Scouts

Also, as an afterthought before sinking into sleep: this is not necessarily a hardline linear progression; there are regressions; and there are no guarantees. All you can be certain of is that you tried your best.

 

Suffering is endemic but not required. Suffer all you like but you suffer for no one other than you. You think your suffering should be worth something to the world at large but it is not. Your suffering is not special,everybodydoes it.

I did not misinterpret as far as the cautionary tale, I quote, "but those who are so disposed, and choose instead to hide in their mystic cave and play with themselves, will be in for a rude awakening when the wolves smell out their blood. Not because they wouldn't have been accosted anyway, but because they are caught unaware and unprepared."

I am glad you have taken upon yourself not to settle for! Overcoming cultural conditioning is only difficult to the extent that you value being part of it. Since you feel dispossessed of mainstream culture, I would say you long for it, as power seems appealing only to the weak. You seek here in these pages, legitimacy for your efforts. Don't make the mistake of thinking you are the only one playing the game.

Reality is non-local, nor is it remote. Special knowledge is a contradiction in terms. You are vanguard only of your own experience, your mind being a kingdom you alone can rule. We do share our thoughts however.

It is no effort to create. There are no idle thoughts. It is a great strain however to perpetuate illusion as there are no objective constituents to support it.

 

Nothing is required. And when nothing is done, nothing is achieved. I make no claim to special knowledge.

I sense that you are getting defensive; but defensive of what, if my rambling is so pointless and even indicative of some insecurity on my part?

I do not suggest --- far from it! --- that all parties embark on this path, nor do I seek validation of any sort. Rather, I seek to put a mile-marker on the path before I move on to the next ordeal. The particular examples of my general theory are much more concrete, and, in many cases even boring; but, if through my ability to relate the pitfalls of my own experiences I am capable of aiding someone in the future to experience it more efficiently, and extend their ability to endure it, and to discover even greater possibilities therefrom, then that's cool. If not, that's cool, too. At least I tried. It's not altruism, of which I suspect in your roundabout way you are accusing me. It is simply my nature and I will suffer one way or another. I'd rather suffer for something than for nothing, "illusion" though it may be.

I have experienced those trances where everything melts away to nothing; but having always returned to discuss them with fellows like your self, it seems to me that the only illusion is the idea that there is any such thing as an illusion. Reality is real, no matter how you experience it. What is it that you are so eager to dissociate from, eh?

 

What would be achieved? You are human being, not human doing.
What does life do but live?

What would I defend osiris?

The next ordeal? There is no hurdle to jump, no mountain to clime, no pressure to endure that does not exist for you that you had not fashioned for yourself. I take it you are in some sort of limbo at the moment, awaiting your next great achievement as you cast hope to the wind that your personal journey might mean something at large?

Mile marker on the path? Is that like taking a dump in the road?

No, I don't suspect you of altruism. I see someone who has not come into himself yet, still looking. I would rather you not suffer at all.

You said you claimed no special knowledge but here you make mention of it,
calling it, my general theory. How does your general theory make another's learning curve, more efficient? Why do you imagine you are any more adept at, 'enduring', one thing or another than anyone else?

Only reality is real, Reality does not need to be fixed. Anxiety is caused by the misapprehension of what is so. When you start issuing warnings about peoples behavior I know you are suffering from some kind of delusion about real things.

An illusion is a mistaken sensory perception. Perception is not knowledge but can lead to it. Knowledge is being, shared. Illusion is also the capacity of mind to be deceived by appearances. The mind is naturally abstract, dealing with symbols. Symbols can have agreed upon meaning, or they can be twisted to mean anything you like.

I teach yoga/joining. To satisfy your theory, I seek to dissociate from the perception of separation.

 

So by your theory, if someone is a known rapist you shouldn't warn others of the fact? Or, if you do, you're just wasting your breath?

You are the one in limbo, friend, but that it is okay. We can point fingers back and forth all day.

You seem to be the one disconnected from reality and you think that this act of dissociation is itself the true reality. The good thing is it's always up for debate, and my voice still works.

Of course you teach yoga classes, or, in other words, sell new age religion to other people who want to dissociate from the horrors around them instead of getting off their ass and trying to do something about it. I'm not buying it, so you can quit selling it to me; but I'll be happy to keep communicating.

 

The world is given you to do with what you will within a temporal order.
Tell us what rapist we should be wary of and i am sure everyone will benefit?
In general and in specific, you find what you look for. Your breath is your only commodity, I would suggest you use it wisely.

I will friend. Limbo rock baby. I am not the one waiting to accomplish something before the next ordeal comes.

Appearances can be deceiving. Perception is not knowledge. Do you have anything to add to the debate other than, "I have undertaken a special program of suffering?"

I did not say I taught yoga classes. I said I taught yoga or joining. I teach all the time without ceasing. No money has ever changed hands in regard to my teaching and I teach simply as I am taught. Nothing special or remarkable about it other than it is consistent. As such it is an honest teaching. I wear in life every thing I speak virtually. I mostly chop wood and carry water and in the course of those things everyone is instructed.

