Replacing addictions so there’s a higher ratio of satisfaction, is a rational way to embrace addiction. To accept it and make do.
I say this is purposefully failing your true desire for bliss, because you’re setting yourself up to never be able to remain in the state of bliss.
James said it’s keeping momentum. I say momentum is struggle. To me it seems you’re advocating your own method of struggle continuity (Life). This is irrational to me when we’re aware of that we don’t care about being alive, we care about not caring. That is bliss. Indifference to change.
Wiki - “Bliss can be a state of profound satisfaction, happiness and joy, a constant state of mind, undisturbed by gain or loss.”
What is the difference between being alive in the state of ‘bliss’, and being dead?
I would consider Death a cure/solution to the problem, rather than an escape.
One does not need to find pleasure in truth to seek it, to be “addicted” to it. We are not only addicted to those things which are pleasurable, and indeed there are many types and qualities of pleasure, some closer to suffering than anything else. Truth involves as much suffering as pleasure, if not more so. The usefulness, the value of truth is not in the pleasure (or displeasure) which it produces.
I don’t have a “desire for comfort/bliss”, I don’t even know what that means.
What’s with all this “bliss” stuff? Life isn’t blissful, if we experience euphoria it is short-lived. Pleasure is not the end of living, at least not for those of us who wish to attain something greater than the hedonist, which is to say, the mere instinctual animal. “Undisturbed by gain or loss” sounds like death to me.
Life is about movement, growth, creation,becoming more and more, it is about how much suffering you can bear, how much difference you can contain and how much truth and creativity you can give birth do, the range of your experiences, and it is about toward what end you put your living, your suffering, for indeed life is a burden, to live is to suffer. Life is about being expansive, not about shrinking from experience, from pain, from discomfort so as to attain a “bliss” that is “indifferent” to everything. If that is what you want out of your life, go for it. But I can tell you that doing philosophy is only going to make that journey harder for you.
Life is not a problem that needs to be cured. Life just is, a condition that occurs sometimes, for a while, and then is over. What end do you put your brief life to? What goals, what values, what usefulness does your life serve? How much truth can you contain, use, create? How wide is your vantage, how great your purview and concern, how all-encompassing your ability to value and to be a creator of values? These questions matter more than trying to escape the “problem” of life with either death or “bliss”. That sort of desire for bliss is nothing but the childhood, the infancy of your consciousness. The inability to face reality, the inability to deal with truth.
That’s your mis-conception. Life may ultimately be a journey toward death – of course it is, from the moment of one’s conception. But it isn’t an escape from death…it simply IS.
Only those who are afraid to realize death and to experience it within their lives, try to escape it. Trying to escape death is like trying to stop the leaves from blowing in the wind.
They are both the escape, depending on the individual and depending on what his/her main focus is. A life of addiction – any addiction – IS an escape but that escape leads ultimately into the belly of the whale. It is only when one’s clarity of vision begins to take over, when one comes to realize that his/her addiction is a form of death, that the mouth of the whale opens up and that person is able to begin its escape into the freedom of the waters of Life. If life is seen as a constant escaping of death, one loses one’s life to a living death.
No, addiction is not life-affirming and it’s result is moving closer to death.
Transcending our addictions is what is life affirming and moves us closer towards Life.
There is a difference between desire and addiction. Addiction has tipped the scale of desire. Our desires, on the other hand, are true instinctual drives. These drives must be respected for what they are - tools for survival and happiness but if they slide off the scale, they don’t lead to more Life but rather an escape from life.
Good and bad? Anything that leads one to value one’s self — (in a way which is not arrogant and haughty) and others — in a way that is not harmful and which leads to growth and becoming is seen as good.
I wouldn’t look on Life as an addiction. An addiction is anything which stops the flow of life in a real, reasonable and meaningful way. Being born, flowing into a life is flux – that is not an addiction. An addiction dams up the flow of life and is only stagnation.
I think we do have to become aware of what we hold to be meaningful and examine that. If they have too much of a hold on us, then yes, they are addictions. But I also think that if we focus too much on our experiences of life as addictions, well, what we see is what we become or bring into existence.
Perhaps it would be better for you to seek what greatly affirms you in a way which is not harmful to others.
Love may be an addiction –most of what we consider to be love – is simply an overflow of chemicals within the brain, but then the part of it which we appear to be addicted to, is simply something else not love. Just an over-indulgence of our taste buds…a form of gluttony. I suppose real love knows when to push itself away from the table and knows what to eat and what not to eat. Love is more transcendence or when those chemicals within the brain have stopped flowing and remain still albeit we do need those chemicals to begin the marvelous chain reactions…but that is still not love.
None of you will agree with this, but I am going to jump straight to the idea that, some part of us ‘is’ death. An inner part of the mind, the part which completely transmigrates form or is otherwise something aside from our expression in form.
