life meaning that we know that we will live and then ultimately die, which happens to the population as a whole but, on an individual level could we consider our existences as being cyclical or close to linear?
At first I was viewing life as if we had 'asymptotes', where we started low at birth and then slowly climbed till death were someone else(after the asymptote) would continue our lives.  This to me makes sense on an individual level because after death we are just nothing in the physical form. Then my question would be if this was the case what happens to the soul? Does it live on or does it cease as we do?  When I was almost certain that life contained a infinite number of asymptotes, the thought of reincarnation started to sway me towards the idea, on an individual basis, of the cyclical life.  You die but your soul cares on in another form.  This gives us the circular motions of life that Aristotle was talking about.  
On an individual basis, would the idea of life be cyclical or linear?  Reincarnations? or Linear with asymptotes?

1 comment:

  1. I would say that an individual life is cyclical. It also depends on what you believe. In the case with religious believers, life is never-ending and you have a life after your presence on Earth. We live our lives with the purpose to achieve a great afterlife. Even if one does not believe in the religious afterlife, your soul is still living in those people who you’ve impacted. It is your spirit that lives inside of your loved ones. We are all constantly impacting the world and changing others lives. This continues the cycle of humanity as we pass along our spirit from one person to the next.

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