"Lament for my cock Sore and crucified I seek to know you Aquiring soulful wisdom You can open walls of mystery Stripshow
How to aquire death in the morning show TV death which the child absorbs Deathwell mystery which makes me write Slow train, the death of my cock gives life
Forgive the poor old people who gave us entry Taught us god in the child's prayer in the night
Guitar player Ancient wise satyr Sing your ode to my cock
Caress it's lament Stiffen and guide us, we frozen Lost cells The knowledge of cancer To speak to the heart And give the great gift Words Power Trance
This stable friend and the beast of his zoo Wild haired chicks Women flowering in their summit Monsters of skin Each color connects to create the boat which rocks the race Could any hell be more horrible than now and real?
I pressed her thigh and death smiled death, old friend death and my cock are the world I can forgive my injuries in the name of Wisdom Luxury Romance
Sentence upon sentence Words are the healing lament For the death of my cock's spirit Has no meaning in the soft fire Words got me the wound and will get me well I you believe it
All join now and lament the death of my cock A tounge of knowledge in the feathered night Boys get crazy in the head and suffer I sacrifice my cock on the alter of silence." [J.Morrison]
"I don't want to be a burden on my children. The most valuable thing I own right now is my freedom, once you lose that and the use of your legs, life becomes misery. My son calls me 'alitis,' a bum, because I won't stay in one place and wait to die. What kind of life is that I ask you, waiting to die. So I wander when begin to feel suffocated." He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag on it exhaling through his nose. "All the money in the world is worthless if you lose your sense of filotimo. There are worse things than poverty." [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
"This obsession with materialism, particularly in the west, has come at the expense of all other human endeavours and, serving the demands of a particular system, has resulted in a loss of human identity, spirituality and natural interconnectedness. We no longer relate to each other as thinking, feeling human beings connected with all of creation intimately but we relate to each other as consuming owners, protective maintainers of that which we own and covet and egotistical misers that take the things that they buy to be what defines them as individual human beings." [Satyr]
"There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright. Afterward you have nothing more to lose. From then on, your erstwhile "serious" pursuits—your spiritual quest for more varied forms of life, your limitless longing for inaccessible things, your elevated frustration with the limits of empiricism—all become simple manifestations of an excessively exuberant sensibility, lacking the profound seriousness which characterizes the man who has penetrated the realm of dangerous mysteries. I'm not talking here of the spiritual calm and empty solemnity of so-called serious people but of a mad tension that puts every moment of your life on the plane of eternity. This profound seriousness cannot be achieved by confronting purely formal problems, no matter how difficult, because they are generated exclusively by our intelligence, not by the total organic structure of our being. Only the organic and existential thinker is capable of this kind of seriousness, because truth for him is alive, born from inner agony and organic disorder rather than useless speculation.
Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art. I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction. Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles? Why don't we want to acknowledge the exclusive value of live truths, of truths born in us and revealing a reality proper only to us?
Why don't we want to accept that one can entertain lively meditations on death, the most dangerous issue existing? Death is not something from outside, ontologically different from life, because there is no death independent of life. To step into death does not mean, as commonly believed, especially by Christians, to draw one's last breath and to pass into a region qualitatively different from life. It means, rather, to discover in the course of life the way toward death and to find in life's vital signs the immanent abyss of death. For Christianity and other metaphysical beliefs in immortality, the passing into death is a triumph, an opening toward other regions metaphysically different from life. Contrary to such visions, the true sense of agony seems to me to lie in the revelation of death's immanence in life.
But why is the experience of agony so rare? Can it be that our hypothesis is entirely false and that sketching a metaphysics of death is possible only by accepting death's transcendental nature? Healthy, normal, mediocre people cannot experience either agony or death. They live as if life had a definitive character. It is an integral part of normal people's superficial equilibrium to take life as absolutely independent from death and to objectify death as a reality transcending life. That's why they perceive death as coming from the outside, not as an inner fatality of life itself.
