The point of this world is to distract yourself from dwelling on the fact that its all meaningless. We all eventually die - so just distract yourself and have fun while you can, right now is your time in “Heaven” so use it.
So, if distraction is meaningful, are there better manners of distraction than others? Is it better not to be distracted by what is not the here and now? Perhaps, rather, the point is not to be distracted, but to attend to the present, for all the meaning it holds. Meaning is inherently incomplete. So maybe what we need to cease being distracted by is the thought that we require a complete meaning.
What works for you, works for you.
For me, seeing the ‘bigger picture’ leads to psychosis - or at least I hope I was psychotic while holding that view of the world.
I also try to refrain from this type of thinking.
A ‘bigger pictue’ is probably allways sort of psychotic. Abstracting, and integrating everything in one system, all the way up to something that can be called a bigger picture, will probably allways horribly disform actuality. You only have a limited view of the world, and need to supplement this with a lot of imagined, or at least biased stuff, to get that far in abstraction. And if it can’t be resisted, maybe it’s better to create a more healthy ‘bigger picture’.
hedonism, in any form, is nihilism.
willfull ignorance is willfull death; yes it is true that we will all die, but, we can still choose how we meet that end, how we live. maybe this doesnt matter, in the end; maybe it does. who knows? certainly not me.
i dont advocate a statistics-based conclusion to seek out religious truths in concordance with some sort of Pascal ideal; however, i do advocate thinking “in the bigger picture” in that, perhaps, what we do in life DOES indeed determine our futures in some way. maybe there is reincarnation, maybe theres not. maybe what we do/who we become in this life will determine our range of possibilities for future energy-states; maybe not. but i still think its meaningful to think about.
its the utility itself that is meaningful. just because we cant find any answers (this is actually impossible to verify, the best we can say is that it seems we are very unlikely to find any answers) doesnt mean that the seeking itself, the journey, cannot be meaningful to us. not in a hedonistic or fatalistic sense, but in the sense of “becoming what we are”, of achieving personal self-actualization, saturating our horizons of possibility. exploring our own domains as best we can, because thats ALL WE CAN DO ANYWAYS. we can either choose to act towards/seek self-actualization (the basic principle of all life/reality), or we can reject this and “give up” trying, content ourselves to shallow superficialities and trivialities (or maybe it is truly impossible to NOT self-actualize, even when we reject the process completely). or maybe it doesnt matter either way. or maybe existential musings/explorations are an indicator of separation between the weak and the strong… and maybe even this is meaningless, in the end. but, can we really know? of course not. so, are we justified in seeking anyways? of course. does this mean that we are obligated to seek (in the sense that we can KNOW that we are so obligated)? no.
so in that sense, if you give up, at least feel comforted that while you may be making a huge mistake, at least it is impossible to ever determine that you were ever obligated to act otherwise in the first place. then again, that may just be psychological rationalization.
It need not be about willful ignorance, or giving up… Maybe it’s a justified realisation that certain types of quests and questions don’t really have satifying answers. What are you going to do if everything points in that direction? Are you just going to keep looking in the same place? How much certainty does one need?
I don’t see why the search for answers to unanswerable questions would be meaningfull in itself. Maybe that is the huge mistake. Why not look hard, and deep, trust your findings, and move on?
“I regard profound problems as I do a cold bath - quick in, quick out” ~F.N. (Gay Science)
not the specific questions/answers, but the asking itself, is what i am talking about.
many give up asking, i.e. asking deeply/completely/personally. to ask in such ways implies risk, and expenditure of energy/time. so, many, when faced with the realization that the (stated/apparent) purpose of finding answers is impossible, give up asking at all, out of fear or utility… BUT, the purpose of asking is not to find answers “out there” or “to the question itself, specifically” (those are some purposes, but not all)-- the main purpose, at least for myself, is to refine and hone the asking-process itself, my own introspective/rational ability and capability to see into/be aware of reality, on any level of conceptualization.
its nice to get answers, but really its about the journey, not the destination. and “giving up” doesnt mean “moving on to new problems”, because moving on to new problems would be NOT giving up. giving up would be NOT MOVING ON.
