duplicate post
By God I think he did, James.
That’s either some lingo from the seventies and eighties or something you’ve just heard on the radio. I don’t listen to rap so I wouldn’t know. But that was not a phrase in nineties rap my nizzle.
The thing with rap is this. It’s the delivery that is the attention of our focus as much as the content. For what it’s worth, which isn’t much, rap music is good if it has some good delivery. What Snoop did was start changing meters around. It was a delivery technique that wasn’t being used in the Too Short and NWA era of monotone rapping in the same pattern… the period that nineties rap came out of. When it turned gangsta it also underwent a structural change. It maxed out in the Biggie Tu-Pac period, and now it has become generic garbage.
You must also keep this in mind; being able to freestyle, or improvise a rap like this… which is really only dramatic poetry… is a real talent (again for what it’s worth). That rap was written, but a freestyle defines a rapper. Eminem like Snoop was a freestyle beast… he put it down for the white boys. Now just for the sake of understanding how this particular talent is expressed, try yourself to do it. Nobody is around… just try to put together a line of phrases with a tempo and rhyme like this… and see what you come up with. For what it’s worth. No big deal… just a minor linguistic talent. In fact reading with any meter is rapping with text.
Where are the philosopher rappers? I’ve found the economist rappers.
Dude Tupac is a philosopher rapper.
Also, not all rap is generic garbage now. Just most of it. Have you heard the song, "I woke up in a new bugatti?
This is why the Buddhists invented… Buddhism. And the idea that causation and physocal stuff is just an illusory temporarily viable feasible interpretation of what is always beyond time and space, the nonlocal reality of subatomic properties we actually proved to exist but dont want to believe in.
Ever noticed how time goes in cycles? Happened to notice what it turns ‘around’? Theres your answer; but yall are straighter than the fold so trapped in paradox.
Yes but they added something to that fact and said that anything that exists, and therefore any kind of existences, are ultimately grounded in a form of suffering and/or conflict. The anthropomorphization of the fact, this human interpretation of ‘suffering’ and ‘conflict’, is not only an inadequate understanding of nature but also a prejudiced contempt of nature. You see this contempt concealed in the eastern-turned-western pessimism of Buddhist doctrine in philosophy like Schopenhauer’s and a few Hegel hanger-ons. Everywhere there is always the complaint that nature is hard and indifferent, that human beings and living things in general are always involved in some kind of conflict and suffering, yada yada. And this small trivial fact about existence somehow stands as a general statement about its total value? Nonsense. The total value of existence cannot be known. N will warn you about these blue-bottle thinkers and slanderers of life. When pessimism enters into philosophy it can no longer be honest. It becomes only the testimony of one’s thinkers struggle with life.
The first thing that has to be abandoned is any notion of teleology or of nature being for man and man’s use. Not until this is understood will man be able to have no grudges against existence when he estimates it total value. See in the pathetic fallacy man is really lodging a grievance against existence more so than he is making an argument against it. He expects man not to suffer as much and determines the value of existence according to the level of suffering man is enduring. Now it goes in one of two directions; either it remains eastern philosophy or it becomes western transcendentalism. In either case the modus is the same. Man’s subjective self is something better than the imperfect, material world of conflict and struggle. So you can either go east and resign from the will to live completely and achieve nirvana, or go west, read Schopenhauer and live compassionately, sympathetically and morally. And living morally means to be aware of how much suffering is going on everywhere and wanting not to be a cause of suffering for something or someone. A modest rule of conduct.
This is passive nihilism I think… as N describes it. Between passive and active would be intermediate nihilism, which I would call Stoicism… specifically the attitude toward existence put in Spinoza’s Ethics. This position is passive nihilism minus the pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphization of nature. It is not offended by suffering and conflict and acknowledges it indifferently and with a stronger resolve, a stronger center… but it is not active power because of its over moderation and over control. The Stoic is the neutral hedonist then; one who understands the purposelessness of existence and the fact that a lot of suffering always goes on, and the best thing to do is just go with the flow.
What then is active nihilism. Firstly it is a perfect contradiction, a perfect paradox. The very name is an oxymoron. It means to acknowledge the meaninglessness of everything and make everything as meaningful as possible. The creation of values has to assert itself and it can’t remain stoically neutral, and if pacifism, celibacy and asceticism were to be taken to their logical extremes in the east, Buddhist sects would eventually become extinct.
I think the eastern-western pessimism of this stuff is to be flipped completely upside down and taken to its other logical extreme. That of not only recognizing the ultimate conflict in everything and the endless, blind striving of life, but telling yourself you like it like that. Active nihilism is telling yourself this lie so many times that it becomes true, and you start to see yourself as something that becomes better the more it suffers and overcomes. Like an idiot you run around looking for some way to suffer so that you can become stronger. Then active nihilism is pride in one’s masochistic mania. Tell me the things you aren’t most fortunate to have aren’t the things you endured the most suffering to get, if you can.