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner. Metaphysical revelations begin only when one's superficial equilibrium starts to totter and a painful struggle is substituted for naive spontaneity. The premontion of death is so rare in average people that one can practically say that it does not exist. The fact that the presentiment of death appears only when life is shaken to its foundations proves beyond doubt the immanence of death in life. An insight into these depths shows us how illusory is the belief in life's integrity and how well founded the belief in a metaphysical substratum of demonism." [Cioran, On the Heights of Despair]
"There is always a serious danger in repressing something which requires objectification, in locking up explosive energy, because there comes a moment when one cannot restrain such overwhelming power. And then the fall is from too much plenitude. There are experiences and obsessions one cannot live with. Salvation lies in confessing them. The terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. This is why lyricism represents a dispersion of subjectivity; it is a certain quantity of an individual's spiritual effervescence which cannot be contained and needs constant expression. To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself.
The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concentrated. Why is the suffering or loving man lyrical? Because such states, although different in nature and orientation, spring up from the deepest and most intimate part of our being, from the substantial center of subjectivity, as from a radiation zone. One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality. What is unique and specific in us is then realized in a form so expressive that the individual rises onto a universal plane. The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the original source of life. True interiorization leads to a universality inaccessible to those who remain on the periphery.
The vulgar interpretation of universality calls it a phenomenon of quantitative expansion rather than a qualitatively rich containment. Such an interpretation sees lyricism as a peripheral and inferior phenomenon, the product of spiritual inconsistency, failing to notice that the lyrical resources of subjectivity show remarkable freshness and depth. There are people who become lyrical only at crucial moments in their life; some only in the throes of death, when their entire past suddenly appears before them and hits them with the force of a waterfall. Many become lyrical after some decisively critical experience, when the turmoil of their inner being reaches paroxysm.
To be lyrical from suffering means to achieve that inner purification in which wounds cease to be mere outer manifestations without deep complications and begin to participate in the essence of your being. The lyricism of suffering is a song of the blood, the flesh, and the nerves. True suffering begins in illness. Almost all illnesses have lyrical virtues. Only those who vegetate in a scandalous insensitivity remain impersonal when ill, and thus miss that deepening of the personality brought about by illness.
There is no authentic lyricism without a grain of interior madness. It is significant that the beginnings of all mental psy- choses are marked by a lyrical phase during which all the usual barriers and limits disappear, giving way to an inner drunken- ness of the most fertile, creative kind. This explains the poetic productivity characteristic of the first phases of psychoses. Con- sequently, madness could be seen as a sort of paroxysm of lyricism.
For this reason, we should rather write in praise of lyricism than in praise of folly. The lyrical state is a state beyond forms and systems. A sudden fluidity melts all the elements of our inner life in one fell swoop, and creates a full and intense rhythm, an ideal convergence. Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire." [Cioran, On the Heights of Despair]
In Sisyphus, Camus remarks the Suicidal never reflects before death and is not really pushed by immediate pressures, but the germ towards suicide had already set in ages ago, quietly, silently. It ferments over until one fine day, it foams to the surface tipping over who we then call the Suicidal...
It makes one alert to the signs of "spiritual death" and if one is perfectly disciplined, to watch its rise and fall many times over in the human Be-ing and be open to what it speaks to us.
"In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular reluctance about passing on to the next stage. A young man goes through the power process by becoming a hunter, hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food. (In young women the process is more complex, with greater emphasis on social power; we won't discuss that here.) This phase having been successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about settling down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern people indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking some kind of "fulfillment." We suggest that the fulfillment they need is adequate experience of the power process -- with real goals instead of the artificial goals of surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his children, going through the power process by providing them with the physical necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and death. Many modern people, on the other hand, are disturbed by the prospect of death, as is shown by the amount of effort they expend trying to maintain their physical condition, appearance and health. We argue that this is due to unfulfillment resulting from the fact that they have never put their physical powers to any use, have never gone through the power process using their bodies in a serious way. It is not the primitive man, who has used his body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man, who has never had a practical use for his body beyond walking from his car to his house. It is the man whose need for the power process has been satisfied during his life who is best prepared to accept the end of that life." [Kaczynski, Manifesto, 75]
I am ordering in the disordering. I feel this in my bones....I feel it in my pains and unsatisfied needs.