Okay, I can agree with that. But I don’t really see the purpose of asking as refining and honing the asking-process itself. It’s more that questioning, aside from giving me some answers, saves me from to much dogma and keeps me fexible. Maybe you mean the same thing though.
yes, your description of how asking is useful to you is a natural byproduct of having a strong, subtle and sensitive awareness/cognitive faculty. dogmas and such are not necessarily false or undesirable, but its just that most of them crumble underneath even a little pressure from a sufficiently rational/conceptual analysis.
i believe that we should be first spending 99% of our time working on the process by which answers are come by, not on what the answers are themselves… eventually (and we will KNOW when this is the case), we will begin to be ready for understanding and extracting deep truths from reality, because our thinking process will have been well-constructed enough to handle such perspectives, and will naturally seek them out on its own. when this is achieved, it becomes a concretely real truth that “wisdom is in the small things”— every experience, small or large, painful or pleasurable, generates new wisdom and insights automatically.
forsaking the metathought level for simply aggregating facts or perspectives or ideologies or dogmas or “knowledge” leads oneself to become a hermit of knowledge: a horder of vastly many disconnected and superficially-analyzed concepts, to which he clings in a desperate attempt at generating self-esteem and feeling important/enlightened; the mental egg of the mental cripple, who memorizes countless “facts” without ever integrating them, understanding them, unlocking them.
it is these cripples that our modern universities turns out by the millions every year. very few can escape the stratification and rigidification of an academic environment designed to petrify the human intelligence/awareness slowly, from the bottom up.
Like I said, I’m sceptical about the ‘bigger pictures’ or metathought levels. I don’t rule them out completely. But as it stands, i’ve no reason to believe such a thing is possible, or even desirable. There are a lot of indications to the contrary in fact. Simply taking a quick, birdseye look at the evolution of philosophy, and at the philosophers I know something about, and gauging who really can be said to have succeeded in such a feat, tells me enough really. This are philosophers who made it their lifes task. So I’m not hoping or aiming for it. To some extent it’s quite liberating to “know” this, I don’t have to look for the holy grail anymore and can focus on knowledge that is within reach. But also, I know I can savely disregard anybody else making such claims. It puts me back where I started, among the common folk - okay, maybe the better part 
- but this time firmer with my feet on the ground. I more or less know why now.
well, ill just say that its not about looking for a holy grail. and i have personally found that it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to “have your feet firmly on the ground” unless you have a larger perspective and coherent deep udnerstanding of the systems and environments that we frequent on a daily basis, those which we take for granted so much that we never even see them; i think that understanding these systems/environments and their rules, functions, forms, expressions and force over us is the only way to actually gain any kind of “sure footing” at all.
and i can definately say that metaconceptual levels of thought are indeed possible. i cant universally speak to their desirability other than from my experience, but as i said, not much else seems to gain any real justification or desirability unless it comes from a place of metaconceptualization, or is at least a coherent part of such a cognitive framework. its not speaking in abstractions or vague generalities: i mean that literally, that metaconceptual thought is quite possible, and from my own experiences, highly rewarding in many ways.
If this is what you meant, I can completely agree. I find knowledge about the world and the forces arround you the best kind of knowledge. But this is not what I would call metathought, these are essentually perspectives and aren’t necessarily integrated into ‘higher’ abstractions.