If there is such an aspect of immaterial mind, then the addiction isn’t entire! For me that gives us an axis of control and a source of clarity, and thus the addiction is a projection of the language we have with the world ~ one is the puppet the other the puppeteer.
Wikipedia - “In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle is the psychoanalytic concept describing people seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering (pain) in order to satisfy their biological and psychological needs. Specifically, pleasure principle is a driven force of id. Furthermore, the counterpart concept, the reality principle, describes people choosing to defer gratification of a desire when circumstantial reality disallows its immediate gratification. In infancy and early childhood, the id rules behavior by obeying only the pleasure principle. People in that age would only seek for immediate gratification in order to reduce their urges such as hunger, thirst or even sex. Maturity is learning to endure the pain of deferred gratification, when reality requires it; thus, the Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud proposes that “an ego thus educated has become ‘reasonable’; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also, at bottom, seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.”
James - “well I agree life is an addiction to self-harmony without which death would ensue.”
I say truth is about the reality principle, but it still is ultimately seeking to find pleasure.
Wiki - “Drive theory is based on the principle that organisms are born with certain psychological needs and that a negative state of tension is created when these needs are not satisfied. When a need is satisfied, drive is reduced and the organism returns to a state of homeostasis and relaxation.”
I would argue every action is based on a drive, and the intent of any person to satisfy a drive is to return to a state of comfort/bliss/happiness.
Joe Schmoe - "If we attain bliss, which is our truest drive, then we are closest to death. One might say upon the attainment of ‘bliss’, we are already in a state of death, the death of conflict. The absence of conflict. Our truest drive, it to attain death, lack of conflict.
This doesn’t mesh well with Life, unless our drive is constantly fleeting and unattainable, such is the pursuit of happiness. James puts it’s well, it is the momentum of self-harmony that enables survival. I would replace the world momentum, with struggle. For the only drive is to remove struggle, therefore, if we’re moving, it’s because there’s still conflict."
Also, reference the sentence I quoted by James a few paragraphs up.
As for pleasure, if you accept the explanations I posted above (Pleasure/Reality Principle), everything we do is hedonistic. Even seeking truth. Therefore, everything we do, is a way to seek bliss, the end of ‘living’ (Momentum/Struggle).
Everything above is a description of how we struggle. I’ve explained why I think that struggle isn’t our goal, but rather bliss. Struggle can be overcome, but so many try to maintain struggle, because they’re addicted to the struggle (Living).
I argue there’s something beyond the addiction, which is bliss. Lack of struggle.
Life is struggle. We’re addicted to struggle. Everything we do is a struggle. You think Truth isn’t a product of the struggle, but it is. It’s as hedonistic as the rest of it. You say that I’m childish for seeing the hedonism, I say we’re all addicts who have a hard time seeing what’s beyond the hedonism. Bliss.
I think the best thing we could do for ourselves, is remove struggle, and attain bliss. I believe this to be the truth.
I never realized that you were such a reductionist. Life is a condition? Like dermatitis? We go to the doctor, he gives us topical medicine and that cures the condition. Actually very often ‘conditions’ return. Is it really that easy, aletheia?
But true, life is not a problem that needs to be cured - but it holds problems which need to be resolved and others for which there can be no resolution.
There can only be one end to life? Ultimately death. But your question supposes that life must be lived with an end in mind - focusing on the end rather than in the present moment.
The way I look at it, life doesn’t serve these goals, values, ad continuum - these concepts rather serve life.
What if you came upon someone who wasn’t so caught up in those kind of values? Would you think that that person’s life/living had no justification?
Do we create truth or do we seek it and it sometimes finds us, if we’re lucky. Can we actually create truth as we do our illusions? I have found that ‘using’ our so-called truths may lead to chaos, hurt and destruction, especially in the wrong hands. Truth is not to be ‘contained’ either -what happens when we try to contain the butterfly?
Only as wide as our perceptions and desires will allow; as expansive as are the possibilities which our vision will allow. If we stand in a place where there is only ‘tunnel vision’ not very wide at all.
For that, the proof is in the pudding.
Some people try to escape Life through death, some people try to escape both Life and Death by running away from those little deaths which come to us in the moment, and which ultimately may lead to more Life, and some people also try to escape Life through running away from bliss when it comes to us. Bliss is not something we can seek - it finds us. Oscar Wilde said (I think) “What we need is a new kind of hedonism”. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy, content, and with meeting our bliss head-on when it comes to us.
Everyone has their own life questions which turn them on to life, their own passions. Your last questions - it’s really quite easy to answer them in the moment. But when life sends us problems which we might deal with, this is the time in which those questions become answered. Our way of dealing with life answers them for us - at least, gives us an inkling as to how deep those values really are to us. Are they real or they just so much dust in the wind?