Who doesn’t? The will to live is universal but everyone has a different perspective of what order is. If Order is simply a weaker will submitting to a stronger then the need for order is the need to submit.
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I am always a heartbeat away from death. This gives my life a value.
But is the fact that life is a “heartbeat away from death” truly indicate value? Everyone and everything can make this claim. To think life has value because it is fleeting is to gauge life by the most common event there is, death. What gives life real value is something else. Goethe has said it well when he said: “The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.”
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Who doesn’t? The will to live is universal but everyone has a different perspective of what order is. If Order is simply a weaker will submitting to a stronger then the need for order is the need to submit.
The feminine and the masculine solutions to order. Man wishes to construct order; woman wishes to give herself in its service.
Order is another term for the absent absolute....the Ideal, in opposition to the Real. Many other words can be used, each with a variation in nuance.
This is where the conflict over ideals becomes a struggle over which object/objective will govern out (inter)activities, our willing.
Ephemeron wrote:
But is the fact that life is a “heartbeat away from death” truly indicate value? Everyone and everything can make this claim. To think life has value because it is fleeting is to gauge life by the most common event there is, death. What gives life real value is something else. Goethe has said it well when he said: “The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.”
The indifference, indicating power. To become indifferent is to overcome that "resentiment" characterizing the unbermensch.
The simpletons - over at ILP and elsewhere - associate the term "overman" with dominance over others, when this is but a byproduct of one's self-control, one's self-dominance; power attracting without meaning to, without caring to. For them the instinctual estimation and goal, is prevalent, though they deny its significance in theory.
In fact, here power is outside the master/slave dynamic, as it is aloof, uncaring, indifferent, as a product of its absence of need.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"The death of God cancels the primordial original "behind" the appearance of the simulacrum; thesimulacrum loses its warrant. This induces the invention of alternate strategies for warranting the real,one of which is the seizure of "real time":
Baudrillard wrote:
Our obsession with 'real time', with the instantaneity of news, has a secret millenarianismabout it: canceling the flow of time, canceling delay, suppressing the sense that the event ishappening elsewhere, anticipating its end by freeing ourselves from linear time, layinghold of things almost before they have taken place. (IE 8–9) / It is the fantasy of seizingreality live that continues. . . . Surprising the real in order to immobilize it. (SS 105)
As historical time is associated with cycles of generation and death, so "real time" is associated withtechnical survival: a literal persistence that does not let time achieve an identifiable genesis or closure.Formerly, death was regarded as the passageway, the threshold to the telos of immortality, andelaborate symbolic and ritual systems were called on to bridge this passage of life into death,permitting a notion of spiritual survival. One could not become immortal without dying; it wasnecessary first to throw off this mortal coil. Whereas the "im-mortality" (non-dying) that is soughttoday is a precise inversion of this: an immortality achieved not through dying, but through not dying,through never dying, through refusing to die.
This refusal to die also leads very naturally to the impulse to eliminate sex, which may be achieved anyday now, at least in principle, with the advent of successful human cloning."
A bereaved wife every weekend walks one mile to place flowers on her deceased husband’s cemetery stone. Neither rain nor snow prevents her from making this trip, one she has been making for 2 years. However poignant the scene, and however high our temptation to exclude it from the cold logic of scientific scrutiny, it presents researchers with a perplexing puzzle that demands reflection. The deceased husband, despite all of his widow’s solicitude, cannot return to repay his wife’s devotion. Why waste time, energy, effort, resources—why, in other words, grieve for a social bond that can no longer compensate such dedication?
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Grief… what is it good for?
This does seem to be a good question. I [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] about this a little in a discussion of love and broken hearts a year ago. The emotional pain, and everything that goes along with it, does seem puzzling. Why cry over spilt milk?
