Karl
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Everything posted by Karl
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We can't buy distilled water, only denatured. Not sure why that is ? Some times it's labelled de-ionised to confuse things further.
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Yes. You know from experience what you prefer. I capitalise many things as a result of my communist education.
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Lubricant and coolant you mean :-) I only use fully synthetic lubricant and a special mixture of glycol and denatured water.
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Yes, but then there are roads, petrol stations, villages, shops and hotels. You knew that when you put your maps away. Your experience has taught you that you can be spontaneous in that way. Just as you know how the car responds to certain inputs such that you do not consciously consider every movement of the wheel, change of gear, or press of brake- but note that you do not neglect the instruments, particularly the fuel gauge. There is no point at which you can spontaneously neglect the fuel level and not eventually discover yourself broken down miles from anywhere. Neither can you spontaneously twist the wheel this way and that way if you want to remain on the road. You cannot neglect to brake and act like a blindfolded man trying to pin 'the tail on the donkey'. You must take note of road signs, the speedometer if you wish not to be prosecuted for speeding. You cannot go faster than a line of vehicles that you are forced to follow, nor to carry straight on when the road ends. I suspect you would not practice your spontaneous driving activity in Afghanistan, Libya or Syria. Here it would be necessary to avoid certain places and certain people unless keen on being captures, ransomed or killed. It seems to me that your 'spontaneous' is calculated risk built on past experience. Of course I know all that anyway, for the sake of civilised discussion I'm softening the approach, but seriously, you are kidding yourself. Taking a few well calculated risks built on past experience and the capacity to cope isn't very spontaneous. True spontaneity is a precursor to suicidal behaviour. Grabbing a pack of jelly babies and sticking them in the shopping basket because you fancy some sweets but they aren't on your list isn't really the act of a whim worshipper. Try downing a bottle of bleach or driving your car at 70mph down the wrong lane of the interstate. Throw yourself of a bridge, or lick the conductors of a 1100kv transformer.
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Caveats eh ;-) first be unspontaneous (do the work) then be spontaneous. There are times when we can be spontaneous but only after we have had the experience first. Sex is a good example where it is very difficult not to be spontaneous, another would be the automatic functions of choosing beef over lamb, or Sun over shade.
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I did not accuse you of anything except the lie that you are spontaneous. As if spontaneity was a virtue. It isn't and I'm glad you aren't. :-)
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Sounds like you calcified already if you wish to remain as you were previously. Crotchety old man is just fine by me, but then I continue to expand consciously. If you like dancing (a skill) then practice that. I like walking, climbing, mountainbiking and motorcycling-none of which I undertake aimlessly.
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Listen without listening LOL 'to make deaf the ears so they may hear' It's important to know that quieting the mind is not silencing the mind. It is to see what you haven't seen of yourself, to see the many crack, splits and mirrors within the self due to poor integration. The task is to put humpty back together, not to ignore him.
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if you believe in it, it will exist or else nothing really exist?
Karl replied to Shad282's topic in General Discussion
Knowledge isn't something you read, it is something that you can prove. -
The point of 'good' music is that one judges it to be so on a number of criteria if one is sufficiently discriminating. The music therefore has a value, we are not merely 'just listening' but 'properly listening' and continuing that judgement. Yet what are we judging ? Music is an abstract made concrete. It is like the words of a good book, or the beautiful lines of a motor car. Our senses do not pick up simple vibrations from which we grin innately, not at all, the crafting of the work resonates with our own internal values. The craftsman exhibits something more than talent, they communicate their abstract values to us in a concrete form. As we read the book, look at the art, see the car, or listen to the music then these values resonate with our own. This is why art is so individual. Unfortunately we are losing this critical discrimination. We are told that unmade beds, piles of bricks and dead horses are art; that any buzzes, tweets and random repetive noises are music. People now depend on media reviews to tell them what art is good, what food to eat and what to buy. If a magazine article tells them an old master is stuffy old history and a shapeless blob of colour is a sublime work of genius they are moved to accept it as truth.
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Not for me. I don't require to re-experience childhood. I don't 'play' and most of what I've seen of adult play seems less fun than people make it out to be. I don't need to forget the adult world as I enjoy it and I have no idea why one needs to remain young-I'd be happy if my body stayed young and fit, but pretending to be a child isn't going to have any effect on the passage of time. I'd rather study or work/perform a skill than go off to mindless play, it holds zero attraction for me. I think you are kidding yourself-literally.
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I don't even know what that means. Time is a continuum of relative causality. A moment is not frozen and causality marches onwards, our bodies age, we must breath, we get hungry, thirsty, cold, sick. Desire is an emotional expression of a value we wish to acquire, or hold. Peace is the feeling of happiness on obtaining, or holding a value that we desired.
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You don't need to answer to me MH.
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Iiving spontaneously ? LOL -surely you don't believe that to be true. You told me you wait for your army pension. You live in a nice house surrounded by storm fencing, have a solar cell powered vehicle and fish ponds. This is you living spontaneously is it ? ;-)
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We 'want' from the moment we come out of the womb, we just can't make sufficient sense of the world and our bodies are too weak for us to survive independently. You must of missed the crying, screaming and mewling of an infant.
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Fuck that for a lark. Can't think of anything more terrifying and miserable. I would question anyone's motives that entreaty you to become as naive and trusting as a child.
