Correct me if I’m wrong but is there such a thing as a non-generalization?
Name one.
Just one will do.
The concept of ‘self’ is itself a generalization describing a phenomenon using imprecise and incomplete information.
When you talk about an individual you are talking about a unity generalized into a single concept against the background of a context.
A generalization often refers to the mind’s ability to integrate patterns within comprehensive models.
We call it a generalization when the patterns are so complex that our mind is unable to integrate all the perceived details within a single abstraction.
When one starts to get at an ever more detalied definition, probabilities and chaos always arises because one is trying to fit something of a mutli-complexited nature into the definition, and there is the possibility that somethings will be so stubborn that they happen to slip through the region one is attemping to confine them to.
Interesting terminology.
“Recovering” would seem to indicate that one is emerging from sickness into health. Perhaps there is something you believe in where previously you did not?
As to this… void. I have long seen diving into it as surrender to something I despise. Despite having to surrender to certain societal forms in order to facilitate survival, I do not see the point in taking that any further than is necessary, and that only for short periods.
I’ve never been entirely convinced of that.
I’ve been isolated for some months now. Reading again is somewhat like waking from a long sleep. Have you ever been so long by yourself that the mere act of speaking to others becomes exceedingly difficult?
No.
My opinions remain relatively unaltered but how I choose to engage them or how I am affected by them, have altered.
Less Apollonian, more Dionysian.
I am not as affected by such idealism nor do I use ‘surrender’ to describe it.
If my core remains intact and ‘clean’, what does it matter if I swim in shit?
I will not swallow any of it, as I keep my mouth tightly sealed, but even if some shit is swallowed accidentally I have confidence in my immune system to get rid of any infections.
What does it matter if my surface is soiled and other will judge me by it?
I know I am not soiled by it internally.
It takes more strength to deny a need while constantly confronted with its temptations than it does to run from it and isolate your self in an ascetic bubble.
Extreme ascetics are inadvertently exposing their vulnerability to the temptation by guarantying themselves.
They are saying:
“I cannot resist, I am weak, and so I completely abstain, making my self-denial easier.â€
It would be like someone blinding himself to the world so that he can deal with it by not seeing it.
Yes.
It becomes trying.
Many forget what effort any interaction demands and what hypocrisy and suppression it involves when the interaction is between conscious beings.
But, like I said, I’m more open to trying the popular ways, these days.
I want to experience it.
The adjustment was somewhat difficult, as dealing with mundane, superficiality and pretence becomes fatiguing, but I have become better at tolerating it and I’m less prone to wanting periods of prolonged isolation and detox.
No offense noble Satyr, but I wish to take issue with this, being my background as it is.
To quote you, yourself: “Know thyself”
In order to resist the temptation, one must first have acknowledged it as a weakness. In order to acknowledge weakness, one must have first spent time in the mind palace to know where temptation hides. This requires preparation to cultivate strength and will to accept what we find within.
This is the esoteric practice, and is very utilitarian, from the introspective view.
Seclusion is not necessaryily weakness, sometimes, it is cultivating strength, away from the mindless cacophony of the mundanities of “civilized society”. Very necessary, for all but the “expert”, in my opinion.
Like Jesus going out into the desert to confront his demons or Zarathustra going up his mountain.
But both return.
I was talking about extreme asceticism being a sign of weakness towards the denied.
It takes more will-power to partake selectively and/or periodically than it takes to completely abstain.
It takes more self-control to live amongst temptation and to resist being soiled by jumping into the mire than it does to go up on the mountain and never come down.
There’s a reason for monasteries. To seclude one’s self and to exclude the sources of temptation and grime makes remaining pious easier.
But how many of them could resist and remain pious and loyal to their ideals when faced with constant challenges to it?
For example:
A recovering alcoholic must completely abstain or risk falling back into addiction.
He cannot socially drink, anymore.
His abstinence exposes his vulnerability to the source of his addiction.
If he has completely overcome it he would be able to indulge and still remain free from addiction.
But I agree, and I practice, the seclusion you speak of.
After prolonged periods of “cacophony†I require a day or two of silence.
A difficult task when the world makes such demands of you.
Well, first let me say that I do not believe in absolutes.
The universe is in flux because it lacks and it is in the process of becoming.
Existence is a process caught between Nothingness and Somethingness.
This flow is a temporal one or entropic decay when the flow is from Somethingness towards Nothingness.
Any absolute would fall out of space/time and existence.
It would be a fulfillment and completion - a perfection, a singularity.
Therefore any reference to an absolute is one of in-the-process-of-but -never-completed, or it is a value judgment based on a comparison.
Secondly let me explain that I’ve deconstructed freedom down to the concept of indifference when in reference to consciousness.
To be absolutely free is to be totally independent.
