Notes from under the bus...... to Monadnock

smelly wrote:It is ironic that one must become blindz to seez.

I think I read that on a bubble gum wrapper.

On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

Well I hear you went to Saratoga
And your horse, naturally, won
Then you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun
Well, you're where you should be all the time
And when you're not, you're with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend,
Wife of a close friend,

dan wrote:

On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

it seems that we’ll never be able to measure up.  

Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine.

Ride the lightening.

Yee haw!

(8:25pm (gmt-3))

So, I will not say I am a personalist or impersonalist.

I swirl around, into and from something I cannot really express.

Is that a cope out to keep the mystery alive?

Perhaps.

Is the self anything more than the social self?

Impersonalism and personalism are concepts I play with.

It is quite the question, what is the self if anything more than a delusion?

Consider the evolutionary view, we live, we die, we are absolutely gone when we die. Zen and Atheism have a lot in common.

Zen really started as a rebellion against imperial power, authority. The Emperor responds to Bodhidharma who had just told the Emperor his acts were transitory and unmeritorious.

"In what sense, then, is it unmeritorious?" To which Bodhidharma replied, "In such building of pagoda temples we may mean to be performing meritorious acts, but being a temporal matter it is in no true sense meritorious. True merit as such resides in the pure buddha, the seed of salvation within us which by inner revelation becomes true merit. Measured against that, these things can only be evaluated as transitory."

The Great Nothing

This is not nothing though, it is everything.

This pearl that Bodhidharma hints at is his theory of the soul.

It is all your potential unfolding within you and to truly express it, one has to get close to it, free of expectations to purely express it.

All I can say, is this is partly how I discovered this intertwined force at work in my life, letting this unfold with no expectations.

Does this conflict with a personalist element of theistic spirituality?

I see theism as a folk view of this intertwined energy, greatly manipulated and twisted by the elite to control the children.

"Indeed, I suspect that there is a quality of agapic love for another, which demands that, in a meaningful universe, the precious and unique individuality of a conscious being will never be lost. This "personalist spirituality," in various forms, is at the heart of theistic religions, and I am suggesting that the theistic/personalist insight into the spiritual necessity of some sort of personal "survival" is an insight to which the Buddhist tradition has not yet produced a compelling response. In simple terms, I cannot bring myself to accept a tradition that suggests that the beings whom one encounters in love--friends, children, life partners--shall experience a short embodied existence and then exist no more."

The author above cannot bring themselves to accept traditions, no-self doctrines, that suggest that the beings who one encounters shall exist no more.

That's it right there, isn't it?

That's the real personal choice everyone has to make that sets them on one direction or another.

East divides from the West down this line, it is a jagged line though.

The West brings this personal aspect to being.

You can't just stick to dogmas here my dudes.

I am a rebel, against stupidity and ignorance and greedy power, my own.

True virtue makes itself its own measure, this is what I think Bodhidharma meant.

Keep going, as far as you can, never stop, bend when you need to, you will snap back.

Perhaps this is a very good state to operate from within life?

No-self is difficult to face and impossible really to work out, it's a riddle.

One is left with the realization you are an unanswerable question, but we have these experiences of gain and loss, love and anger, essence or being first?

Plato says we gain our essence from relations to ideal Forms all objects are copies of. This provides the basis for the Best Possible World of Leibniz.

"Existentialism was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre's endorsement of Martin Heidegger's statement that for human beings "existence precedes essence." In as much as "essence" is a cornerstone of all metaphysical philosophy and of Rationalism, Sartre's statement was a repudiation of the philosophical system that had come before him (and, in particular, that of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger). Instead of "is-ness" generating "actuality," he argued that existence and actuality come first, and the essence is derived afterward. For Kierkegaard, it is the individual person who is the supreme moral entity, and the personal, subjective aspects of human life that are the most important; also, for Kierkegaard all of this had religious implications."

Existentialism emphasises the existence of a person as a free and responsible being determining their own development through acts of will. In principle it shows that your acts have consequences on the rest of the world, in the same way a pool ripples when a stone is thrown into it, when you make a decision there are ripples that effect the world around you. Taoism emphasizes living in harmony and that everything is in balance, this is not the same as existentialism. Given that Tao informs all reality, and Taoists focus on learning about, and harmonizing with, the Tao, they seem to be most focused on ultimate reality.

To the Taoist, things are as simple as they seem and they accept the world. They do not approve of ignorance, they just accept it, not needing to try to change it. It is in our darkness we find our light and strength. Hello Yoda.

"Sartre's(Existentialist) La Nausee, in which he contemplates the strangeness of the other is a very Taoist story. We take for granted the individuality of the Myriad Things, but when we start to wonder as to their ultimate source, when we let our own distinctions and barriers dissolve, what then? So it is with the Tao. In Existentialism as a Humanism his description of the potentiality of human action, as well as the ways in which it is in our darkness we find our light and strength is also a Taoist perspective."