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Oh dear Jeff. A regression to a totally dependent childhood of tantrums and tears does not appeal at all. You want to get a pack of diapers and a pacifier, then go ahead-if you get old enough and sufficiently senile you may have a second chance at your paradise. I prefer full power reasoning and the volitional option of reasoned judgement. Existence-reason = hell and please stick a needle full of poison in me before I become that way. Going with the flow is total abdication, it is evasion and moral cowardice of the worst kind. If you feel so badly then whatever you are practising is leading you further into hell, that is your decision of course, I can only look on perplexed and slightly saddened at the incapacity. It is a place I do not ever wish to go either voluntarily, nor by force.
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That's a strange kind of relative dimension. There's something oddly poetic about such a statement. Existence exists and consciousness is its axiomatic twin. Only a conscious man uses the faculty of reason by which he can transform existence into something useful to him. Here is a crude sum: existence + reason = happiness The benevolent universe of which reason was born in man, for man to first obey and then transform by reason into happiness. Only reason can measure or define a relationship as part of the process of transformation.
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That's the first time I have detected a sense of the greatness of man in your posts. We are small, yet only in a purely material sense, but boundless in the mental and physical sense. Don't you love that juxtaposition ? The sense of the mighty against which we are matched ? How we are a prime mover, a first cause, creators. Make me a lever long enough and I can lift planets, stars, solar systems and galaxies:-) yet people either moan like this greatness is a curse, or feel so tiny, like helpless specks buffeted around in a malevolent universe. We seem to want to destroy the good for being the good, to be impotent sacrificial beasts wearing sack cloth and ashes for the sin of greatness.
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if you believe in it, it will exist or else nothing really exist?
Karl replied to Shad282's topic in General Discussion
All seperate consciousnesses ? Yes, of course, not a collective. All Mystics are irrevocably hooked on a path of attempting to nullify the reality that we are all independent volitional consciousnesses. That consciousness has identity, that it is something. Once that premise is accepted then men lose power over men and we move towards a greater civilisation of man. Some of us understand this well enough to attempt to nudge philosophy towards this end. A mans life as an end in itself with the pursuit of happiness his only goal and reason as his absolute moral guide. Anyone who begins with a framework of altruistic sacrifice or duty to anyone or anything should be treated as a dangerous plague from which they should run away. Those that tell you that happiness is the reason for mans existence demand nothing, they don't require men's souls. The first is evil, a gatherer of souls, the second sets souls free and is the good. This isn't new of course. From ancient times men have known the tricks to get their hands around men's souls through guilt and fear, it works just as well today. -
There is most definitely a self and that's what you speak from. As to whether one experiences a whole, integrated self, or something akin to the disintegrated multiple reflections as of self trapped between opposing mirrors, then that is another thing entirely. I dispensed with the mirrors and no longer have the disintegrated version of self. That 'mirror' self is an illusion of a kind, but only because there are so many broken reflections that the integrated self is lost within them, but it remains the self even if it is a mere shadow of what is possible. It's a broken/stunted ego that cannot hold on to reality, it is morally disjointed and creates a great deal of internal conflict because it lacks integrity (integrity-integrated, just like calculus). Something disintegrated is differentiated from the whole, the pieces need putting back together (integrated) before the true man appears. I like Rand's words on this, those above are my interpretation in terms of what you might better understand in spiritual terms. Rand is more succinct and gives integrity and honesty equal weight: "Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness."
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Depends on ones definition of peace-how broad or narrow. Peace would seem to mean the absence of violence, or force, yet I see very few advocating laissez faire capitalism and a strictly delimited government who's only duty is to protect rights. Most people are advocating force in terms of welfare, redistribution, increased statism. The Government always doing more. Which means the Government imposing greater violence against its own people. The bomb has become the great bogey man of the peaceniks, but killing is killing, force is force. A nuclear weapon is more destructive in the shortest time, but on balance the dead don't really care if they were slowly starved to death in a labour camp, or vaporised by a nuclear warhead. I'm sure that the people of Greece who cannot afford the cost of a loaf of bread, or the Venezuelan people's murdering each other over food rations is really no different. It is not just armed conflict between nations that should be considered when talking about peace, but the unarmed people suffering under a dictator state-or any state that uses force to extract unearned production and transfer it to others who have done nothing to merit it. As the saying goes ' be the change you wish to see in the world' if you wish an absence of force then stop supporting force by proxy. Instead of banning bombs, ban taxation.
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Yes I'm fine with it, not that I necessarily understand it, nor can I discuss it with any alacrity what so ever, but, as I have said on many ocassions, I'm not a physicist. I'm talking about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
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I haven't argued anything yet, I'm waiting for a reply. I'm not sure what point you are making BES ? If it is that existence exists independent of consciousness, that our consciousness grasps existence directly through our senses and sense perception, then I agree. A red sunset is a red sunset even to one who is colourblind, even to one who is totally blind and can see no colour/or have any appreciation of colour. Just as I can't see atoms in a chair, but accept that they are there given sufficient evidence reasoned and concrete evidence.
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You know better than to disturb our truce, we will end up with logic and arguments over physics definitions over which you are fanatically accurate and I'm a dim slob. If I thought we could discuss these things without it turning nasty I would plunge in, but the gap between my philosophy and yours is such that I don't think we are on the wrong page, but in entirely different libraries. I say tomato you say tomato and we will be ships in the night chucking broadsides at each other. I like too much of what you say in other areas to get embroiled in definitions of quantum mysticism. We won't agree, we will never agree and I'm comfortable with that disagreement.