To be totally unconcerned and unaffected.
To be absolutely free, like any other absolute, is to be inert.
To be ‘free’, in any degree, is to be indifferent.
Indifference is the essence of power, confidence, courage, independence.
To not depend on something is to be indifferent towards it.
On the other hand we have the concept of will.
To will denotes an act - an acting towards or upon.
Acting exposes a need or interest or a lack.
From the beginning we see a contradiction.
To be absolutely free and yet act is to contradict your original freedom.
Therefore willing is possible for the unfree.
So, free-will must refer to a lesser degree of freedom, where the will wills as indifferently and independently as possible without ever becoming absolutely so.
In fact it is a definition of Being if by Being we mean a completion.
Being is theoretical.
Our universe knows no completion and therefore no Being.
We are all Becoming or striving to Be.
This Becoming is an ordering.
We try to resist the disordering, we perceive as chaos, by ordering, by cutting ourselves off a piece of the flux and trying to stabilize it (Autopoiesis).
But existence, by definition, exists within something and is therefore dependant/contingent upon it.
To exist is to be perpetually caring about existence and fulfilling a lack.
to exist as a living unity is to be forever in Need/Suffering.
Therefore to exist and to be free, at the same time, is impossible in any absolute way, unless absoluteness is achieved.
I’m more flattered than offended.
I always sought challenges to my views.
I’m convinced that the mind wasn’t meant to contemplate its own existence.
Intelligence was such a dominating force of survival that it freed the mind from its ‘work’ and made it turn upon itself, questioning its own ‘work’.
This leads to nihilism: the natural conclusion to every existential journey.
There is no meaning.
It would constitute a determining necessity and an absolute.
Man’s freedom lies in the absence of meaning and purpose.
It is possibility, even if conditioned, that determines mans potential.
The goal is not to reach an end, because this would make one’s self obsolete. The goal is to overcome and surpass the self, forever on, into a horizon that can never be reached. I am not what I AM, but what I want to be or what I overcome and endure towards that end.
This is my dignity.
I can’t say that I agree here. Judging the complexity of the mind, not only in structure, but in function as well, I see no alternative but for it to become the representative inquirer of its’ own abilities as well. It seems natural, to my way of thinking.
Perhaps I am confusing or unnaturally obfuscating the issues presented, but if sufferance and endurance is our only reason for being, then life is summarily valueless.
Those things as purifiers and correctives certainly seems the function.
Corporeal form is an energy container. If science is correct, and energy is neither created nor destroyed, but constant of the universal process, then that energy must move somewhere after entropy, to suit some other function?
I can’t say I see where possibility is even relevant to a thing that’s entire premise is based on nothingness.
I have yet to find dignity in being. It seems rather antithetical to the entirety of the scenario, stealing “time” to dally as form until nothingness takes us.
I’ll think about it some more, but it just doesn’t present itself as dignified in the current perspective.
But I believe that the mind isn’t suited to look upon itself as it is to look upon the world or the other.
The eyes (the senses) look/point outward and cannot look back upon themselves.
This is why the self is discovered in relation to the other and when the mind turns towards self and becomes self-conscious, and if this gaze peels away enough of its own layers, it discovers its own lack – its emptiness.
Self-consciousness, itself, is the separation of a piece of consciousness from the whole and the looking upon the rest, as if you were an external observer.
It objectifies self.
This partitioning creates the illusion of duality, of mind/body of spirit and soul.
Since the seer cannot see itself it places there God or soul or pure-identity or the mysterious.
We are always surprised by how others perceive us or by how we appear to others.
Value is a human judgment based on a comparison.
What do you have to compare life with to deem it “valueless�
An ideal, perhaps. An ideal life?
Death?
Life just is.
What value it can have you must give it.
But, life and suffering are the same thing.
The universe is in movement > movement exposes absence > life is this absence/lack made more efficient in its striving for fulfillment. It is directed lack/need > lack – or the universe’s flux - is perceived/felt/interpreted as Need > Need is consciously interpreted as Suffering > Suffering is endless just as the flux is > Pleasure is a momentary distraction or un-focusing of consciousness - a release - from Suffering.
In other words pleasure is the distraction of consciousness from living – ecstasy.
Matter isn’t an “energy container†it is energy emerging/congealing in time/space and perceived as substance due to its speed of flux/change.
A remnant of the past near-perfect-Somethingness perceived as a vibrating vestige of Somethingness, resisting its own inevitable demise/dissipation/attrition.
What resists entropic decay more – has reached some level of ordering – is perceived as more substantial or hard.
What is softer and more ephemeral has less resistance to entropic decay.
Life is a sophistication of this process whereby harness is replaced by flexibility as a better method of resistance.
Evolution is life being flexible/adaptive.
