The Texture of Day to Day
Like probably >80 percent of people on here, I was drawn to existential literature as a teenager. It can be a way of social branding, but still, before that, there's some draw to smart people who thought Wait, But This Isn't Enough, Are We Really All Ok With This? This can shade into pessmism (Schopenhauer especially) or shade the other way into heroic self-assertion (Nietzsche, especially) & both of those things make sense, for a time.
But they also butt against reality.
I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at biographical detail. Schopenhaeur was a sour son of a bitch & Nietzsche was locked-in hard to his own self-mythologizing. He was essentially alone. That doesn't negate their literary and philosophical genius, but it does (or should) make you think twice about taking life advice from them. (Joyces' A Painful Case does a better job of this than anything I can do)
It seems like Big, Magisterial Ideas often function like a smokescreen. The throbbing pain at the center of addiction asks that you do anything but feel it. The marquee addictions, like heroin, strut their function openly and unabashedly - the experiential Everything of them seems, for users, to speak for itself. And the idea of heroin addiction can always function, for those who haven't used them (like myself) as an 'at least I didn't go that far.'
But big philosophical ideas can also blur the lines. They elevate and leave the central wound down below. The world gets smeary, 30s' softglow. Plus, it offers control. If you can do arguments, that's a kind of power.
Still, the whole time you have to live. And, if you're hooked on ideas, the world is degraded in favor of those ideas (or good literary recaps) and you get more and more zoned-out. That's me in my 20s anyway.
What I really want is techniques for how to live, and techniques for how to approach life as it is. That's hard - some inner instinct bucks and shies from that - but what else to do? It feels like the only thing to do is shave off everything that isn't touching on that, and find what works. But the addiction is still there, trying to make things as abstract as possible.
I guess the thrust of the OP is - does anyone else feel this, or have some suggestions? I feel like I'm at least in the airlock, but definitely not ready for outer space.
But they also butt against reality.
I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at biographical detail. Schopenhaeur was a sour son of a bitch & Nietzsche was locked-in hard to his own self-mythologizing. He was essentially alone. That doesn't negate their literary and philosophical genius, but it does (or should) make you think twice about taking life advice from them. (Joyces' A Painful Case does a better job of this than anything I can do)
It seems like Big, Magisterial Ideas often function like a smokescreen. The throbbing pain at the center of addiction asks that you do anything but feel it. The marquee addictions, like heroin, strut their function openly and unabashedly - the experiential Everything of them seems, for users, to speak for itself. And the idea of heroin addiction can always function, for those who haven't used them (like myself) as an 'at least I didn't go that far.'
But big philosophical ideas can also blur the lines. They elevate and leave the central wound down below. The world gets smeary, 30s' softglow. Plus, it offers control. If you can do arguments, that's a kind of power.
Still, the whole time you have to live. And, if you're hooked on ideas, the world is degraded in favor of those ideas (or good literary recaps) and you get more and more zoned-out. That's me in my 20s anyway.
What I really want is techniques for how to live, and techniques for how to approach life as it is. That's hard - some inner instinct bucks and shies from that - but what else to do? It feels like the only thing to do is shave off everything that isn't touching on that, and find what works. But the addiction is still there, trying to make things as abstract as possible.
I guess the thrust of the OP is - does anyone else feel this, or have some suggestions? I feel like I'm at least in the airlock, but definitely not ready for outer space.
Comments (78)
Of course I offer it not as a downer or dissent, but just as an observation.
I've heard people like you exist, but this is the first time I encounter one with your outlook. You and I are so different, that it's almost scary.
Which is better? I don't think it's a question of better. It's a question of what we are, and that is not something that's likely to change any time soon.
The differentness. I see many posts here. Some stupid posts. There is a lot of "stupidity" about me. There are some smart posts. There are philosophical, emotional, funny, sombre, crying, debating, provocative, deep, shallow, cutsie, sexy, and dumbfounding posts. I have seen those, and can identify with all of them. I see, even if not precisely, where the poster is coming from, and where he or she is heading.
With your post I see none of that. It is completely strange to me, I have no way of identifying with it, I never experienced anything similar to what, it seems, your whole life essence must be.
It is not just the strangeness, but the different strangeness. I have seen religious posts, and I can't identify, but I see perfectly where they are coming from and where they are headed to.
AHA! I got it. I can comment on ANY post. There is something in every post that touches me, even if tangentially, and lightly, but touches me.
None of that in your post. I am not saying the writing is foreign or nonsensical. Nonsensical, I can deal with. But yours has sense, and yet I can't deal with it.
This is weird, I know, but hey. You live to be 66, like I, and you think you've seen everything, until a post like yours comes along.
You decide on a measure (life-affirmation in Nietzsches case), evaluate different ideas by that measure, and discard the ones that don't stand the test. Seems to me you allready get this.