Could you give me an example of this, because I’m not sure what you are talking about. Are you talking about concepts such as Nietzsche’s will to power? I’d agree that it’s one of the most wide and still useful concepts and it can be rewarding to view the world from this point of view. For a while. But ultimately is still is just an abstraction, and as good as it, after a while i’ve found it to limiting, as I get with most of these concepts.
i would consider these things as prerequisites of, and dependent upon, the ability to perform ‘higher conceptual abstraction’.
i mean thinking about thinking, i.e. about the psychological processes and social conditionings that take place every moment we cognize; psychological compensation, ego-satisfaction, sublimation, repression and projection, self-actualization, socialization and oversocialization; the components of the self, and the differences/relations between these and elements of social apparatus; the processes and reasons behind what we think, say and do, the amounts of social or instinctive predetermination; how we visualize/sense/understand our mental universe of ideas and perspectives, how we integrate thoughts together into theories and paradigms; how perceptual data is filtered and data extracted from it, interpreted physically, then unconsciously, then subconsciously, then consciously, until we come to a “belief”; how we think deeply, do we do so in words, images, shallow concepts or deep ones? do we form relations of necessity and sufficiency within a coherence network of noncontradiction? do we bother to reevaluate existing beliefs or conceptions based on new information, or do we just allow active contradictions in our minds? how we perceive the information-flow of neural-biological causality that is generative of our thoughts— being able to visualize this 3D tree-structure of information, examine one small part in detail or the entire thing from a distance; changing our scope and focus of awareness, how sensitive and in what way it is to what type of information/stimuli/data… and our awareness of our awareness of these, and our progress over time in diving into them and becoming better as we grow intellectually and philosophically. placing “us”, ourselves within these processes, seeing them through our eyes and also objectifying our perspective as best as we can to abstract relative truths independent of our vantage point, and indepedent of our psychological needs.
thats just off the top of my head, but maybe you begin to get a feel for what im talking about. its the difference between night and day, really; i can still remember the about 3-6 month period when i “woke up” in these senses, coming to myself in learning that these things were possible, such deep and broad and comprehensive visions. and its wide open, still: i dont see any ending in sight, anywhere. so its a journey, one with very real, tangible, practical and enjoyable rewards.
Okay, so you’re talking about introspection. I’ve been an introvert for the larger part of my live, so I think I have a pretty good feel for how my mind works, the moods, the biases, etc… But to much introspection can be very harmfull IMO, it literally changes you mind and can just make things overly complicated. I’m thinking all the awareness and consciousness talk is severly overated. It’s a tricky subject, and lately i’m gravitating more towards extraversion. And I’m finding it very much the more enjoyable mode, my eyes firmly fixed on the world, and letting my mind do it’s job naturally. But I suppose some measure of introspection is unavoidable.
I’m curious as to what suddenly changed your mind, and what the method is that you use that gives you the result. But maybe this is for another thread…
If you would call the above "your time in heaven - I wonder what you would call hell.
extroversion is probably necessary to maintain homeostasis, and to allow a recharging/reset of brain energies, in a similar way that sleep is. emotional stability is pretty important to us humans, and emotions are responsive seemingly best to situations of extroverted engagement with others. as with anything, its about finding a balance.
and certainly, deep thought can be harmful, its something that if a person hasnt realised that fact, they probably arent capable of thinking deeply. but just because its dangerous to rewire ourselves consciously, doesnt mean that we shouldnt do it— it means that we should do it carefully, with awareness and sensitivity to every change and subtle difference that takes place. we should move slowly, deliberately, cautiously, at first, until we “get a feel for it” and until we learn to recognize warning signs that tell us clearly “move to a different subject” or “its time to stop this line of thinking”, because either the brain is running out of mental energy and you are losing your ability to be aware and sensitive to change, or because your mind is not quite ready to handle such thought exploration.
its why i call it differentiating your limits: working on your awareness and powers of thought/introspection until you have a clear picture of your mental schemas and paradigms, and can see where your beliefs lie in relation to others (information theory); then you are able to get a sense of your “limits”, the limits of your reasoning ability itself, limits of your knowledge, limits of your confidence or where a justification ends and an assumption begins; the limits of your conceptual ability to think and your perceptive ability to see/perceive. for myself, i spend a while exploring these limit areas, understanding as best i can the “whole picture” and why/what caused be to believe/assume/perceive these things, and what the limits are (and why they are necessary)… then i am able to transcend those limits, by deliberately challenging them, pushing against them, falsifying them rationally and consciously; this is A) consciously moving past them into uncharted waters, and B) consciously moving into them, exploring the limit/barrier itself as its own belief/thought structure, and seeing the causal/necessary/sufficient/emotional relations that support it (why it exitsts/what its functions are), and then, in understanding these, expanding or breaking apart the limit, to recode or differentiate it into seeing its differential, its reason for existing, the changes that give rise to itsself.