I have asked you some specific questions to which you have not responded but rather have deflected with characterizations of what I may or may not be alluding to.

What you have offered of yourself is a text that says one thing, there is guilt to be had, and a signature sentiment that suggests exactly the opposite, i.e. every point a sacrament. Some thing does not compute.

Maybe you could fill out the details of your theory, even as boring as you think I might find it? I am not pointing fingers but asking you to address our mutual conditions. What is true for you is also true for me. I don't mean true as in our subjective senses but true as in what is so for all. Reality non-local, nor remote.

 

"Perception is not knowledge." ????

This is exactly the type of nonsensical jargon that I am attempting to point out in all of your replies.

You are not communicating, you are evading, no matter how sage-like you think you sound when you are doing it.

The point I am attempting to make is difficult, because I am attempting, in this philosophy forum, to generalize.

Fair enough, though. I'll put away the purple prose if you will.

If people don't take their perceptions seriously, and are not grounded in concrete reality, regardless of what delusions they may hold about the illusory nature of their existence, bad things happen to good people. It is true that this is an inevitability, but that does not mean that it always has to be, or that this suffering can't be lessened by an actual appeal to what can be sensed, perceived, known, understood.

In order for this to happen, people have to put away their mystic preconceptions, which are facile carry-overs from antiquity, and actually put a little effort into the world outside their own mind.

This is not to say your way of thinking doesn't serve a purpose, up to a point; but when the proverbial shit hits the fan, which is to say, when bad things happen to good people, there has to be something else: indignation, which is of course an interruption of the stoic serenity you pretend not to be pretending to practice.

There is something here so material that it is spiritual. We are seperate. You can pretend we are not, but we are. The real communication doesn't start happening until that is accepted. Your idea of everything being joined together is just that: an idea. It's a dissociation from all the evidence of your senses, which is all that there really is to go on. No matter how non-temporal and non-local reality may be ---and even if you are capable of having some direct experience of that through your yogic practice --- you and I are temporal and local, and you and I are not illusions, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Other ways of putting this: you are mixing up the planes. You are copping out of the human experiment while chiding others for participating. Quit it. It's childish. It accomplishes nothing. Go back to your mystic cave and play with yourself. I am not fascinated. I am not interested. Been there. Done that. Got the hangover. Moved on.

Thank you.

 

I believe in suffering AND connection. I see things in a non separate spectrum with variations of shade or color between but have a hard time unlinking anything from that spectrum now that I see it.

 

^ I had posted without finishing ...

 

One reason I do this spectrum thinking is that my mother suffers from mental health issues which have cause her to see and think in only variations of black an white thinking. She lives her reality in that world. With no gray area. She suffers greatly there and yes much of that suffering is beyond her control.

But I have learned that there is more then black and white and that there is more then good or suffering but I do love the learning of the suffering. And so I live in a spectrum of connectedness instead of a world of chunks..chunks of boxy black and white thinking.

There is suffering in freedom but it doesn't mean that is a bad thing. If it hurts to disown her from my life that is suffering sadness. But like I said it doesn't mean that is a bad thing since I gain a more free mind frame.

 

I have always been the one to step out of the boxes of others around me. This is especially true with the relationship with my mother. The interesting thing is that her mind is in fact a prison. And I have learned so much being an observer of this. It has thought me much about freedom, judgement and perception.

 

I have an all-too-keen understanding of mental illness from my own bitter personal experiences which I documented in a post in the Politics forum. I don't think in black and white, but I do recognize the beauty and complexity of seperateness, of spectrum. There are planes and planes. We exist on a temporal plane where things are seperate, and it seems to me that the attempt to resolve all those beautiful colors back into the white light is really a regression, even if death may make it an inevitability. What's the hurry, right?

Nice talking to you, Applespark.

 

I used to feel so disconnected and that was long ago. Because now I live I full color. The connectedness is like a net between objects but its never cut. I'm alone an immense amount of time so I could easily feel separate from everything. I just don't. It isn't an attempt to be idealistic and try to fit into something but I guess it's my reality.

On another note the other day my boss and I were talking about what is fact and what is not. And he threw a razor at a box and he said its a fact I threw a razor at this box that's real. And he said and *fill in the blank with news story from 2000 miles away* happened and that's also real and fact.

He believed it. I didn't want to tell him I didn't agree. This is where fact and illusion get mixed up. What I saw was fact from my perspective. If I didn't see it then it would be illusion like his news story wasn't fact to me.

 

Nice to talk to you also.

 

Exactly, we may be deceived by appearances.

You haven't determined nonsense, see above.

What am I evading?

It's difficulty being it is not well conceived.

You are not describing energetic phenomena but your own arbitrary judgments surrounding the question of worthiness. Do you suggest then that some lives are more worthy than others?

