Posted by finelinebob on October 4, 2006, at 23:40:16
In reply to You made me cry » finelinebob, posted by Racer on October 4, 2006, at 14:46:24
> That if I died then, I'd die a true failure, since I hadn't even achieved biological success.
That's why I went into physics. Biology just messes with your head. "Evolutionary perogatives" and all that rot. But wanting someone to care for is an excellent reason to stay alive. Knowing Leyna depends on me -- doesn't matter who else does -- that's enough for me.
> ... although I think I could at least do a hell of a lot better if I had some help, some support, in real life. Too bad I ain't got that, huh?I wouldn't know. But I **know** that I wouldn't know, if it were me. So I don't trust me to know, and rely on the word of others who can prove me wrong on a regular basis. Whenever I feel like I have no one on I whom I can depend, I treat that information as suspect.
> Which, of course, also doesn't bode well for childrearing...It doesn't take a village, but it takes more than one. Usually the same ones who can prove you wrong about not having anyone you can depend on.
> I dunno...Neither do I.
I was talking with my T about Landmark Education -- the kinder, gentler child of EST. I have a friend all caught up in Landmark, and knowing some Buddhism, knowing the purpose of koans and how they're confused as "Socratic teaching", and knowing some Heidegger, it's rather amusing to see what it's all turned into. But the going back to EST, I've read how the founder's purpose in create his methodology was to "raise" people's consciousness to the point that they "get it". And what was it that they were supposed to "get"?
That there was no "it".
That was EST's path to Enlightenment. Landmark talks about it as being able to create your own meaning out of anything you experience. It's a bastardization and corruption of Buddhist Enlightenment and most certainly the same of Heidegger's Dasein (literally, "being there" or being-in-the-world ... that movie title and Peter Seller's behavior didn't come out of nothing or pure whimsy).
I'm reading Thich Nhat Hanh right now, someone described as the closest we have to a living Buddha in the present moment -- but THAT is the point. All we have is this present moment. We say when we get this degree we'll be happy. Then we say when we get this job that pays better we'll be happy. Then a house, then a nice car, and we keep putting off being happy, never really being alive in the present moment. Dasein not as something objective, but rooted in what it means to "be" and therefore subjective, metaphysical.
It's so damn hard...hell, I can't even clean my apartment and finish unpacking and I just got my lease renewal in the mail. But the only thing you can count on is being alive this moment, and by the time you've read this that moment has irretrievably passed and we're on to yet another moment.
So, how do you want to live in this moment?
For me, I dunno ... that's why I pay my T ridiculous amounts of money and swallow eight pills a day minimum to alter my state of consciousness. It's why I'm studying classical guitar and it's why I look at the mess occupying the place I want my music space to be and feel terrified by it. It's why I practice Buddhist mediation and why I try to put aside the "sword I carry in my heart" so that I can become a convinced Quaker, and not one by association.
>
> Thanks for answering, though. Have I mentioned it's great to see you back?
poster:finelinebob
thread:691584
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/2000/20050828/msgs/691986.html