This is what I am talking about, Salisbury. ChatteringMonkey hammered the ideas into a recongnizable shape. "good philosopher", "do away with the bad ones", "decide", "evaluate", "discard". These are actions and judgments and solid, concrete things, even if conceptual. Your writing, Salisbury, did not hammer anything into anything; your perception and your reperesentation what you got out of ideas, how you see ideals, ideas, is not touched by hammering souls.
You see, I am already hammering your style or outlook into shape. That's what you don't do. This is at least one difference.
Another difference I can hammer out, is that you don't seem to NEED to hammer things into shape. That's even stranger than not hammering them into shape.
That's good - I'm on brand in the OP.
Quoting god must be atheist
I can relate to this distinction - the need for solid, concrete things, as limited as they may be, is a comfortable way for many people to interact with the world. Some of us, so to speak, must collapse the world into particles, while others find ourselves interacting directly with the potentiality wave.
For those who see particles, the world seems more solid and easy to navigate - except that they can be battered or blindsided by change. For those who perceive the wave, it’s more blurry and uncertain, marked by indecision and too many options - except that they’re less surprised by the world when it changes, because for them this change is pervasive. The former despairs at a world that refuses to behave as expected, while the latter despairs at the amorphous uncertainty of how to live in a world without expectations.
Quoting csalisbury
I think how we approach life will always be relative to where we are in our journey, so any techniques should be considered in that context. It helps to have a tether of some kind - at least at the outset. A concept that inspires your imagination as much as it informs your life, regardless of how the world changes. Then, like Descartes, you can question or dismantle everything else and rebuild a conceptualisation of reality from scratch.
My own tether began as a ‘spiritual’ connection to the world, but has since been distilled many times over. I am now absolutely certain only that something exists, and that something relates to that existence. That’s enough for me, now. Even @god must be atheist’s expression that he cannot relate to your post is a relation in itself, and informs a more accurate understanding of reality that transcends your subjective position within it: that it’s inclusive of both particles and waves, as it were.
I guess what I’m saying is, your inner instinct to buck any established techniques on how to live is a recognition of this pervasiveness of change, but it needn’t stop you from structuring how you approach your life and then continually restructuring as new information comes to light. The idea that we have to be consistent in life is bollocks - we are a work in progress, after all.
If it helps, my own technique for how to approach life is to strive to increase awareness, connection and collaboration, despite the risks, recognising that the majority of the universe (including myself) will act instead to ignore, isolate and exclude.
Schop was a grandiose writer. That was the habit of philosophers in the 19th century. They forgot how to write with self-referential wit. That is what we do all day nowadays. You can probably capture the man's real daily life philosophy better in his personal letters. However, if anything, DESPITE Schop's grandiosity of theory, his theory well conforms to the naive psychology of everyday living- the textured one you are writing about here (or I believe you are getting at). His reality is the one of constant restless change, but change of mental states between really very basic things (what I further label as survival, comfort/maintenance-seeking, entertainment-to-avoid-boredom-seeking). That is it. Other than that we deal with contingencies that we face. I see the airy clouds of philosophy touching reality right there in his description of human nature, and the contingency of the universal cause-effect that we experience. What else do you want in a philosophy?
Nietzsche is a blowhard pompous ass. He wants you to embrace the suffering. Camus wants you to embrace the absurd. Schopenhauer isn't so forgiving. He complains and laments and says there's no real way out. He does dabble in ideas of Enlightenment through asceticism, but he probably knows that only a few can even get to that very rarified mental state (if it exists at all). Thus we are left in his schema with compassion and complaint-of-situation. That is what we have.
Nicely written.
Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that we become corroded too. One might need to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.
When I hear you say you want to approach life as it is, what I am really hearing you say is that you want to be able to adapt to life’s changes. Right?
My advice (which I haven’t been the best at following myself) is to keep the principles by which you live by simple. But it’s important to have some principles, and it’s even okay to bend or break them sometimes when things get harry, or if you just mess up and need to forgive yourself.
My first principle is: don’t be too hard on yourself.
Principle #2: don’t be too hard on the people you love.
Principle #3: Try to forgive those who have done you harm in life. (This one’s the hardest, but if you can’t do it yet, then first principle.)
Find a few principles to live by.
Martial arts? They emphasize "no mind."
That's a good idea. I'd have to overcome a few things (1) bad experiences with martial arts as a kid (karate & jiujitsu in dusty spaces) (2) Irrational stigma that lumps martial arts with things like owning snakes, being into knives and so forth (which, at its core, is the idea that martial arts is part of a class of things that people use to compensate for a feeling of leaky masculinity. That's true sometimes, but is wildly reductionistic. I blame the media. (3) Social anxiety blended with actual physical contact.
Which is to say : that'd have to be something I work toward. Presently, I'm dipping my toes in meditation. It's working a little better than it has in the past, but it's hard to find the discipline to regularly do it.