Winegard et al. locate the puzzle in costs. This is a key point given the argument that they want to make. As you can see from the opening passage, their idea is that the “time, energy, effort, resources” are being wasted on the dead, who, they correctly point out, are notorious for failing to reciprocate. (I except here of course the Dead Men of Dunharrow, who really came through in a pinch.) Time and resources are being wasted in the sense that they could be used more productively. Walking to the grave in this example, then, carries an opportunity cost, which is the next best thing that one could do with a given resource. (I’m gratified that these authors lean so heavily on the notion of opportunity costs, which I have recently [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in a quite different context.) It’s clear that the puzzle that Winegard et al. have in mind has to do with the very large opportunity costs being paid by those who grieve.
Their explanation is that bearing these costs acts as a signal. Drawing on Costly Signaling Theory (CST), they argue that paying these costs sends signals to other people regarding one’s value as a social partner. Recall from CST that for a signal to convey information, the cost must depend on the underlying quality being signaled. Crucially, the size of the cost must depend on a property of the organism doing the signaling; in the usual example of a peacock’s tail, the cost of a bit tail is marginally lower for higher quality organisms. The authors write:
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We suggest that grief functions like these (and other) hard-to-fake signals because it is costly and conveys information about the underlying traits of the griever. Humans’ prolonged grief response may act as an honest signal of prosocial proclivities, most importantly, of the proclivity to form strong, non-calculated bonds.
Their claim, then, turns on the idea that grief will be less costly for people with greater “prosocial proclivities.” (As a complete aside, this is more or less what the anonymous yet obviously insightful commenter Aliera [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in my “broken heart” post, writing: “…perhaps extreme reactions to unrequited love or rejection (in the form of creative endeavors, passionate manifestos, devotion-displays) might serve as signals of one’s ability and willingness to commit to a romantic partner in general. These signals, then, are actually – and unknowingly – directed toward new potential mates who might now consider the individual attractive as a long-term mate based on the quality, costliness, and honesty of the display.”) In any case, returning to the paper, the argument rests on the idea that less prosocial people have better things to do with their time than more prosocial people (my underlining, their italics):
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A relatively low commitment social strategy, one that consists of cheating and manipulating others, may constitute a viable social strategy… If so, intense grief would cost those who pursue such a strategy more [i]relative to those who are inclined to form strong bonds because their time, energy, and resources would be better spent searching for and exploiting less costly opportunities.[/i]
I find myself puzzled when I take this claim in juxtaposition with the opening vignette. The story about the woman turns on the idea that she could be doing something else with her time and energy. That, indeed, is supposed to be the root of the puzzle: that she is paying substantial opportunity costs by visiting the grave. These costs are supposed to animate the issue in the first place: Why are people paying such huge costs, in the form of all the things that they’re not doing because they’re grieving? It seems clear that the woman in question has more than just the two options of either grieving on the one hand or exploiting others on the other. People have many things they might be doing at any given moment besides those two activities. In short, it seems from the opening vignette that the authors not only concede but require that it be true that grieving carries very big opportunity costs, even if one is a prosocial sort of person. Yet their argument also requires that the opportunity costs of grieving people to be small, at least relative to non-grieving people.
So, while the logic of the opportunity cost argument turns on the idea that non-grieving people have bigger opportunity costs than grieving people, I see no particular reason to believe that the benefits of searching for and exploiting others – the thing that non-grievers are up to – carries especially greater benefits than other activities that either they or grievers might do.
Further, suppose that it were true that, generally, how much one grieves depends on what else one might be doing with one’s time, such that people who grieve have less they might be doing, and so are bearing lower opportunity costs by grieving. In that case, unless one grants that “searching for and exploiting others” is an especially valuable way to spend one’s time, then grieving will wind up, just like other costly signals, signaling the underlying quality that keeps the signal honest: that one doesn’t have big opportunity costs. This property – not having much else valuable that one might be doing – seems like a puzzling quality to signal, but I suppose it’s possible.
In short, if the asymmetry in opportunity costs for grievers versus non-grievers doesn’t hold, then the rest of the argument in the paper doesn’t hold. I hope I am not misunderstood. I think grieving is indeed mysterious, as my Love post implied. And of course I think the evolutionary point of view will help to clarify matters.