True bliss has nothing to do with seeking after pleasure or facing or not facing reality or dealing with truth. We don’t go chasing after that butterfly which is bliss - we simply stand and enjoy the scene of its flying and motion and the way it cuts through the air and shines. And we go about our business. If it alights on us, we’re lucky and we feel the bliss.
If bliss doesn’t come to us at times or some kind of happiness, what is that could possibly remind us of how precious life is or can be? What is it that would make life worth living? If we take such a nihilistic or puritan attitude toward happiness and bliss, what is it that gives us the drive and the passion when it is time to once again ‘face the truth’ or to 'deal with reality"?
How long can we subsist on trying to create value and on the ability to value if we are not even capable of valuing and promoting our own spirits and well being.
I wonder - have you ever followed your bliss with the consciousness and the freedom of a child, aletheia?
There is no problem with our present life. For thought there seems to be one because it extracts certain knowledge out of past pleasures and pains, compares the present with it, passes judgments, avoids the present by concocting a future and pursuing it. But for the comparisons that thought makes there is no problem with our life as it is; and there is no other life. It is precisely our thought of a better state that prevents us from coming to terms with our life as it is.
It means “going with the flow” sufficiently that experiences are enjoyed rather than dreaded.
It means join the party, don’t try to control the party.
It means, accepting what you cannot change, boldly changing only what you actually can, and having the wisdom to know the difference.
We already break free all the time, it’s built in to the system.
The addiction is made of thought. If/when we stop thinking, or slow the volume of thought, the addiction is gone, or reduced. The addiction can be controlled by controlling thought. It’s an ongoing management process, not breaking free permanently as your question may imply.
We do this all the time naturally. Somebody enters the room behind you, and you turn around to look. At the moment of looking “you” are dead. Your body is still functioning, but the “me”, the thing that experiences addiction is gone, just for a moment. It happens a thousand times a day. But it happens very quickly, and is so utterly normal that we usually don’t notice it.
Life and death are intimately woven together like the threads in a cloth. It’s our minds, ie. the divisive nature of thought, which attempts to take a magic marker and draw a big bold neat and tidy line around each to divide them.
You’re already dead half the time, pay attention, and enjoy it!
Life entails a great many things besides pain and pleasure. There is also that middle ground called detachment. There is also that thing called joy that runs deeper than pain and transcends simple pleasure…and ad continuum.
Pain is not the avoidance of harm to survival. It’s a symptom or a signal that something is not quite right with the organism.
To the contrary, at times, an avoidance of harm or running from pain leads to addiction. Diving into that pain and dealing with it, may lead to more life.
And yes, pleasure, the positive kind, is beneficial to survival. Some think that they find pleasure in alchohol or drugs or sex. That’s really not pleasure but an avoidance of the message which pain may be attempting to send.
If the only thing that life, conscious life, were about were survival, it would get very tiresome at times and some might wait only to die. For someone fighting cancer, life is about survival, and for someone realizing that they are losing that battle, they might want and wait to die. A life lived in consciousness or at least awakening to it is about finding what it is that speaks to us about Why we are here and what it is that brings meaning to that Question for us, what it is that resonates within us - our raison de etre - and makes us feel more whole as we continue our journey. Following our bliss is an affirmation of life.
Instead of thinking in terms of life as an addiction, wouldn’t it be better to think of Life as an Affirmation of Being and moving toward whatever it is we sense/intuit in full spiritual (not religious) consciousness, affirms that Beingness within us.
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[i]If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.
Joseph Campbell[/i]
Bliss is the absence of struggle. Bliss is a state of death. (Every time I say bliss, I mean a state void of struggle).
We find bliss in life through satisfaction. Through satisfaction, we find death. Satisfaction pulls people closer to death, and away from life. To live, is to struggle/strive/will for something. Life is resistance of entropy. Satisfaction is acceptance, and the lack of resistance. To ‘flow’ with entropy, is to find death.
Life resists entropy. All the different ways we resist death, is the behaviour of life.
Wiki - “Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased (death), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate.”
@Arc
Semantics.
Pain results in avoidance. Pleasure results in embrace.
In other words, you don’t like what I say, but have no way to articulate other than dismissal or patronization?
Bravo!
We are naturally occurring. Everything we do, is therefore natural. I don’t know if you’re attacking drugs or attacking companies that prescribe them, but I’m not going to humour you further.
We’re all as dependant as each other, and if you think differently, odds are, you’re well adjusted to your addiction.
I am taking up OnlyHumean’s issue, as I take it. And continuing my own, in the post prior to the one you are responding to here. I don’t think it is beneficial to look at being alive as an addiction, but I am not sure, so I came at this idea once playfully, then more, hopefully, pointedly, about what constitutes action/habit.
I never realized that you were such a reductionist. Life is a condition? Like dermatitis? We go to the doctor, he gives us topical medicine and that cures the condition. Actually very often ‘conditions’ return. Is it really that easy, aletheia?