I want to tread delicately here, because I don't want us to get too into Schopenhauer. I disagree with him on almost everything, though I think his philosophy is ingeniously put together, and perfectly consistent. It is probably impossible to better convey the certain stance toward the world it takes (maybe Beckett?) Anyway, this isn't an argument or anything. Take it as axiomatic for this thread: Schopenhauer's philosophy is off the table here. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but it's just not what I want to focus conversation on.
I think the only other thing I want to say here is that, again, I strongly recommend Joyce's A Painful Case It's from his collection of short stories, Dubliners, and not too long.
I think this is a perceptive and accurate way of looking at how people think. I think most of us are woven together with threads from both parts. @god must be atheist sees a fluid aspect in how I think about ideas, but there are a lot of ways in which I'm very particle-y. I'm flattered to be seen as blurry, but that probably derives in part from a particle-y distinction between waves and particles, where the former appeals more to me.
Quoting Possibility
I very much agree with all that (I too am certain of something, and think it best to leave in abeyance what that is, as it seems you do). I'm definitely looking to slowly build a structure. Regarding the last paragraph: what you describe as a technique strikes me as something closer to a goal (or a guiding value, or a theme etc). I share these values, but how to realize them?
Yes, I can see your particle-ness showing here - my wish to build a comprehensive structure is for my relations with others more than for myself.
It’s quite common for people to view this technique as an end goal, or as something imposed on our actions from without. My view is that it’s an underlying impetus for all existence, and that we unlock its potential in the rest of the universe insofar as we realise it in ourselves. In other words, we reduce ignorant and exclusive behaviour such as racism by our capacity to increase our own awareness of why they act this way, increase our connection to them through this understanding, and increase our collaboration with them in ways that then increase their awareness, connection and collaboration with diversity. It takes longer and is risky, but it contributes far less to suffering than isolating or excluding racism, in my view.
As a turning point, accepting the condition is not the embrace of a replacement to what has been set aside. You start by doing without something that was always a part of the previous starts.
It sounds like a mystical statement but is simply an experiment that is begun or not. And if begun, easily abandoned.
Ah, I think I should clarify here. When I say 'end goal' that does suggest something imposed from without. A better way to say what I mean is: I'm searching for techniques to cultivate the 'underlying impetus'. That can look like removing blocks, or also ways of attending more attentively to our own awareness. The difficulty I've run into is: It's very easy to get separated from this underlying impetus, or to naturally decrease in awareness. Certain methods of trying to undo this can exacerbate the problem. My feeling, these days, is the more concrete you get, the closer you get to the spiritual.
Those are good. 1 & 3 are the most difficult for me.
I should make it clear that my God certainly wouldn’t want me to forgive pure evil. That would be like forgiving Hitler or Satan. In cases of pure evil, one should fear not and stand against it in righteous indignation.
I’m not sure what you mean by that last sentence.
There are a number of ways we tend to conceptualise reality anthropocentrically, that I think interfere with our openness to cultivating this impetus - so I’ve been looking at building a structure that addresses these misconceptions. One of the main blocks is our interpretation of Darwinian theory, which suggests that evolution is goal-oriented towards survival, dominance and procreation, and therefore we should be also. This blocks our understanding of pain, humility, loss and lack as important factors in cultivating the impetus at all levels of awareness. Another is the various forms of dualism that distinguish between mind/body, physical/mental, material/spiritual or actual/potential, that isolate ‘cause and effect’ from our understanding of the will and its freedom, among other things.
As for techniques, I’d say begin with an internal base of integrity, patience and self-awareness. Learn how you got here, what makes you tick, what you’re afraid of, and what motivates you. Be honest with yourself, and most of all be aware that change (if you want it) takes time, energy and attention. From there, strive to always relate to the world (including yourself) with kindness, gentleness and generosity. When this is difficult, fall back to re-establish integrity, patience and self-awareness. When it gets easier, challenge yourself to initiate compassion for all, and to build the potential for peace with the past, joy in the present and hope for the future. Again, when this is a struggle, fall back to kindness, gentleness and generosity, or begin again with integrity, patience and self-awareness.
I see this as a sign that @Csalisbury lives her life (I assume she's a woman, for simplicity's sake... her pic) in the negative imprint. By negative I don't mean "bad" or "undesirable" or "pessimistic"; I mean photonegative, so to speak. What spiritual is to you and me, @possibility, is tangible reality to CSalisbury; and what is miasma, conceptual flow to you and me, nothing concrete, is also the bread-and-butter of the real, concrete world for CS. However, in her life, what you and i consider concrete, solid, and established, is the spiritual, the figmentational, the imaginary, the conceptualizable but not touchable for CS.
This is, if it is this way indeed, not a common phenomenon of perceiving the world. Perhaps that's why she digs to me incomprehensible poetry, because to her that's hard reality; and I imagine she considers music that is of this world, which speaks to her not in hidden but enticing emotional tones like to you and me, but music speaks to her in concrete elements of her world.