For my part, I’m skeptical in general of explanations that turn on the notion of Types, to use the language of game theory. It seems perfectly plausible to me that many people might form very deep attachments to particular friends, kin, and lovers, yet be very exploitative in other relationships. I have little doubt that people who viciously exploit strangers nonetheless grieve when their parents die, limiting the information that is conveyed by observations of grieving. The fact that people can vary their degree of exploitation versus prosociality over time makes me very skeptical that grief and related emotions have to do with signaling one’s Type. Nothing, as a logical matter, prevents someone from grieving at time one from being exploitative at time two.
Not that I have a much better idea. Tooby and Cosmides [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] a simulation view and a recalibrational view, both of which seem plausible:
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Paradoxically, grief provoked by death may be a byproduct of mechanisms designed to take imagined situations as input: it may be intense so that, if triggered by imagination in advance, it is properly deterrent. Alternatively-or additionally-grief may be intense in order to recalibrate weightings in the decision rules that governed choices prior to the death. If your child died because you made an incorrect choice (and given the absence of a controlled study with alternative realities, a bad outcome always raises the probability that you made an incorrect choice), then experiencing grief will recalibrate you for subsequent choices. Death may involve guilt, grief, and depression because of the problem of recalibration of weights on courses of action.
Don't be a hypocrite Lyssa, who have you exposed yourself to, here, and why?
The answer is obvious.
Neon, you still are under the assumption, that indulging in your own eargasm about females' only value is spreading legs and males having to work hard amounts to doing philosophy.
If I do not say anything, its maybe because I'm working towards a Form of philosophy akin to the zen masters or the Greek sculptors, who thought em-bodying gestures is a kind of speech. The mystery of the Troubadours being liberated or finding salvation in the mere "glance" of a woman has this for its basis. The reason sculpture is such an art is because a slant here, a look there, etc. is enough to speak.
Sculpture is Speech Form-alized.
Some quotes to help you;
"The mind that does not stop at all is called immovable wisdom. Fudo Myoo grasps a sword in his right hand and holds a rope in his left hand. He bares his teeth and his eyes flash with anger. His form stands firmly, ready to defeat the evil spirits that would obstruct the Buddhist Law. This is not hidden in any country anywhere. His form is made in the shape of a protector of Buddhism, while his embodiment is that of immovable wisdom. This is what is shown to living things.
For the man who can make his immovable wisdom apparent and who is able to physically practice this mental dharma... This is the purpose of Fudo Myoo's tidings." [Soho, The Unfettered Mind]
"In Seishindo we describe mushin as: "The state in which your thoughts, feelings, and actions occur simultaneously and spontaneously. Nothing comes between you and another person. Nothing comes between your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Nothing is lacking and nothing is left over. When part of you moves, all of you moves. When 'you' are calm, your whole self is calm. Thinking, doing, and being all become one and the same." ...When you embody a mushin state you greatly improve your ability to learn and live with grace and ease. At such times, the structure of your body is open and balanced, and your thinking mind is filled with emptiness." [ib.]
In short, doing philosophy is like a self-sculpturing and working towards a state where you em-body your knowledge to that extent, your atmosphere, a word or two, an expression is potent enough to communicate directly. It is "making apparent" of all your wisdom.
Didn't I once tell you, the most powerful air-conditioner for eg., is the most silent one?
A young plantling, like a child is fragile and needs a firm support and a steadiness to entwine around or grow against, till it finds its own strength.
But when not detached at the right period - this becomes a sheltering, a taming, a domestication…
Nietzsche wrote:
"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life—all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of death itself, for value judgments about man and the past." [TOI]
"A British teenager who died of cancer has been cryogenically frozen in the United States after winning a court case before her death.
The girl -- who can't be identified and is referred to only as "JS" -- suffered from a rare form of cancer and expressed a hope to be brought back to life and cured in the future.
She wrote: "I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I'm only 14 years old and I don't want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years' time. I don't want to be buried underground. "I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish."