You want to suffer then so you can have this pride. So then the one who seeks suffering is the active nihilist, the one who observes it indifferently is the intermediate nihilist, and the one who tries to avoid it is the passive nihilist.
Where you are as a people is a big factor in the determinations made after the experience of the loss of God. The Eastern philosophers were in a settled state without much internal conflict when they reached their philosophical stage of atheism. Everybody was chilled out so nobody freaked out.
In the west, atheism appeared during a period of uncertainty, instability and fear in Europe. Nobody was chilled out, so the crisis of the loss of God was doubled. Western atheists have issues… eastern atheists are cool and laid back.
How a people survives its crisis of atheism has much to do with what and where it is happening. The Chinese had rice and good weather to get them through their crisis… the Europeans had natural disaster, alcohol and war. No wonder existentialism appeared in Europe first. It was madness.
But not real madness, in today’s definition of the term. The differentiation has signifiers, absent hallucinations, cognitively intact, it must not be personal.
Therefore, the theistic retreat, must signal the new enlightened mind, the hubris in the the emergence of the rational and the new man? Socrates was put to death precisely for that reason, does this not smell of
the circularity of the time ? This is not heeding the warning of repeating the mistakes of history. Enlightenment in the Buddhic sense makes millions of repetitions often insufficient, who would dare say ‘I am enlightened’ just by the passing of 1 epoch?
That si all good and well but this is value judgment and not phenomenology. I was just saying that causality is a concept, and it implies a linear time frame which implies a beginning and an end. The Buddhists say the concept is the wrong one to understand the origins of being. If it came out of nothing, nothing is not less than something, and this is the point the Buddhists make, that something and nothing are both what existence is not. Because existences just hovers over possibility and it never completely fixes it into necessity. Science wants it to but we know that story.
Oh yeah no. I wasn’t saying you weren’t saying that… I was just making a side note.
But the so called ontology of buddhism is a somewhat nonliteral, overly metaphorical and confusing. If you want to talk clearly and competently you don’t try to juggle concepts like Being and Becoming and Nothing and Existence in a single philosophical statement because you will sound silly. What would you do if a Chinaman waiting beside you in line at Burger King out of nowhere suddenly fixed his gaze on you and said something philosophical like out of the Tao Te Ching or something and then took a defensive martial arts position with his cane right there in front of you… waiting for you to strike.
That’s the kind of stuff you had to deal with when messing with those eastern philosophers. They were always too obscure to understand and real self conscious and touchy about that. Ever see the cliched angry master in the kung fu movies. Yeah. Back then eastern philosophers were always masters at some martial art too, so if you have a frustrated eastern philosopher martial artist teacher trying to explain ontology to you, you’re asking for it.
This is why Zen answers this paradox. Words , definitions get in the way, and a Master was usually paradoxically responsive to a pupil for exactly that particular reason.
The rub is the universe is expanding at a linear rate…which implies it started out small, perhaps even as an inverse size.
Pride in suffering is not Nihilism, it is simply masochism…Nihilism is the devaluation of all things…Nothing has value, all is suffering, nirvana seekers, nihilists.
Clear as mud…
i’ve never noticed time go in cycles, dear…for me it only goes one way…perhaps you are referring to the seasons, the earth orbiting the sun, or the calendar, dear…
He may be alluding to the Western , hypothetically re occurring sense of time…, Trixie ?
For this discussion, universe means the collection of galaxies we call “the universe”
the “super universe” is totality of all that is…
Consciousness is the other side…the other half of the equation…the opposite of the infinite…
The sharper consciousness is, the slower time is perceived…
A large consciousness, means a narrow perceived amount of reality…
A non-existent consciousness, means a perception of the infinite…infinite time being perceived…
The mechanism is obvious…Consciousness automatically fills space, it is a self-organizing essence, consciousness creates itself…a self-ordering entity.
In an infinite space, a blob of random void…consciousness would automatically expand until the blob, the void, became lesser than it, until it appeared ordered, to the consciousness…because consciousness would not exist until it manifest a certain clarity…time and space will expand until consciousness acquires a level of clarity…Likewise, time and space will shrink if the level of clarity declines if it becomes too chaotic due to it’s increased probability of randomness of the contained stars due to increased sample size
Identification and perception are on rotating , not linearly opposing axis. The paradox is inherent in mis identification of this negation between the void and consciousness ?!? Or !?!
Hi Lyssa, didn’t realize you were back.
it is said there is no such thing as paradox…but if so, there is no such thing as truth…
What is truth…simply a matching, between the internal [real]ities, and the external…
A fantasy, or a lie, is simply an internal, that doesn’t match with the external…
So what is a paradox…?
A paradox, requires 2 dimensions…
In one dimension, it is a truth, syncronicity between the internal and external…
In the other dimension, it is no longer a truth…
So a paradox, is by definition, a truth in one dimension, but a lie in one dimension…
People who claim that all truths are true…misunderstand what a truth is…if it is simply internal, not connected to any grounded logic, or external reality, it is not said to be a truth…a truth must be rigid, obedient to the mundane, physical laws…