I thought I was weird and unique inasmuch as I don't think in words, but in concepts. But @CSalisbury tops me. I've never seen anyobody else like her. Maybe others like her have just not revealed to me this part of their essence.
Vive la differance.
My suggestion: Learn about the world. Focus on the facts. Read philosophy if you want to, but realise that these are only ideas about the world and not the world itself; they may be useful or they may not.
Quoting god must be atheist
Another way to say this, from the lens of overcoming ego, is that the driving force of my ego is something like 'demonstrating I understand something, by talking about it' (I think this is a common problem for ex-precocious-kids, you spend a lot of time being paraded in front of adults, so that the performance of understanding becomes more important than understanding, even the main goal. My hunch is that many (most?) philosophers were ex-precocious kids.) My ego tries to hoodwink me, as much as others. I feel that it's important for me to focus on the 'chop wood, carry water' aspect of things, if that makes sense?
Existentialism evolved - at least in the mind of one man: Colin Wilson (made famous and fashionable by his first book, The Outsider, in the 1950s, when he was 25 years old) - into The New Existentialism; a philosophy rooted in, and foil to, the Sartrean Nausea: centered on the notion of peak and plateau experiences as documented (later in the century) by Abraham Maslow.
This is one path out of existential darkness and still an existentialism.
You're right. Bad arguments start with bad assumptions.
You are, now I realize, a cross-dressing, lesbian, post-op transvestite space alien necrophiliac hunchback robot.(*_*)
I know I erred. But please believe me, for me this is not the first, and not the worst of instances of wrongly recognizing gender identitty.
Furthermore, (*_*) it takes one to know one.
I remember in high school one time my mom, as some kind of punishment, disconnected the internet for a week. For most of that week, at night I would have this totally disproportionate feeling of fear, of being absolutely alone and in danger. I imagine its probably similar to what a bird would feel if it couldn't find materials to make a nest.
You're good. I am male (tho with a hypertrophied anima), but I do identify with something in the avatar. It's a still from a Russian movie called Mirror. The actress's name is Alisa Freyndlikh. I really like the image. I guess I'll sieze this opportunity to talk about the image, because I haven't on here before.
There's something in her face that suggests equal measures of longing and mistrust. or affection with a proportional amount of knowingness. Maybe the way you would look at someone who you know to be profoundly flawed and masking it, but for whom you nevertheless care deeply. You're going to put up a guard, and not give in to their bullshit, but behind it, you still care.
The first thing - longing + mistrust- is what makes me identify with her. The second thing - being looked at by someone who truly knows your flaws, but still cares for you, but is prepared to withstand your bullshit - would be the ideal glance meeting me.
It's a great image and a great film. :up:
I've never read Colin Wilson, but I did read a good article on him one time. He's fascinating. This is is the image of him I took away from it (which is sure to align with the perspective of the author who wrote the article, since that's my one window.) It seems like in the crucible of his youth he ingeniously brought a whole stew of ingredients together to express the things he was going through. After that, it seems like he continued, cyclically, to look for an outside answer explaining everything. I want to emphasize that I'm not throwing shade at mysticism, because I think mysticism is a rich and wonderful thing. But his approach to mysticism (and science and everything else) was to re-establish a connection with the world, such that his own chaotic feelings would be sanctified and codified by an authoritative para-mainstream summation. So again and again, there are these earnest grasps at some Truer explanation of things. My sense, as someone who is prone to the same kind of thing, is that he seemed to think that if he found an explanation that accorded with his own sense of the world, he would be brought back into the fold. I think that is one instance of the general structure of addiction (peaks and plateaus, even elevated outside of the peak of a drug-high, get drawn easily into the magnetic field of addict-thought). I think addiction is usually concomitant with a pathological egoism (which, while a vice that one must take responsibility for, I also see as a kind of affliction that besets a soul trying to survive). This seems to characterize Wilson.
I want to talk about this a little, even though it doesn't really fit the thread. It's where I'm at tonight. There's a book of short stories, Redeployment, by Phil Klay that I had to read it for a class. I would never have read it otherwise. The marketing is this: 'Book about the Iraq War written by a real life Iraq Veteran, who came back and did a writing workshop, and then found the human element in all of it'. That's the type of thing that makes me immediately uninterested. It fits way too neatly with a certain liberal fantasy about soldiers and war. It seems like a book fitting this description would have happened no matter what, and people would have loved it no matter what, because of that description.
The thing about it is it's really good. And what it's really about is the need to be seen, and how easy it is to manipulate how people see you, and, further, how much people want you to manipulate your story. And then how you grow to hate - or feel contempt for - the people that believe you.