At the start of proceedings, the teenager's father, who also has cancer, wrote: "Even if the treatment is successful and [JS] is brought back to life in let's say 200 years, she may not find any relative and she might not remember things and she may be left in a desperate situation given that she is only 14 years old and will be in the United States of America."
However, he subsequently changed his position, saying he "respected the decisions" his daughter was making. The judge said this fluctuation in his views was understandable, adding, "No other parent has ever been put in his position"…"
UK teenager wins battle to have body cryogenically frozen
In the far-east, Japanese aesthetics declared being open to death at all times, the samurai readiness towards death [that Heidegger also borrowed] is what defined its essen-tial heroism.
In the far-west, J.-Xt. American ethics declared clinging to life at all costs - drugs, religion, machines, artificial-intelligence, space-exploration, pure survival is what defined its essen-tial heroism.
Nihilism of the dionysian and apollonian respectively.
With us, the I.E. synaesthetics found Nietzsche declaring, not just to die, "but to die at the right time", breathing Our spirit into a cause enough to Raise it sacred with 'How' we fight, beyond cost/benefit, beyond hedonism, [as opposed to dying for a 'sacred cause'], defined our essen-tial heroism.
A sensibility for natural contentment is a kind of strength from self-trust about life and death that is only built slowly from the knowledge one always exerted one's possible best at any given moment, and surpassing that a little every time. The knowledge of exhausting oneself into one's maximum takes the form of a joy, a consciousness of strength.
Trust is rooted in the word dare.
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""Tharsein Hri" - Dare! or trust in your courage, is attributed to "the Goddess Athena, through the mouth of Odysseus, as words of encouragement to the Greek forces besieging the city of Troy"…
Dare:
"Old English durran "to brave danger, dare; venture, presume," from Proto-Germanic *ders- (source also of Old Norse dearr, Old High German giturran, Gothic gadaursan), from PIE *dhers- "to dare, be courageous" (source also of Sanskrit dadharsha "to be bold;" Old Persian darš- "to dare;" Greek thrasys "bold;" Old Church Slavonic druzate "to be bold, dare;" Lithuanian dristi "to dare," drasus "courageous")."
To 'presume', is to 'take upon oneself'.
Inventiveness, and self-trust is taking onus on oneself. It is to be daring.
It evolves into the word credo. Lit., to put one's heart.
Hell is not a punishment in the conventional sense; it is, in fact, the expression of a great kindness.
The Jewish mystics described a spiritual place called “Gehinnom.” This is usually translated as “Hell,” but a better translation would be “the Supernal Washing Machine.” Because that’s exactly how it works. The way our soul is cleansed in Gehinnom is similar to the way our clothes are cleansed in a washing machine.
The Christian hell promising eternal death is thus, in a way, an inversion of life. One dies after death where they are irredeemable because of their actions in their first life as Christian. In Judaism one is redeemed and 'cleansed' after death.
Faith in the 'first life' is tied to the Christian determination of eternal life/death.
In ancient Greece:
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The afterlife was known as Hades and was a grey world ruled by the Lord of the Dead, also known as Hades. Within this misty realm, however, were different planes of existence the dead could inhabit. If they had lived a good life and were remembered by the living they could enjoy the sunny pleasures of Elysium; if they were wicked then they fell into the darker pits of Tartarus while, if they were forgotten, they wandered eternally in the bleakness of the land of Hades.
In the same way that one had to remember one's duty toward others in one's life, one also had to remember one's duty to those who had departed life. If one forgot to honor and remember the dead one was considered impious and, while this particular breach of social conduct was not punished as severely as Socrates' breach, it was certainly frowned upon severely. Today, should one consider the tombstones of the ancient Greeks - whether in a museum or just below the Acropolis in Athens - one finds stones with comfortable, common scenes depicted: a husband sitting at table as his wife brings him his evening meal, a man being greeted by his dogs upon returning home. These simple scenes were not merely depictions of moments the deceased enjoyed in life; they were meant to remind the living viscerally of who that person was in life, of who that person still was now in death, and to spark the light of continued remembrance in order that the `dead' should live in bliss eternally. In ancient Greece death was defeated, not by the gods, but by the human agency of memory.