this lets new limits become set, automatically. as long as you are careful not too destroy or threaten the foundations themselves (sense systemic threats and carefully deal with them), you can rewrite changes and new insights/knowledge over existing false knowledge/false assumptions.
like i said, it sounds vague and absract, but for me its a very real, concrete process that seems to actually rewrite the connections in my neurons. i think differently afterwards, and i am constantly trying to be engaged in some phase of this process. i have come also to realise, as a direct result of this, that it is only possible to truly and completely know something is wrong/untrue/fallacious (for beliefs/concepts/assumptions/paradigms/ideologies) when you have first believed it strongly as an assumption, as a given, and then come to see how those assumptions/givens are wrong. i have gone from beliefs to their opposite, affirming the negation of the previous belief, and in accomplishing this i feel that i gain real, true wisdom, “from both sides” of the issue; and also, in then seeing the relations between the two (or more) sides, these relations eventually take over as the belief itself, themselves in relation to other sets of relations, and the specific “sides” become meaningless— i am able to transcend false dichotomies in this manner, see into beliefs/issues/ideologies/perspectives that others, and myself had as well, take for granted.
Like you describe it now, it sound familiar to was i’ve been doing on and off in more introvert fases. Maybe not allways all that aware, determined and methodical, but still, the general idea is the same.
But I’ve come to doubts the value of this proces, and I mean I question the value for myself personally. Maybe it can work for you, it’s maybe a question of differing values. Anyway, I see a couple of problems with it now.
One of them is maybe because of a partial misunderstanding of language. Language originates at least partially in a social context, and is a lot of the time just a tool for communication, and not so much suited for representation of truthvalues or knowledge. I think a lot of these false dichotomies you speak about, are not so much meant to be representations of how things really are, but are more normative language.
Let’s take for example the egoïst/altruïst, or the objective/subjective dichotomies (and it’s not about these specific dichomies, it’s just an example). Looking at them independent of any social context, and for a pure personal point of view the altruïst and objective side don’t make a whole lot of sense. Nothing can really be truly objective since there isn’t a objective God-type point of view, and altruïsm can mostly be reduced to psychological egoïsm.
Yet, in a social setting these words do make sense. When somebody says, “Yeah, he’s just an egoïst” I know more or less what that means, the same with “You’re not being objective”. I means something along the lines of “he/you didn’t consider the intrest of the group or the other enough”. It’s normative.
If that’s how these words came to be, or how they are used now, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to go dissecting and redefining them on your own. Or maybe it does, if you want to go Nietzschian on the herd 
. But, really, I think examining them outside of a normative social context will neccesarily be confusing, you’ll also begin to be working with different definitions.
“You’re not being objective”
“You stupid f**k, don’t you know objective doesn’t exist”
That’s why I think introspection doesn’t allways work, for me at least, and extravert dialogue does. The meaning is clear in context, shifting it outside of context muddles things up.
yes, examining the relationship between thought or meaning and language is quite essential. objective/subjective is rooted in language, but also is rooted in our perceptual processing (prior to language-interpretation) and cognitive faculties (logics-based heuristics, also prior to language [or at least parallel/coextensive with it]). language is meant to be representative, but as you say, it exists within a social field dynamic— every word has a history, and different interpretive meaning for each individual who uses/hears it. separating out the inherent social elements (implied meaning/field assumptions), from the subjective-personal connotations/intentions, from the structural/syntactical or semiotic elements (universalizable within a language-social field), from the command-statement meaning underlying active/passive usage (and also separating the meaning herein from the commanding), and taking that diverse view of all the various perspectives/elements of language and holding it up to onesself, ones image of onesself and one’s own mind to compare and contrast where such lines/boundaries/structures begin and end within our mental schemas and paradigmatic daily functioning… that dissection is always taking place within its own language-social field, typically constructed and reevaluated in light of the introspective process itself; BUT, we can still nonetheless engage in this process while being aware, in the “back of our minds”, of how this field is operating, and what its parameters/rules are, specifically how much they may be deconstructed or stretched at any given moment without rendering the field too unstable for the introspective process itself to function well.