If you think about it, it's wild, as a soldier coming back from Iraq to write a book about these themes for an audience looking for a book to humanize Iraq. The book is basically about how the book they want is bullshit. But the reception of the book largely bulldozed over any of that and turned it into The Award Winning Book About Iraq We Were Waiting For. He hasn't written any fiction since.
A word of caution - the ideal of needing to be truly seen by someone often accompanies narcissism. Everyone is bullshitting, everyone is being bullshitted. Only the narcissist thinks that they are a true, real, individual in a fallen world of phonies. The truth is that almost everyone understands that, and goes on to play the game with a heavy heart. There's something bordering on cruelty when you sanctimoniously call out someone for being fake, when they know they're being fake, and just really don't know what else to do.
I think Klay gets this, and the nuances of his book work this in, but then it doesn't really matter. Whatever he believes, his book does a good job of expressing the human need to be seen through at the same time one is cared for. I think most of us learn, over-time, that the two can't coexist. But that's what we're really after.
I see Schopenhauer & Nietzsche, among others, as creating a conceptual dollhouse of sorts, where they understand the whole thing, can look into any room, and see how it all fits together. But no matter how sophisticated they get, I still feel that they're turning away from the world as it is. ( John Ashbery: "was there turning away from the late afternoon glare/as though it too could be wished away".) Systems do this inherently;systems are inherently dollhouse-thinking.
But I don't think it's something every philosophy has to butt fatally against. It all depends on whether the philosopher is aware of the finite place their philosophy occupies within a greater whole (or, if you're hip and know that totalities are bunk, what I mean by whole is not totality but something like : outflowing expanse). Again, its something the systematizers seem to fall prey to. It seems like system, rather than philosophy, is the culprit.
In terms of the door metaphor - desperately wanting to unlock is something I relate to (I touched on this a little in a previous response talking about Colin Wilson.) I think you're right to talk about it in terms of escape. There is something fearful at the heart of a lot of philosophy.
In that statement we see a hidden impulse to flee from reality as expressed in the phrase "stop believing in it" and our abject disappointment vouched for in "it doesn't go away". Maybe I'm reading this a bit too pessimistically but hey, if that wasn't Phillip K. Dick's intention then he didn't pay attention to rhetorics in philosophy school.
It seems then, if I have the correct picture, we're a dissatisfied lot, unhappy with reality as it has been exposed via philosophy or even the random musings of the average Joe. It fits quite well with how humans are in the business of changing reality as evident, in its crudest form, in the way we've changed or attempted to change our physical environment: we've invented air conditioning and heating so that we may live comfortably even in the harshest of climates. Then we discovered morality which is, at its core, about how the world ought to be, contrasted with the way the world is (reality). Reality, it seems, is hard to take in and so either we do something about it in real, practical, terms or simply invent our own personal imaginary worlds to escape to. The former route is less prone to damage/destruction than the latter and Phillip K. Dick's definition will attest to that fact.
I can't part the Red Sea, I can't parlay with god, and I can't find my glasses most of the time.
Then again, much like Moses, I've never been to Israel, can't bake levened bread, and don't wear earrings.
I would have sworn that The Outsider had been written by Albert Camus, in French, with the original title "L'estranger". He was about 25 years old, too, in the 1950s. It was made into a really good film, too, starring that french guy, forgot his name, with the wide-set eyes and big head.
I have found that once you have found a way, or a few ways to settle back from the external things you can learn to settle. The key to this is the realisation that it is not a learning, but a relaxing, a moment of rest, a stillness.
Once you know the stillness then you can perhaps, if you wish, learn to (allow) it to remain, while you carry out your daily tasks.
Zen master Dogen wrote about this in Moon in a Dewdrop. His life was devoted to carrying out his day to day tasks, in a sense of an unhindered freedom/reverence.
I'll have to borrow El Cid from my local library and watch it.
If it's a Western, I expect him to shoot first and ask questions later.
If it's a Film Noire, he tortures himself to death to deal with his existential agony of not hearing enough good jokes.
If it's a detective film, he solves the crime, but also solves second-degree one-unknown linear equations.
If it's a comedy, mostly nobody gets the jokes.
If it's a war movie, he plays the bullet.
If it's a porno movie, he enters the Womb of Eternal Joy and Knowledge.
If it's a computer programming teaching guide, he plays the if-then-else conditional function.
If it's a film to popularize stamp collecting for young adult male iguanas, he plays the Blue Mauritius.
I am monumentally and crushingly in dispair, I can't believe that you haven't watched El Cid. He plays a heroic savior of the Christians in their battles with the Moors in Spain, in the same vein as Spartacus, but arguably a far better film. With Sophia Loren as support actress. Please don't tell me you haven't heard of her.