Shit happens period. Harm has no face. There are no bad or good people. There are people who are regarded in the false light of vain egotism. There is no human nature beyond biologic entity. That is we all posses a sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomous nervous system. There is human behavior administered by the abstract processes of mind.

You have my agreement here.

What stoic serenity I pretend to practice. Perhaps you haven't heard how I beat a raccoon to death in recent memory. Perhaps you didn't hear as I described how I administered CPR to my wife who was in the throws of a massive myocardial infarction. My life is serious and frankly you strike me as a poser.

The only thing indignation delivers is indignity. There is nothing righteous about it. It is all cliquish derision thinking itself good judgement.

We are individuals with a common, not separate, humanity. I make no pretense that I am a special case quite contrary to yourself.

See above.

Do you know what my ideas are? Have we spoken before? I think you confuse me with associations fro your past, not mine.

How many children do you have? Grandchildren? You see me, not at all.

Not me. I am simply hung, get over it.

Where did you go?

 

Even in her apparently sorry state she is in fact a major actor in your life. You are in no way superior to your own experience.

 

Sorry, man. I think you are full of shit. Period. I think you are trying to convince yourself of your own sage-like wondrousness, or at least defend yourself aginst the possibilty that your knowledge is just as limited as mine. You need to give examples of things you've done to defend yourself against a discussion in a philosophy forum. Looks insecure to me, but whatever. We've all done things.

There is no good or bad? Tell that to the molested child... or, hell, maybe the beaten racoon! When Nietzsche talks about being beyond good and evil, he means that the distinctions have to be constantly evaluated and re-evaluated in every era. This is a lot like what I'm trying to indicate, though I am not a pure Nietzschean.

When you talk about good and evil, you treat it as a nonexisting and facetious human concept, as if anything you think or believe or know could be anything but a result of your human subjective experience. This is the same mystical quibbling bullshit that the ancients had to believe just to get through their confusing and mostly awful lives. We can be better than that. I won't accept your amoral stance, even as a speculation. If it is truly something that compounds my suffering, I'll happily accept the consequences. I always have.

You are trying to convince me of things that are irrelevent to the discussion, total non-sequitors. You are obviously the one who thinks he has special knowledge, as you are the one lecturing. I could care less.

I tell you I'm not buying it and to just leave me be, and you press on with inane questions like "From what?" when I say "Moved on." Nice. Well, here's your definitive answer: YOU.

Have a nice delusion.

 

"What I saw was fact from my perspective."

What we percieve is the only approximation to fact we can have, and we must inevitably accept it as a rough and ready standard and build on it as best we can, constantly evaluating and making new judgements. This work is pleasure for me, pain for those who have already decided they know what it's all about. Our perception may not be strictly true, but it is the basis of all knowledge as it is all we have to go on.

I feel I am an individual connected to other individuals, and it should be quite obvious that the blurring of the autonomy of the individual with other individuals is the first step to unwarranted transgressions. I hold tight to this one principal: Every person has the inviolable right to do with themselves as they will. One can think they have had everything taken from them; but one will discover that it is that which remains that was ever of any true value, and that it can only be given away.

...and, come to think of it, it's usually the type of people who like to talk about life like it's a play on a stage and everyone's a damn actor or something that try to convince us to do that, once they've lulled us into their confidence. Wouldn't you agree?

 

I'm not sure i understand what you mean by superior to my own experience.

Yes she's a major influence in how my brain connections were made.

She has a severe post traumatic stress, depression, borderline personality disorder and short term memory loss. So in time has been very interesting dealing with those states and then also dealing with the world of yoga and other ideas and ideals people live by, inside or for etc which are heart and mind expanding as aposed to understanding that some people's minds can barely make those connections.

Some people without fully understanding would say that everyone has a choice on their feelings and connections but I for a fact understand this is not always true. Yes to much of an extent we are the main energetic motion of our own lives but there are those with a malfunction. It's not their fault always so I don't consider myself "better" I feel more fortunate to be able to make such positive connections and try to use them wisely.


I want to add too that
Freedom could be simply remembered by some. This is an idea in the yoga world which we simply have forgotten and all we have to do is remember to re center ourselfs. Well what do you tell someone who has no memory of what freedom is or would be like. Some ideas are attainable to normal functioning people but sometimes I know people don't understand others. Because some ideas are simply ideal. We can't forget that some people are in prison with themselfs.


I wish that more could be shared and that our human egos did't get in the way of simply sharing ideas. I feel like it would be a safer place for people who feel alienated to share and learn if we didn't speak so hostile like to one another. We're all on our own journey co-mingling. It's more interesting to me that we have such differences then it is frustrating.

 

Anyways weather I can articulate myself clearly or not is beside the point that the original post I feel I completely understood and can relate to. But I haven't heard anyone state it in such a way as was stated. So thank you.

I could relate to the illusion or reality prison of the mind and the fact that others sometimes can't handle ones own venture out from those walls.