Fear is the root of All suffering

[ChiForce]

We are all a product of cause and effect and the march of time. A tree produces many leaves, but every leaf is unique. When it falls there will never be another identical to it. Impermanence writ large.

But it is all the same when each leaf decomposed and going back to refertilize the soil.  And to grow another tree.  Therefore, it is the illusion that you are different.    It is also an illusion that the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth does not apply to you.  Even a great Boddhi may need to relive or reborn to another life to achieve nibbana...   Yes, I am also a gardener and somewhat good with plants too.     

Edited August 17, 2015 by ChiForce

[Karl]

Greek philosophy uses the rational mind to understand the world around it, a useful tool but not ultimate reality. The greek's ultimate reality is  a higher world, a supernatural being that is separate from nature that can only "know" the answers, like life is a question to be "known". Western philosophy did not transcend mind itself to reach ultimate reality.

 

Polar complete reality symbol is the yin yang symbol. western philosophy symbol would be two blocks one white, one black that are separate from each other. This represents that everything is  independent from each other and absolute, the big mistake in greek philosophy.

 

If a  god is responsible then mortals do not have to be divine, not know their true self, ultimate reality. This is a cowards way out. 

 

How do you interpret 'ultimate reality' ? Something more real than real. Sounds fishy. Is reality less real than real ?

 

Everything having independent and separate identity does not suggest independence from each other. Everything is effect of some other cause.

 

Your last sentence could have come straight out of Atlas Shrugged, it is the Ayn Rand philosophy of Objectivism.

[Karl]

But it is all the same when each leaf decomposed and going back to refertilize the soil. And to grow another tree. Therefore, it is the illusion that you are different. It is also an illusion that the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth does not apply to you. Even a great Boddhi may need to relive or reborn to another life to achieve nibbana... Yes, I am also a gardener and somewhat good with plants too.

That is a different thing. That materials are recycled is well understood. That everything is made from exactly the same thing-whatever the universe is composed of is clearly true. However everything has independent identity and is unique regardless of timescale. Once a snow flake has melted there will never be another one exactly like it. Entropy smashes the pot for good, it can't be remade as it was. One day the pot may once again be clay from which a similar pot is thrown, but never the same pot.

 

I like to hear you are a Gardner. It's never been an interest for me, despite the odd bit of planting and pruning, but I like the results. My wife is very keen and we often go choosing some new plant together.

Edited August 17, 2015 by Karl

[Orion]

The root of all suffering is trying.

 

You can compartmentalize the problem all you want and identify it as mind, an emotional problem, whatever... but it's all part of the One. It's all just arising and dissolving and there's no "you" in any of it.

 

Nothing you've ever done has been wrong. Nothing you've done has ever been right either. There's no "you" doing any of it. Anything could happen in a minute, in a week, in a year... anything *could* arise or dissolve. You're not in control of any of it... there's no you involved. It's the trying, the grasping, the need to do that creates the problem. Trying to avoid suffering causes suffering, just like trying to be happy causes suffering. You don't have control over what happens next, not really. You just think you do, because you think you're a "you".

 

Right now is as good as it gets. There's no time or place that will make it any different. This moment is your enlightened life. And even if you awaken to that, it doesn't mean the end of suffering. It just means the ability to relax into it, because it's not your fault that it's happening. It's just happening! It's kind of like how a rock climber looks for little rests while climbing the wall. They're ultimately climbing for no apparent reason, but even en route in their arduous, meaningless task they can find rest in the midst of it. That's kind of what suffering becomes... just another thing that arises and dissolves, and you find micro-rests in the experience by knowing it's all just happening without a "you" to speak of. And it's not a psychological thing, you feel it in your body. And you can't always be in that state because, as already mentioned, you're not in control of what happens next, because it has nothing to do with you, even if it seems like it does. Wouldn't it be great if we could feel that peace all the time? If you're attached to always feeling that peace, then guess what, you're going to suffer!

 

Enlightenment is meaningless and hopeless. You're totally fucked. Welcome to freedom.

[Karl]

"The root of all suffering is trying"

 

That's a bold and simple statement. What about succeeding or failing ?

 

There is no control that is true, but free will always exists. That is the basis for morality, if everything is pre determined then choice is an illusion, therefore there are no consequences and no cause and effect.

 

You can take a stab at compartmentalising, but I agree that it is ultimately a pointless exercise beyond trying to communicate the experience.

 

There isn't a doer, we are that.