Integrity, patience and self-awareness, for instance, all relate to awareness before we even begin to connect or collaborate with the world. They point to our attitude towards information. In the past I’ve used ‘self-control’ instead of self-awareness (and I’m not convinced this is the right term, either), but I’ve come to understand that it isn’t so much about ‘control’ as it is about learning how we accept and integrate information before acting, and how that affects the way we respond to the world. In a way, it’s about gathering enough information so that our predictions about future interactions are more accurate. I have noticed, for instance, that hormonal cycles change my awareness of quantitative vs qualitative information - not a great deal, but enough that either my spatial or emotional intuition is affected, for instance. Knowing this enables me to factor this uncertainty into how I then interact with the world at certain times.
Integrity is being honest with ourselves - particularly with how our past impacts on our present, and our openness to information from the world based on the sum total of our past experiences. This is basically an understanding of cause and effect in relation to who I am up to this point. With self-awareness, it doesn’t have to stay this way, but we need to interact more accurately with our past in order to start somewhere.
Which brings me to patience - which is recognising that any change we want to happen requires time, effort and attention in the present that we have to find from somewhere. The brain makes predictions about the body’s energy requirements and where our attention needs to be focused every moment of our lives, to the point that we can pretty much go through the motions without conscious effort. If we’re going to adjust this in any way, there will be internal resistance from systems that are used to working autonomously. No change happens overnight, and experiences of pain, humility, loss and lack will feature in any adjustment worth the effort. We need to be aware of how much of this is tolerable at any one time, and therefore how long it’s going to be before things improve. So it’s about an accurate interaction with our present situation.
Have more conversations with people. Step outside your given personality a little bit. Approach the threshold of being a sociopath. Be kind to others including McDonald's workers to rebuild your soul.
You must be an optimist in hoping that answer which eluded humankind for thousands of year will
found in the discourse of the Forum. Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking question/````
Different book.
For me, humility (like pain, loss and lack) is an experience of life - not an attitude or action that we need to be striving for. It seeks us out easy enough and slaps us around a bit. The trick is to be prepared for it, to recognise it as a consequence of increasing awareness, connection and collaboration, and to manage our tolerance of it as best we can.
These experiences of suffering, such as humility or humiliation and our fear of it, are signs that we’re challenging the perceived or predicted potential of the system. In increasing awareness, an experience of humility calls for patience; in increasing connection it calls for gentleness; in increasing collaboration it calls for peace; and in relating awareness to connection, connection to collaboration and collaboration to awareness, it calls for compassion - a recognition that humility is a familiar experience for all.
QM tells us that the amount of relevant energy/information in a physical system is always finite - but that there is always new potential energy/information whose relevance is yet to be discovered. In other words, the universe is not a closed system - it only appears that way from a four-dimensional perspective. I consider humans in the same way. Managing our tolerance of humility enables us to discover this unrealised potential.
"The New Existentialism" is worth a read. It's short and to the point.
Sophia Loren -- one of the icons of my youth, along with Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida, Audrey Hepburn, and Claudia Cardinale.
In my country in my youth there was no following of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando.
But there was of Paolo Bernardo, Roger Moore, and that famous French actor who had an italian name which I can't remember. Oh, scratch Paul Bernardo, he's a more modern name from my past, a guy who enjoyed torturing young virgins to death with his wife, and then getting nailed for it. The actor's name was Jean-Paul Belmondo. Sorry for the mistake.
I am too old to accept legends, I am too skeptical, jaded and woodened. El Cid may have been a heroic Christian warrior, but only by the viewpoint of Christians; the Muslims most likely viewed him as the Devil Incarnate.
Much like the political tortures, murders and heroitizing the victims these days don't work for me. While I abhor torture, and would abolish it if I were the Lord of the World, I also recognize that if Party A is getting tortured by party B, then given the opportunity, Party B would be torturing with equal vehemence Party A.
There is no justice, no heroism, no legends, and there is no evil, no despicable enemy, no nuttin', without first taking sides in a contentious international political issue. Therefore I don't condone epic movies of heroic Christians, of heroic Muslims, of heroic communists, of heroic Nazis, of heroic Americans, of heroic Germans, of heroic Jews, Tamil Tigers, Black Panthers, White Supremacists, French Undeground Resistance, Russian partizans, Yugoslavian and Greek partizans, Bolshevik Red Army, Menshevik White Army, and any movie heroitizing any of these or the likes of these.
Interesting you seem to be saying that humility is an affliction, an unfortunate feeling, like sadness, or grief. You are the first person I have come across in a thread like this who sees it this way. Perhaps in the passage above if you substitute the word engenders, or something like that for "it calls for" it would be more appropriate.
For me humility is the most powerful means of affecting change in oneself. In spiritual development personal humility is the cornerstone of the spiritual life. In most forms of self help, or personal development processes personal humility is the first lesson, the first step.
We can whip the horse's eyes
And make them sleep
And cry"[/i]
~JDM
Quoting csalisbury
"How to live" in what way? to what end?
"Approach life" from within or without? (i.e. immanently or transcendently)
"Life as it is" what?
