A sick concept of freedom?

Index » 喫茶店 (Koohii Lounge)

 
Reply #26 - 2012 June 06, 5:01 am
Tori-kun このやろう
Registered: 2010-08-27 Posts: 1193 Website

@KanjiDevourer: I forgot to add something. There also people, I consider worthless. Their only meaning in life is hurting others or making them feel sick and miserable. I do have met such people. It was not difficult getting more distanced from them, but they always needed a victim and searched for people they could **** up.
I am truly sad to have met such people. Mainly because they think what they do is right and makes them in fact happy. I could not treat such patients as a doctor for example.

Reply #27 - 2012 June 06, 7:56 am
ファブリス Administrator
From: Belgium Registered: 2006-06-14 Posts: 4021 Website

@KanjiDevourer  I understand what you're saying about relationships. The things I mention appear to be unpractical or unrelated to everyday life. But they are in a very profound way. But I will grant you that when one is very agitated, it is hard to ponder on these questions. Yet at the same time, it is in times of psychological crisis, that there is potential for big changes.

It is so hard to talk about these things. So I'll just post links to Alan Watts talks that I found very helpful.

There is the one where he talks about time and causality. This one took me many months to "digest". I couldn't see some of the things he said for a long while, but I was so fascinated by the premise. For those of you who like Eckhart Tolle, in many ways this talk about time and causality is the "intellectual" version of Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now. It had a much greater impact on me that Tolle's book.

Over the months changes started to happen, there were I suppose a lot of emotional release because I cried many times, sometimes seemingly for no reason. It felt like I was releasing many things, sometimes it felt like a deep sadness for having believed or having put much importance in things that were never there.

Now sometimes I take a walk in town and it seems very odd, that everything is so quiet in a way. What happened? Did the world really calm down? Cars are racing past, lots of movement, lots of noise.. and yet under it all there is a quiet that I didn't notice just ten years ago. Ten years ago I remember I was walking always somewhere, and my mind was always onto something. Do this, become that...

The subject of causality in this talk, imho, can have a real impact on relationships. It can make you see that no one "hurts" others. Not one person can truly be an independent causal point for anything. So you can continue to react to things, but at the same time there is a quiet undertone where you realize that it's simply life's dance, and you have nothing to do with it. It takes two lovers for breaking up smile

Time and the more it changes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15QW2lTAZmA


Then if you want to deepen it in this talk Alan Watts talks about two principals ways of looking at the world, the old "creation" image of the world, and then the modern "automatic" image of the world, both Alan Watts argue, are unsatisfying.

This talk I think is helpful to start to undermine the idea that the world is made of stuff, and therefore that there really are "objects" which have an inherent existence which we can possess or lose, or hold onto.

Alan Watts - What is reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6SX3ZgJRs

Reply #28 - 2012 June 06, 9:40 am
ファブリス Administrator
From: Belgium Registered: 2006-06-14 Posts: 4021 Website

Some choice quotes:

Tori-kun wrote:

They argue that suicide is escapism and capitulating in front of reality, but is this necessarily true in every case?

"Why go on?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6SX3ZgJRs&t=37m

KanjiDevourer wrote:

Space (or actually, spacetime) is how we describe relations between objects, which are really there. It's a completely different debate which we probably should not go into here

No, it is a very profound and potentially emotionally balancing realisation to really inquire whether there are separate objects, and whether we are really "aliens" into this world.

"There are no such things as "things", that is to say separate things or separate events" (he talks more about the absence of separate events in Time And The More It Changes I linked above)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6SX3ZgJRs&t=31m20s


Riccardo Manzotti has put together some really nice comics that go into similar topics that Alan Watts discussed, in particular "Do Objects Exist or Take Place?"

http://public.im-media.it/externalism/

Advertising (register and sign in to hide this)
JapanesePod101 Sponsor
 
JapanesePod101
Reply #29 - 2012 June 07, 5:03 am
vileru Member
From: Cambridge, MA Registered: 2009-07-08 Posts: 750

I'd like to write a lengthy, insightful reply, but I have other priorities and I think it's best not to preach regarding such a topic. Anyway, I'll make a few comments which I think are worth meditating on:

It's much easier to place blame externally than internally. This is not to say that self-blaming is the solution. Rather, it is to say that resolution may lie within.

The value of life is contained exclusively in our relations with each other. In this "in-between," all creation is born.

Happiness is not a state of affairs.

The future we see now is not likely to be the future we see tomorrow.

After they've passed, sometimes we're grateful for bad times.

Whenever making a hypothesis, seek evidence to the contrary.

Sorry for the fragmented, vague reply, but I've no more time to write. Live well.

Reply #30 - 2012 June 07, 7:27 am
ファブリス Administrator
From: Belgium Registered: 2006-06-14 Posts: 4021 Website

@vileru  Some very wise words there.

Here is something a little more "practical". I used to have a lot of insights/thoughts posted on my Google+ page in early 2012, then I was frustrated one day by the "social profile" aspect and deleted them all >_>

This is part of an older post:

Nothing Beyond the Sensations

Lately I was reading through George Berkeley's _Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_. Prof. Jonathan Bennett has a "plainer and more straightforward" version in modern english which I linked below. It's quite fun to read in its dialogue form. It's not incredibly long either.

It was a good reminder, that all we ever experience are "sensible" qualities. It's an invitation into the subjective, immediate experience. In my immediate experience, I never really _know_ an orange. I only experience its sight, taste, texture, and so on. And memory likewise simply echoes those original perceptions. If I slice through the orange, again, I experience sight, texture, taste and so on.

But anyway... what I wanted to share is that this also led me to reflect on physical and emotional pain. When I feel pain, _is there really something beyond the pain?_

And this ties again into the rationalizations that we habitually come up with in the mind. Rationalizations, explanations about whatever pain arises, are NOT what is "beyond the pain". They are misguided attempts at escaping what already is.

It can be helpful to observe pain simply as it is. It has no purpose, it has no agenda. Just like a tree is "treeing" to use Alan Watts' metaphor, pain is "paining".

When pain arises, it arises presently. There is no "past" that can explain it. It's very tempting to use causality to explain why pain may arise, but it is futile, because all you'll ever find is isolated causality. You may as well go back to your birth, and then that of your parents, and then that of the whole world, and then the Big Bang, and so on to explain why you are feeling stress today.

Pain is a _sensation_. And there is nothing beyond it.

Michaël Brown, who wrote a book called "The Presence Process" has a great quote, he says:

It is not about feeling better, it is about getting better at feeling.

Perhaps some of you already came to this observation, perhaps in other terms?

When I focus on stress or other emotional pain like that (I went through quite a bit last year as it seemed a lot of stuff was brought up).. I feel a release, often times accompanied by an automatic deep breath or belly breath. It's as if the thoughts were created a strong pression or contraction in the chest. Sometimes I feel the same release when focusing intently on the surroundings, or focusing in the space instead of the objects, putting the thoughts to rest...