What a soup of thoughts, will, essence, existence, and no-thought action swirling around us.

Ultimate meaning is...what...hope, hope for what, life after death?

Shrug. It's easy to want to be arrogant and say, fantasies of childish minds.

I don't know really, I can't just dismiss these things as silly childish ideas.

Some may say the Great Nothing is the Antichrist rising up if they try to consider the Eastern mind.

Is it Christ that gives you ultimate meaning, he is not the measure, sorry, you are.

I prefer to use my common sense in the moment and leave the ultimate questions to the high roads. I'm more of a Dudeist goat in the end I guess.

This is why I prefer the low roads.

My opinion is evolution is understood only on the most rudimentary level, not understanding will, or essence or existence really, how can we say we understand anything rationally or irrationally?

Doesn't existentialism turn rationalism on its head?

Could there be an independent observer of matter that is the self, continuous and unbroken?

Are the Atheists right, self is just an illusion of the brain?

We know what Dan thinks.

I am not sure I think anything about it, but I can summarize others' thoughts on it roughly, very roughly.

Portals apparently are Dan's last hope.

Are we brains or souls, all the above?

You can't just dismiss your body and emotions and thoughts of course.

As much as I pretend to try to.

Who thinks these thoughts?

I am my body, feelings and thoughts, as much as anything else.

The social self is a construct.

Ultimately Zen helped me see I can stand with my emotions and thoughts.

Can I name self and hold it, it is more subtle than that.

Taoism has more of a sense of the undercurrent, the natural connections between objects.

I don't find this unanswerable question a source of nihilism or depression.

Some do.

The soul is the realm of the anti-materialist.

The materialist needs proof of the soul or spirit.

Well, there is a lot one can do themselves to explore their existence and essence.

I can't say you come to any ultimate conclusions.

I suppose some have deluded themselves into conclusions.

I can't say I don't exist, something is happening here.

The common sense observation here, love those taoists, things change.

Is the person yesterday, the one here today.

Consciousness as the soul?

It is a mystery.

No one can prove the statement consciousness is the soul.

It is kind of silly, we are here, whatever this is, it is this.

Imagine the struggle of the Humanist or Atheist.

They intuitively feel themselves as persons, but cannot acknowledge a meaningful inner self experience.

I will not name or make a distinction between body and spirt.

It can't be resolved, an existential crisis.

I do not ridicule the lives of the spirit led, but I do question them.

One can be true to themselves by acknowledging this is happening and no one but you can understand your life.

Who could or would try to prove or disprove God?!

An inauthentic person in my experience.

I see now this is kind of a synthesis between east and west, directly perceiving mind.

There is no holy act with any merit than any other.

We don't need codified laws here.

In his book Phaedrus, Plato was most concerned with demonstrating the immortality of the soul and its ability to survive bodily death.

Directly perceiving does not inform one of the souls proof or possible path beyond death.

We are not distinct here body and soul/spirit. We are intertwined energies.

We breath invisible air that feeds our bodies.

Is that different than soul?

Does it matter, get it, ha.

Anything we come into contact with transmutes us and we transmute.

Is there an unchangeable part?

How do you know or not?

You can't, unanswerable question again.

If you are going to inquire into the self, at least do so honestly and authentically.

I can't say what you may or may not find.

It is worth looking into, but only if you feel it a matter of life and death, that was how it was for me anyway, still I think it one of the greatest things to consider, this happening, living and dying.

I tease Dan because he is influential, in his own mind bahahahahaha, and he knows when he is fronting for the old gods and he knows no more than you do or I do.

That's how they snag you, well, I have to call bullshitz, it's the George Carlin in me, question all authority, better yet, fuck any sight of authority.

He was a freeman.

Well, the gods are dead and here we all are now, born again.

Do we hate ourselves enough to pull the trigger and end our world?

I wish parts would die at times and think maybe it's better to put the beast down than let it suffer.

Other times I can't get enough.

Nature shall decide I guess.

Smile if you mean it.

(2:45pm (gmt-3) 12/27/19)

Part of me is here typing this Dan.

As much as we want to transcend, we just firmly ground ourselves in awareness.

I am the black hole.

You know a better portal?

This portal is real.

No shit.

Nis still had a little religious baggage.

As I do.

Divine.

I despise that word
icon_wink.gif

What a crock of shit that word has been used to justify.

We are not ready for that word.

Meanings of words shift.

God has forgotten we have forgotten.

Can we say all these persons are god?

No need.

I speak of god poetically.

When you wake up you are aware that nothing needs to happen or be said even, it is all happening.

You can become enraptured by awareness.

Others become inflamed with their being.

Some just sit under a tree and chill.

Luminous beings are we, not just this crude matter.

No one knows what will happen after death.

Sometimes you really dig a girl the moment you kiss her,
And then you get distracted by her older sister.
When in walks her father and takes you in line,
And says, "Better go on home, son, and make up your mind."