[ChiForce]

That is a different thing. That materials are recycled is well understood. That everything is made from exactly the same thing-whatever the universe is composed of is clearly true. However everything has independent identity and is unique regardless of timescale. Once a snow flake has melted there will never be another one exactly like it. Entropy smashes the pot for good, it can't be remade as it was. One day the pot may once again be clay from which a similar pot is thrown, but never the same pot.

 

I like to hear you are a Gardner. It's never been an interest for me, despite the odd bit of planting and pruning, but I like the results. My wife is very keen and we often go choosing some new plant together.

Hehehehe..independent identity and has it own intrinsic values..so much for the 12 dependent origination of suffering.....son, you have a long way to go....

Edited August 17, 2015 by ChiForce

[ChiForce]

"The root of all suffering is trying" That's a bold and simple statement. What about succeeding or failing ? There is no control that is true, but free will always exists. That is the basis for morality, if everything is pre determined then choice is an illusion, therefore there are no consequences and no cause and effect. You can take a stab at compartmentalising, but I agree that it is ultimately a pointless exercise beyond trying to communicate the experience. There isn't a doer, we are that.

Free will???? Sigh....I will assure you that your free will is only as free as the size of your bank account and the amount of education you have.  If you are dirt poor and not so bright, your free will is pretty much limited.  You are free to either get govt helps or working in a min wage job.  If you are rich and rolling in mad money and have plenty of social connections, you can do anything you want.  Even buying your way out of jails.  Hehehehehehe.....  Please, stop throwing these words around...think before you write.  Gosh.....  Basis of morality?  What is that, may I ask???  Free will?  If you are free to kill and to murder, that makes you a moral person????  Seriously, I am like huh.......   

Edited August 17, 2015 by ChiForce

[Brian]

 

Free will???? Sigh....I will assure you that your free will is only as free as the size of you bank account and the amount of education you have. If you are dirt poor and not so bright, your free will is pretty much limited. You are free to either get govt helps or working in a min wage job. If you are rich and rolling in mad money and have plenty of social connections, you can do anything you want. Even buying your way out of jails. Hehehehehehe..... Please, stop throwing these words around...think before you write. Gosh..... Basis of morality? What is that, may I ask??? Free will? If you are free to kill and to murder, that makes you a moral person???? Seriously, I am like huh.......

I think the point (whether it is Karl's point or not, I can't say) is that the concept of morality hinges upon the existence, at least to some extent, of free will. This is a fairly straight-forward point as the two go hand-in-hand.

 

Of course, acceptance of either eliminates the possibility of a deterministic universe...

[ChiForce]

I think the point (whether it is Karl's point or not, I can't say) is that the concept of morality hinges upon the existence, at least to some extent, of free will. This is a fairly straight-forward point as the two go hand-in-hand.

The problem is that his philosophy revolves around the almighty ego which can rationalize everything (we can all see this here with this logic this and logic that)...this including the free will.  That is, the ego thinks it is acting on free will to choose to do good or evil but in reality, the ego isn't free.  

 

As I have pointed out, your free will is only limited by the resource you have to make choices in life.   

[Tibetan_Ice]

I think Karl might be an objectivist. He keeps harping about identity and denies the existence of anything that cannot be realized by the senses.

Its a pretty warped philosophy and didn't amount to much.

 

You can read about it here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)

 

Here is a taste:

Objectivism's central tenets are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform humans' metaphysical ideas by selective reproduction of reality into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and to which one can respond emotionally.

 

 

...

Rand's philosophy begins with three axioms: existence, consciousness, and identity.[12] Rand defined an axiom as "a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it."[13] As Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff argued, Rand's argument for axioms "is not a proof that the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity are true. It is proof that they are axioms, that they are at the base of knowledge and thus inescapable."[14]

 

Rand held that existence is the perceptually self-evident fact at the base of all other knowledge, i.e., that "existence exists." She further held that to be is to be something, that "existence is identity." That is, to be is to be "an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes." That which has no nature or attributes does not and cannot exist. The axiom of existence is grasped in differentiating something from nothing, while the law of identity is grasped in differentiating one thing from another, i.e., one's first awareness of the law of non-contradiction, another crucial base for the rest of knowledge. As Rand wrote, "A leaf ... cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time... A is A."[15] Objectivism rejects belief in anything alleged to transcend existence.[16]

 

Rand argues that consciousness is "the faculty of perceiving that which exists." As she puts it, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something", that is consciousness itself cannot be distinguished or grasped except in relation to an independent reality.[17] "It cannot be aware only of itself—there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something."[18] Thus, Objectivism holds that the mind does not create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality.[19] Expressed differently, existence has "primacy" over consciousness, which must conform to it. Any other approach Rand termed "the primacy of consciousness", including any variant of metaphysical subjectivism or theism.[20]

 

Objectivist philosophy derives its explanations of action and causation from the axiom of identity, calling causation "the law of identity applied to action."[21] According to Rand, it is entities that act, and every action is the action of an entity. The way entities act is caused by the specific nature (or "identity") of those entities; if they were different they would act differently. As with the other axioms, an implicit understanding of causation is derived from one's primary observations of causal connections among entities even before it is verbally identified, and serves as the basis of further knowledge.