i think its just dependent upon how personally deep or meaningful one makes their own thought process. i try to get multidimensional analyses of all elements and relations, and use these to differentiate the limits of the analysing-faculty itself, and then back again. a sort of spiral process, a reductivist reciprocity of relations. but, as we well know, words are just approximations (from the perspective of signifiance) and so such descriptions of mine are only as meaningful as they register personally with your own experiences/knowledge.
another interesting point i think is relevant is that language isnt just a tool for communication (meaning), but also for commanding, for being generative of change/orders within its own social-political field. to the extent that our constructed worlds, mental or physical or social-relational are mediated/operated by linguistic elements, language literally performs operative changes in the world and within us. this has relevance also to introspection, because our thought process is such a social-political field (a part of the larger field, i.e. a microcosm) and therefore even the use of language colloqially will command real, immediate changes within us (e.g. from one role to another, content to another, intention/observation to another, moral attribution (blame, guilt, merit, etc) to another (or the negation of such), social-political ownership status of physical or intellectual property (or of another person), legal status, interpersonal relationships, our relationship to ‘truths’ (habituation/assumption), created contextual relationships (ambivolence, desire, respect, revenge, etc), emotional validations, etc.)— when we use language during introspection we make use of such command-change functions of language, effecting real immediate normative/operative or functional changes within us (i believe these are indicative of neurobiological/quantum field changes); so it is indeed very important to understand and consciously utilize all elements/aspects of language in our thoughts, especially when we are attempting to “dive within”.
driving a wedge between various element of language allows us to eventually be able to drive a wedge between language and other, the nonlingustic self/perceiving/pure conceptualization. using language in this way shows how normal reflective/philosophical thought generates relational information in the brain’s network fields, and that this information, while existing within and being decoded by the personal subjective social-political language field within each of us, is nonetheless of its own type, i.e. nonlingustic (nonrepresentational, nonsymbolic, noncommanding… a pure relational form, a form of relations); as such, this information is independent of possible sufficient expression through any form of signification. because of this, only by transcending/deconstructing language itself, through its operators, signifiance, semiotics, commandings and fields are we able to really sense this deeper part of ourselves, that resides as close to the personal field itself. until we can truly understand and deconstruct language within us (and therefore necessarily also from without us as well as within others) we can never reach this level of pure conceptualization/information. so in a sense, all introspection which fails to differentiate the limits of language (at least a little) is bound to exist superficially with regard to deeper fundamental areas of truth/information i[/i] within ourselves, and therefore we thus remain severely limited in what it can directly or consciously accomplish (i.e., introspection therefore represents greater risk by virtue of necessarily unknown elements), and are also therefore limited in the quantity and quality of interpersonal wisdom we can gain through utilizing the introspection/thought process itself.