I don’t know if I’ve already posted my opinions on this before but I’ll repeat them here.
That energy is not created or destroyed points me to the possibility that the entire system is a flowing where entropic decay regionally increased while it decreases elsewhere or simultaneously.
We can only perceive a unidirectional flow towards decay/fragmentation/chaos because we are resisting disordering by ordering it.
Memory, knowledge and thought and life is a form of ordering and so life, as we know it, is only possible or ‘necessary’ in this temporal direction.
I see life as another material strategy of efficiently resisting entropic decay.
Life is a pocket of order within a river of disordering or fragmentation of ordering.
Knowledge, information is only possible and can be stored as ordered patterns of abstraction making evolution possible.
I imagine the universe as being this temporal/spatial flow.
The Big bang represents the horizon where the flow turns back on itself.
The Big Crunch is the turning back towards the other direction.
It, therefore, appears as a focal point out of which the universe/existence streams out of – an explosion.
Nothingness is not an absolute, in a universe that knows no such thing.
It approaches absoluteness but never attains it, just as Somethingness approaches completion but never attains it.
This approaching represents the temporal focal points.
The Big Bang, we are told, was a state where all the forces were unified and everything approached a near-perfect state.
We could say that it approaches Somethingness – perfection, an absolute state of stability and harmony and so non-existence.
Near-perfect because there must have been an absence a lack which turns itself back/causes fragmentation.
The same could be said about the Big Crunch only here one approaches near-perfect Nothingness.
Existence, as we define it, takes place within this flow from Somethingness to Nothingness.
This is why all our ideals are related to a return back to our previous state of approaching Somethingness, and finally attaining it.
We dream of being substantially obsolete.
The opposite flow would mean we would be tumbling from nothingness towards Somethingness.
Paradise.
Suffering turns into Pleasure.
Death unto Life.
A universe of light with only hints of darkness (a flaw) as it approaches its own ecstatic, but never completed, finality and then begins flowing back again.
To fight the un-winnable fight is courage personified.
To stand up for one’s self, knowing that defeat is inevitable is becoming noble.
Meditation is a function solely of the mind, whereby the conscious is superceded. That truly is the function of meditation, to quiet the drone, so real work can be done.
Meditation is natural in higher mammals. Felines, canines, avies, etc., all manifest a form of meditation, albeit, for differing necessity.
The conscious mind is crude, easily distracted, and I agree, poorly suited for the job of introspection. The sub-conscious is more important to deal with, it is where I believe we “hide” the mind from itself.
Before you baulk at the term subconscious, I am speaking of wave frequency level associated with the term.
Scientifically speaking, as I know you are prone to ask, the conscious mind operates in the Beta wave range, generalised between 14 - 40 Hz. This is the normal wave pattern frequency of the conscious mind.
During meditation one can approach Theta wave frequency, this is where simple meditation occurs, at approximately 4 - 7 Hz.
Deep meditation and REM sleep occur in the area below 4 Hz, and at this level the hemispheres of the brain start to find synchronicity, which allows for greater mental productivity. Hence the old colloquialism of “sleep on it before you decide” actually has some scientific backing. There’s also questions as to the brains usage of potassium and sodium at the Beta level, possibly being a hinderance to clear thought as depletion of essential nutrients from overuse on general activities.
My point while I am droning on, the mind has the ability for more than most of us understand, or are likely to be trained to use. Summarily, I believe the mind far more capable than any of us care to use of it.
I also, have little concern for how other’s perceive me. Unless I were to come across someone actually capable of ESP, no one has sufficient knowledge to accurately perceive another. The only thing that tends to surprise me, is the depth of idiocy with which we humans “exercise” our perceptions.
This is probably another instance of my ignorance, but without the presence of polarities and antithesis, comparatives cannot be accomplished. This is the bane of a fragmentary and segmented perception capability. Once the comparative is established, valuation or devaluation can be attached accordingly.
Death being the antithesis of life, would have to be the proper comparative, suffering and endurance being modes, within a structured definition, to supply an accurate structure to the comparative.
I tend towards the ideology that a large part of the suffering we submit to, is self induced and predicated upon lack of attention, avarice, general aberrations of the human animal. I never claimed to be other than a fool though.
Here we are likely to part company, from the philosophical perspective.
My theory rests with balance and harmonics, and the universe is the only absolute that my mind has found.
Universal flow, is simple enough to perceive, as in the manner that life emanates forward from the flow. I do not find lack in the universe, I find continual process of an almost artistic balancing act, harmonic movement, that to my perception, does not allow for lack. Again, only theoretical.
Very interesting view you have there. Most would consider a protracted war of certain defeat, a fool’s game at best. The likelihood is though that you are correct, and this is all there is to the human legacy.