 

 

[sufiman]

angra mainyu is the root of all suffering

 

Zervan (aka God) is the root of angra mainyu

 

so God is the root of all suffering, but that doesn't make Him any less great.

 

In defense of fear: fear helps me behave myself, and it certainly doesn't cause me as much suffering as doing evil does.

Edited August 17, 2015 by sufiman

[Tibetan_Ice]

...

Once a snow flake has melted there will never be another one exactly like it.

...

 

How would you know? Have you examined every snowflake that has ever existed and will exist? There must be billions of billions of billions...

 

Define snowflake. How big does it have to be? I can conceive of a snowflake made up of so few atoms that identical matches could be easily replicated. Oh, I know.. You rely on statistical inference.

 

Would not all snowflakes consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen have exactly the same formation? And even if the formations varied based on position relative to each atom, the combinations are finite and thus capable of being duplicated.

 

So you have uttered a falsehood, haven't you?

 

On tv the other day it said that in all the infinite universes it is very likely that there is an exact duplicate of each person existing in an other universe. If that were true, then there would also be billions of billions of billions of identical snowflakes.

Edited August 17, 2015 by Tibetan_Ice

[Karl]

How would you know? Have you examined every snowflake that has ever existed and will exist? There must be billions of billions of billions...

Define snowflake. How big does it have to be? I can conceive of a snowflake made up of so few atoms that identical matches could be easily replicated. Oh, I know.. You rely on statistical inference.

Would not all snowflakes consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen have exactly the same formation? And even if the formations varied based on position relative to each atom, the combinations are finite and thus capable of being duplicated.

So you have uttered a falsehood, haven't you?

On tv the other day it said that in all the infinite universes it is very likely that there is an exact duplicate of each person existing in an other universe. If that were true, then there would also be billions of billions of billions of identical snowflakes.

 

A traditional earth snowflake. Everything is finite, but that doesn't alter the fact that every snow flake is unique.

 

'Infinite universes' shows a poor understanding of the meaning of universe. There is one finite universe no matter how many dimensions and objects reside within it. It is the universe, totality, everything that ever was or will be.

[Karl]

Hehehehe..independent identity and has it own intrinsic values..so much for the 12 dependent origination of suffering.....son, you have a long way to go....

 

Nothing has intrinsic value.

[Karl]

@ TI on objectivism and Rand.

 

I don't have enough information to know if that is true or not. I suspect not, but I agree with much she says just not everything. There is something not quite right about her dogged defence 'individualism' in the sense she means it. Objectivism seems to me to have been the cult of Rand after first being her philosophy. It was in Atlas shrugged where she created the ideology of 'Galts Gulch' which goes completely against economic reality.

 

It's an interesting point you bring up as it reminds me of the notion that all Libertarians are Misesian. Yet these two things are completely different. Libertarians have a political philosophy about freedom and no aggression. Mises on the other hand said nothing about these things, his work was purely on the science of economics. Yet over time they have become entangled. I think this is why objectivism confuses me, it isn't a pure work, it's a design like libertarianism with an independent philosophy of everything. It's like a scientist developing the philosophy around a subject. There is a hint of the Mussolini in it.

Edited August 17, 2015 by Karl

[Nikolai1]

Hi Karl,

 

I have been a mystic for virtually my entire life. I've been out of body, past life, ghosts, clairvoyance and what not. It was all, perfectly real at the time. My brother once had a dream that my Dads office had been broken into and water was pouring down the stairs from a broken pipe. Next day we went across at his insistence and found that to be exactly as he predicted. 

Out of interest, how do you explain what the 'precognition' showed by your brother.  I know all your explanations must be logical in order to satisfy you, so what is your explanation of this?

[Karl]

Hi Karl,

 

 

Out of interest, how do you explain what the 'precognition' showed by your brother.  I know all your explanations must be logical in order to satisfy you, so what is your explanation of this?

 

It's funny what I think of being implicit and isn't.

 

What do I remember ? What was true of that event ? I took no care to look at the reality at the time, the story has been repeated so many times that it has developed its own truth. It is true because I (we) say it is true. This is how legends and myths happen. We so want to believe it to be true we create our own proofs.

