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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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35, T Hocking.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 3, 2017 - 07:03pm PT
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As I carry on with my own practice, I've suddenly grown tired of all this talk about objective and subjective and matter and ghosts and awareness and firing neurons and only thinking this when that is really going on cha cha cha.
What we find across the board are people trying to dig into the heart of SOMETHING. No harm in believing that something is the true target, so long as you keep boring in. At some depth, so long as the person has not left their humanity behind, what people find is usually fascinating.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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"JL: There seems to be a tendency to look at life like a vast network of information that we should process the best we can, resulting in a quality life"
I would add there seems to be a tendency to look at life like a vast network of experiences that we sample and process the best we can, resulting in a quality life.
Knowledge and experience together give meaning.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Paul: The idea that ritual and belief can reconcile us to and make comprehensible both joy and tragedy through a sense of meaning begs the question what is meaning anyway?
A really great question, a postmodern, socratic, and spiritual one. I would say it cuts to the core of what, who, and where we are. To me, answering the “what is mind” question ends up with a declaration of all those ideas. That we can’t seem to answer them to broad, consensual understanding seems to be the answer. In my mind, it unavoidably leads to part of Paul’s conclusion:
In the awesome place we find ourselves, . . .
And that would quite simply be awareness, consciousness, being. Q.E.D. We can’t really say what any of those things are. (Yeah, well, there are theories.) When we come to that realization, then we *can* “just live our lives” as though we were watching a movie.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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That depends on what you mean by living our lives as though we were in a movie.
It's a good philosophy for a sense of perspective. Sometimes we are watching a tragedy, sometimes an adventure film, and very often a comedy if we had the right sense of humor.
I am not content however, to just sit back and watch the show. We all have a choice in what to watch, we can walk out if we're disgusted, and mainly we can participate in our own home movie instead of passively watching someone else's.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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we *can* “just live our lives” as though we were watching a movie.
I find that each spring, each summer and fall and winter of my life, has a hue and quality of its own, given by some prevailing mood, a train of thought, an event, an experience - a color or quality of which I am quite unconscious at the time, being too near to it and too completely enveloped by it.
If I say to my neighbor. “”Come with me, I have great wonders to show you,” he pricks up his ears and comes forthwith; but when I take him on the hills under the full blaze of the sun, or along the country road, our footsteps lighted by the moon and stars, and say to him, “Behold, these are the wonders, these are the circuits of the gods, this we now tread is a morning star,” he feels defrauded as if I had played him a trick.
One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them. Then the ideal steals in and lends a charm…It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests. We all see about the same; to one it means much, to another little.
One’s own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself
If one spends enough time in the landscape of their own mind, it will naturally come to mean much. But if everything starts to look like a movie, it may be time to take a walk outside the theatre.
quotes from John Burroughs, who was born in 1837 and lived in the magical landscape of the Catskills of NY
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WBraun
climber
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watch the show?
The gross materialists only watch their own illusioned minds projections onto the REAL show.
That why the gross materialists are always ultimately so bewildered and do so much mental speculations
along with an astronomical amount of guessing all masqueraded as so-called science and knowledge,
When the gross materialists become ultimately frustrated and inconclusive they then say "NO ONE KNOWS".
Thus the gross materialists unknowingly and defectively plays the part of Ultimate Authority on everything ......
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Accross the board of trying to decipher politics and being fascinated by science, science fiction, art, poetry, literature, music, philosophy, and debunking religion. I have spent the better part of my life perilously absorbed with curiosity about the meaning of life; what is the secret origin of our universe and what makes it all tick? And also in trying to give my own life meaning and where I place my priorities; Family, career, mental health, physical fitness, idle pursuits?
This question of the unknown metaphysical and/or scientific explanation of reality haunts those of us who have no firm religious belief, and will until the day we die. So be it. I can live with the unknowns of atheism. I cannot live with what appears to me as unauthentic, another person's philosophical take on life. I can observe it, I can delve into it, but unless it fits I cannot embrace it.
35 black dots, that's what I got too, Tad. So, 35, it's the meaning of life. Life must have been over when I turned thirty five.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Thus the gross materialists unknowingly and defectively plays the part of Ultimate Authority on everything ......
so says the UAoE who masquerades as a smoking duck
as constructed, there are no black dots at the intersection of the white vertical and horizontal lines
what we perceive to be black dots is a property of how our sense of sight works
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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what we perceive to be black dots is a property of how our sense of sight works
The directive was, "Count the black dots."
There is more than one way to do that, including the recognition that we only see black dots because of how our retina is wired up.
The directive could have been "Count the black dots you see."
If you take that interpretation, there are 35 in total, though you don't see all of them at the same time.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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The purpose of life is to live. Life is pointless beyond that and has no meaning except what you give it.