Since “existence after death” is so abstract and metaphysical, we can not know anything for certain about it. If there even is a well-defined existence after death, the odds are just as likely that it will be based on suffering and not based on pleasure. We simply can not know anything about it - under the best possible circumstances (that there is a heaven full of eternal pleasure and bliss) what are the requirements for getting into it? 1000 Good-Willed Actions? What about the guy who only performed 999 Good Willed Actions and didn’t make the cut? Perhaps the requirement is having a higher ratio of Good-Willed Actions compared to Malicious Actions? What defines the quantity of “One Action”? Could it be based on the intensity of how significant the Good-Willed action was? If so, what is the intensity of Good WIll Based off of? The amount of empathy we feel as a result? The amount of pleasure another individual gained as a result of your good willed actions? But arent pleasure and empathy relative? How could you know exactly for sure if you were giving someone else pleasure, they could just be lying to you. Are you willing to spend your entire life helping somebody, then come to find out you are denied entry to heaven because the individual you helped actually didn’t care for your help? Who is to decide these ‘qualifications’ for entry into Heaven? God? Doesn’t God himself feel sorry for those individuals who ‘almost made it’ into Heaven but were denied? Maybe you only have to spend a certain time in Hell before you gain entry into Heaven. Wouldn’t we eventually become desensitized to all the pleasure and glory of heaven over an eternity? What happens then? Eternal Boredom? Maybe then we have to go back down to Earth and live again to relearn the value of what Heaven means to us. Maybe over the course of all eternity, the amount of suffering we experience is perfectly proportional to the amount of pleasure we experience, if that is the case then are we even making any progress? If progress is an illusion, that what is the point of even trying? Do we even deserve an eternity of paradise? Wouldn’t we feel ashamed before God of how undeserving we are of eternal pleasure? What is eternal pleasure even worth if you do not have suffering to compare it to?
Once you have listed the nearly endless amount of variables, it actually becomes quite logical to think that Heaven would actually work in a quite similar process to Earth, in fact, it is also quite logical to assume that Earth and Heaven are the same thing. It is also quite logical to say the same thing about Hell.
You can then figure it logical that Earth can be either Heaven OR Hell, depending on the perspective of the person viewing it.
Think about it: On Earth, you aren’t guaranteed to “Get what you put in” but you have a fairly good chance of “getting what you put in” and by that I mean that having good intentions will more often than not produce desirable results.
All the variables become accounted for when you realize that Earth IS the eternal Heaven:
Pleasure has a value because you can compare it to the suffering you experience.
Heaven isn’t boring because there is a level of randomness in the results of your actions, and you’ll eventually forget about things during your eternal life so that you may continuously surprise yourself with the same thing twice.
You aren’t guaranteed love, because if you were then love would seem robotic and would cease to be love. Instead, you have to work for love, and even then there is still the chance you might not get it.
What is ‘labor’ or ‘work’, really? It is performing an action despite knowing that you may not get the desired results, that they may not be worth it, or that it could be a waste of time. If you choose a path of laziness and never have to work for what you want, then you won’t value what you have.
Heaven is not confining, because you aren’t forced to believe in “One Grand Unified Meaning” for everything, and instead you get to choose what you do or do not believe in. This also solves the situation with the “One guy who just barely didn’t make it”, since “making it” is perspective.
You don’t have to feel like everything is an illusion in Heaven, because there are fundamental physical laws that are objective and unchangeable, and they will accompany your metaphysical “beliefs” to prevent you from having to feel like all of existence is an illusion in your mind - there is a world outside of your head.
You have free will which grants you the ability to “choose to believe” in things that are metaphysical.
You can choose to believe that we go to heaven after death,
You can choose to believe that we cease to exist after death
You can choose to believe that you don’t have a choice in your beliefs,
You can choose to believe that what happens after death is whatever you want to have happen,
You can choose to believe in God, or you can choose not to.
You can choose to believe or not believe that there is some sort of purpose to life that we can not know about for certain, that the purpose of life is a set purpose and you can’t perceive it all at once but only unexpectedly catch small glimpses of it occasionally to remind you that you are not alone in the universe.
You can choose to look down on existence as a meaningless pit of despair,
Or you can choose to look up at existence as something so mesmerizing and complex that there is no point in even bothering to “look down” upon it, since your perception while “looking down on it” will be embarrassingly flawed compared to what existence actually is.
You can choose to believe that you were at one point in existence a part of God, who in turn fractured himself into many pieces that would be inherently handicapped in the human condition, so that God may indirectly experience feelings using the human brain as a vehicle to travel through those feelings.
You can choose to believe that God is himself the “feeling” which we experience, and that physical matter is merely the “outlining” of figures in the portrait of existence, while ‘feeling’ is the color and meaning of the portrait.