When all else fails ... question your questions?
Oh, drat. My cover's off.
I understand that most spiritual language encourages one to actively ‘seek humility’. I guess I’m a little resistant towards instructing subservience without qualification. I think people tend to also distinguish between humility they choose for themselves and humiliation thrust upon them unwillingly. I think it’s important to recognise the experience of humility as inclusive of experiences in which humility is not explicitly sought. Humiliation is more the affliction: only one’s attitude towards the experience determines which term we use.
If I said that ‘experiencing humiliation engenders patience’, would you agree? Sometimes I think it gives rise to anger, frustration or even violence. We don’t like the idea of not being able to choose our experiences of humility freely. Like with unwanted pain and loss, we often feel entitled to retaliate - this is where our spiritual development can be challenging.
Personal humility is a starting point - I agree with this. Self-awareness, patience and integrity together enable us to recognise the potential distance between where we are and where we aim to be. There is not only humility in this, but also an awareness of lack, perhaps even pain. When we experience all three, we are ready to take the first step.
I like the term engenders, by the way. Thank you.
I think these converge at the limit.
Please explain.
I like self-awareness for self-control. I also have cycles, in that respect, but I don't know what causes them. When I'm low in self-awareness I overcode everything as 'hostile'. I don't have too much more to say, other than that I thought this was helpful. I have struggled a little with the confront your past vs be in the moment thing, and your way of framing that makes sense to me.
It sounds affectedly gnomic, I'll grant. I'm not sure how to put it. One way I've thought about this is childhood memories. Things seemed much more alive and full then (so there was surely a lot of imaginative blurring going on) but I also, without a doubt, was much more in tune with the concrete aspects of the world. Having a full-throated imaginative relation with the world, maybe, allowed me to be interested in it enough to actually engage with its details. For example: playing with action figures in the woods, with the woods as setting. You attend closely to the details, when you care about playing.
I've been attracted to gnosticism for a while. I guess the DNA of gnosticism is that the real world is removed, or you're removed from it. That sounds transcendent: the goal is to get back to the real world. But I also think that you can be fallen, within the world. 'It was a great wonder they were in the father without knowing it.' A lot of the gnostic myths seem to cast the archons as having some sort of limited perception, where they mistakenly see their limited creations as the whole, while still being embedded in something that exceeds what they can allow into their awareness. Or Christ's thing in the gospels about how the kingdom of god is already present.
So something like : The world that you're fallen from is already there, and you're already in it- The fall was just forgetting how to pay attention. It's like being too drunk at a concert.
I read some Wilson at work today, including parts of New Existentialism, but it was only what I could shake out of Google Books' preview. He's very good. And it makes me uneasy. I found that I agreed and was excited with what he was saying. The uneasiness relates to the ego-aspect. It's like there are two things happening simultaneously : A sincere exploration of how meaning works, executed with great attentiveness and uncanny perception + another thing (cf Wilson's introduction to New Existentialism, where he self-consciously describes its value in terms of his entire ouvre) which carefully charts the progress of the former thing as a reflection on the author's importance. The uneasiness is tripled because the sincerely exploring, attentive thing seems to understand exactly how the narrow concerns of thinking importantly of oneself works. And then the self-important thing thinks more importantly of itself for recognizing how self-importance is limiting. You can see how the friction between these two things could erupt into a lifelong restlessness.
I don't mean this as a moral criticism - I mean it as a giant frustration that I bet Wilson experienced too.
I'm an epicurean (scientific) materialist, though once upon a youth ago I found gnosticism quite intriguing (my 'existentialist' phase no doubt), so transcendent notions strike me as ad hoc woo-of-the-gaps evasions (i.e. Camus's "nostalgias"). One is real which presupposes belonging to the real world so trying "to get back to the real world" makes no sense to me.
I can relate. Aesthetics (philosophical) and making artworks (play) - as you suggest in the 'toy soldiers in the woods' vignette - reminds us 'how to pay attention' - how to attend - to negligent and impermanent things that are too close to see or looking thru/past foreground bright & shiny trivias that obfuscate the deeper dark surrounding background. "The goal", it seems, is not "to get back in the world" but rather, IMO, to engage and challenge the shallow figures & events in the foreground (like artists do) which the real world - with a bedazzling myriad of 'veils', camouflages or mirages - conceals its absymal, chaotic depths from its real creatures, like us, who're too fragile & fleeting to digest (i.e. totalize, encompass). Thus, the absurd persists, even if only tenuously in momentary flashes, or strobic lucidity (Camus again) ...
Are you familiar with Clemént Rosset's short 3 essay book Joyful Cruelty: Toward A Philosophy of the Real? I wonder what your 'restlessness' would make of it.