 

Really I have no knowledge that this is exactly how it happened. My brother often had precognition and 99.99% we have forgotten. The first time we got a wisp of correlation we concluded it was real.

 

As you know we grew up on a diet of fantasy and mysticism. Seeing ghosts, precognition, UFO etc was every day fare to us as a family. We hardly questioned anything and produced volumes of false evidence. My second book, as I think I told you, is a fictional story. All the family/except my absent dad-were highly imaginative. School reports often mentioned my 'vivid imagination' and 'story writing skill'. I even had an English tutor argue with me about a place I had invented. She believed it was a real place and that I couldn't possibly have invented it. I've lived in Storyville most of my life, when it's sunny it's beautiful, but when it turns dark it is horrific. That kind of suffering you might understand I wished to exit.

[Nikolai1]

So are you saying that you don't even know if that thing with your brother even happened? did you just make it up to convince TI that you were a mystic?

[Aithrobates]

Greek philosophy uses the rational mind to understand the world around it, a useful tool but not ultimate reality. The greek's ultimate reality is  a higher world, a supernatural being that is separate from nature that can only "know" the answers, like life is a question to be "known". Western philosophy did not transcend mind itself to reach ultimate reality.

 

Polar complete reality symbol is the yin yang symbol. western philosophy symbol would be two blocks one white, one black that are separate from each other. This represents that everything is  independent from each other and absolute, the big mistake in greek philosophy.

 

If a  god is responsible then mortals do not have to be divine, not know their true self, ultimate reality. This is a cowards way out. 

 

The greek philisophy was very diversified. What you describes mostly fits the Athenians schools (the Academist, both Platonits and Skeptics, the Perpipatetics). But there was so much more...

 

In a sense you're right because those Athenian varietes became quite the reference in the consciousness of the modern westerner, it is, sadly, the definition of greek philosophy.

 

Anyway, greeks were not greek. They spoke greek but lived everywhere from Gaul to the Hindu Kush. The were Gauls, Sicilians, Egyptians, Persians, Bactrians, Indians...

[Karl]

So are you saying that you don't even know if that thing with your brother even happened? did you just make it up to convince TI that you were a mystic?

As far as the events are concerned my Dad had an office, it was broken into and water was pouring down the stairs. My brother and other siblings insist that they remember it as a precognition whenever we get together. I know longer know if I have been swayed by their multiple telling of that story into believing I also remember the accuracy of the prediction, or not.

 

Remember that recent story about the journalist that said he had been on a helicopter under attack. The truth was it was a lie, but he seemed to have convinced himself it was true.

 

Was I really a mystic ? That is a really excellent question. I believed I was. I wrote a book which confirms I thought I was. There in lies the reality of what I have consistently said. You don't know what you don't know and cannot do what you cannot do. If you have no rudder then you drift, the world is anything and all things, maleable as putty but as unyielding as granite. Hold those two views simultaneously and suffering occurs.

 

[this is why I said Brian was incorrect when he implied I was wasting my time here. Challenges produce observations and are very helpful to me. So thank you for that question.]

Edited August 17, 2015 by Karl

[Nikolai1]

Do mystical type experiences still happen to you?

[Karl]

Do mystical type experiences still happen to you?

 

Another good question. I would say mystical type thoughts, or feelings will emerge now and then which I would describe as irrational, not so much mystical experiences. I can apply logic to any growing irrationality to check if it conforms to existing reality.

[Nikolai1]

Another good question. I would say mystical type thoughts, or feelings will emerge now and then which I would describe as irrational, not so much mystical experiences. I can apply logic to any growing irrationality to check if it conforms to existing reality.

There must be some instances where this is hard to do? Times when the mystical explanation seems more compelling?

[Karl]

There must be some instances where this is hard to do? Times when the mystical explanation seems more compelling?

 

They exert a pull, they have force and power. It would be equally hypocritical for me to deny that these thought are non existent. I would then be doing the exact same denial of facts and reality. I give them breathing room and examine them fully. They wither and die if they cannot stand the light of reason. They are just concepts like all the others.

[Nikolai1]

If a sceptic has a premonition, he does not find it hard to say 'it was just coincidence' or 'I am simply imagining in this moment T+2 that there was a thought at T = 0 predictive of the event at T+1'.

 

Likewise, the mystic does not find it hard to convince themselves of all sorts of clairvoyant genius.  They can be so dogmatic that they never stop to think that they might be rewriting history.

 

Have you never noticed a similarity between these two types?