Fill it up, give it a point, make it mean something, make a difference.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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The directive was, "Count the black dots."
If I could see out of both eyes, perhaps I would say something other than "What black dots?"
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WBraun
climber
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The purpose of life is to live
NO ....
The living entity is already living and continues to live as it never ever dies.
Only the material body does.
The purpose of life is for the living being to become fully conscious.
Not semi-conscious like the foolish gross materialists.
The gross materialists are all only materially conscious and even that consciousness is very low almost on the same level as a dog,
thus they are not even human beings yet .......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Thanks Ghost! You are right. If I close one eye it is much harder to see the black dots, but not impossible. My simplistic understanding of the illusion fails to account for any difference between one eye and two, so I don't know how it works.
But I bet some smarty does.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Lovegasoline,
Do you see a difference between:
the force that drives people
and:
a force that drives people?
Can you let us know if Nietzsche made that distinction? As a great philosopher, how could he not?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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There's always this (now a cliche?): "The unexamined life is not worth living" -Socrates
I suspect that most of us think about our lives, examine them even. But I'm not sure that is necessarily a part of an existential search for meaning. Meaning, like being, is a fuzzy concept.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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"An unexamined life/mind can lead to personal peace because some things are too f*#ked up to consider repeatedly, after the event".
You're right. Most people don't want and don't get PTSD.
Most of us in this global culture skim the headlines lest we be accused of being uninformed, but at some point we decide not to read or watch the awful details. We know it's there but we don't dwell on it.
Most people do what they can locally, and sometimes in a broader context, and hopefully they feel grateful that they live in a place where such things don't happen to them.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan: I am not content however, to just sit back and watch the show. We all have a choice in what to watch, we can walk out if we're disgusted, and mainly we can participate in our own home movie instead of passively watching someone else's.
Jan, it’s not quite like that.
I refer you to Longchenpa.
Non action is complete spontaneity. An exemplar of being in harmony with the Tao is often anonymous and a divine madman (an urban yogi) jumping through decisive moments in life as easily as through the most difficult dramas, jumping easily into the most difficult dilemma, gleefully shouting the absurdity of existence from the rooftops and asserting the essential beauty of the human existence. “Doing nothing” is complete abandonment to all stress and striving of ambition and deliberate committed effort, where one sees that every event is actually just him or herself. One simply jumps into life with true freedom by letting go because reality is defined by the spaciousness of total openness (i.e., the dharmakaya).
The author of oneself (and their life) is not themselves; there are vast and almost untold complex influences that go into creating the false self. All of this can be seen at any time because it’s constantly unfolding and unrepeating like a kaleidoscope.
Non-action cannot be seen through any endeavor: instead, one simply stretches out in the pure pleasure of immense relief like an old man basking in the sun, like the satisfaction after coitus, that of a retiree, an idler, a circus clown, an opium eater, an itinerant sadhu. Total equanimity arises by being free of the hope of success.
If there is such a thing as karma, then the lack of self-sprung awareness is really the root problem. (Directed action and karmic thought projection could be thought of as sin.)
One can enjoy watching any drama that presents itself by not taking sides or having concerns for outcomes. That, . . . with total engagement (spiritual openness, physical readiness, cognitive vigilance, and emotional availability—nothing shut down).
I guess I can’t explain it.
Taking sides, making decisions, and choosing all diminish awareness. They all take one away from here and now. (Give it some thought.) Don’t do; don’t not-do. One can just relax and let reality (and themselves) show up. One can be who and what he or she cannot help but be. In that lies complete freedom
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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No-thingness doesn't exactly ring the bell on the scale of self-examination.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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MikeL
Taking sides, making decisions, and choosing all diminish awareness. They all take one away from here and now.
NO.
These mental events, Taking sides, making decisions, and choosing all happen in the here and now. The here and now is what is going on in our minds here and now. And that here and now of making decisions can happen only when we are doing it. These modes of mind use entail part of the four ways we manage our awareness in the making of meaning that Csikszentmihalyi and Fehmi's talk of doing other than narrow focusing.
You maybe are like stalled on one form of awareness or have little experience in using the full spectrum?
The sickness of mulling and dwelling on some thoughts and getting little change does diminish the integral effect of all that our awareness could be doing as our awareness is finite. But the mulling & dwelling does happen in the here and now and does not diminish the here and now as the theatre of where things happen.
It sounds like you want only the subjective experiences of the here and now going on in your head and have limited your awareness to that form of using the theatre? You can have all those subjective forms of floating awareness you want but I would rather reside at ocean floor in waking life and notice single thoughts/feelings arise from the bottom limits of where conscious awareness meets the unconscious.
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