I've been an existential gnostic, as a lad, but then also came back later. The Nag is rich - like most good things, it shows a different face depending on when you read it. The gospel of truth + the the origin of the world is a good one-two. I did my damnedest to show how 'getting back to the real world' can translate into something simpler, and I stand by that. That one is already real, is, of course true, and I happily fold it into what I"m trying to express. If it's youthful folly, that's what it is, but something more is needed to drive the point home.
IQuoting 180 Proof
Yes, I think I agree. But I also think maybe 'abysmal', 'chaotic' 'fragile' 'fleeting' 'totalize' etc. are bringing everything into a comfy semantic field. It's sort of like going far out in your youth and marking spots with flags, and then retiring to the shore and talking about the flags you've set. I don't doubt for a second those flags are earned. But what are they doing here? We all set similar flags.
Artists don't challenge the shallow figures and events. Huffpost does. Jim Carrey has some vicious twitter art. If partisan politics is the endpoint of an encounter with lovecraftian horror, than that's one point against lovecraftian horror (brassier for klobuchar, or something.)
If you don't have access to the book I can drop off some quotes:
"We cannot talk about contingency until we are in full possession of the facts about the intentionality of consciousness. For what is subject to contingency is the 'false self,' the idea of ourselves built upon the fallacy of passive perception."
I'd be interested in a clarification of this idea.
"[studying healthy minds (Freud et al only studied unhealthy minds)]...led Maslow to a conclusion that...the need to know is a burning drive that is not necessarily a manifestation of more important drives - the need for security, etc. It is a primary psychological drive in its own right. ...The revolutionary implications of this may not be apparent at first sight. It means that the fundamental drive of human life is not some Freudian libido or death-wish, nor the fear of the unknown and the need for security, but an evolutionary appetite..."
Wilson's italics.
Yeah, I've had my cosmicist dark nights of the soul, so I feel ya ... :zip:
When you said
"The goal", it seems, is not "to get back in the world" but rather, IMO, to engage and challenge the shallow figures & events in the foreground.'
I read that as something in this vein, brought into our current era.. It seemed like you were saying the goal is to fight the dummies, ala Jon Stewart. I may have been misreading though. What did you mean?
I remember the first time I heard, from a dearly valued friend I had feelings for, how much she loathed philosophy. Its irrelevance, seeming uselessness, how she felt more practically oriented, more of the order of learning directly from concrete experiences and relationships. I was completely taken back by her statements, haven't heard it expressed so forcefully and bluntly.
But I think I've drawn a bit more to her side of things now, though. Not necessarily her view of philosophizing, but more so her practical orientation. There's another friend of mine who, albeit narcissistic and pompous, I really admire for how much he makes it a point to push himself into new experiences and situations, outside of his comfort zone. His living goal is resilience building, social-skill-improving, health-maximizing and impact-making in the realm of environmentalism. He also acts like a socratic figure, challenging everyone's opinions and getting them to break out of their shells. He's incredibly analytical, articulate, and highly reflective, but has not dabbled in much philosophy. I think this is kind of the ideal I've been striving for in the way I've been living. Something more balanced, intentional, and value driven than the abstract, passive living I've been doing.
Quoting csalisbury
Pierre hadot has a nice book where he outlines different techniques from the greek schools on happiness. I actually find certain ones helpful during my day to day, the 'view from above', the attitude of equanimity, impermanence, meditation on life's finitude.. I actually now have an app that functions doubly as a scheduler which has on the front page the percentage of my life that I've gone through. I'm currently somewhere near the 40% range to 70. It's terrifyingly motivating.
I think the one thing that's helped me the most has been intentionally putting myself in roles and situations that I do not want to actually be in, and that actually challenge me, force me due to the expectation for the role being fulfilled, to adapt and grow in qualities I have been deficient in. I started doing a co-teaching gig for elementary students which keeps me on my toes and forces me to improv ways of explaining, ways of making otherwise dull material interesting and relatable. I love it in spite of their horseplay, and feel like it's helped me grow in empathy, feeling comfortable in front of people, improv and so on. I'd suppose this sort of growth is typical for the time in and out of college, but making it a point to identify deficient areas of your life in relation to what you value, and then attacking it with intention.. I think that is where I'm going as an alternative to living in abstraction verses just passively moving through and accepting the monotony of everyday.
I should have been more specific, by humility, I mean within the person, rather than in human interaction. It is weird that humility in the person can be so benign and constructive whereas humility/humiliation in human interaction can be so destructive and divisive. Perhaps this distinction points to the importance of a focus within the person when considering these issues, rather than a consideration of human interaction*.
I would point out, you do still seem to be attributing something negative to personal humility?
For humility to be constructive it must become the inviolable touch stone of the spiritual life, this is its natural place. When one realises the personal humility in other mammals, our close relatives, one realises the obfuscation generated by our brains and minds, the Chitta Chatta.
* I acknowledge there is a social route to [edit]personal[edit] humility, but it is only really achieved within religious practice.
Put the mind to one side, attend to the feelings.