An odd thought occurred to me while driving this morning

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Eeezee
Moonbeam, you sound very naive. You've obviously never been in the kind of situation where divorce is inevitable. Remember, it only takes one person to create a divorce, and suddenly you've lost half of your income.

What I hate is when two working people get divorced and the man still has to pay alimony, even if his yearly income is less than hers. It does happen, and it's insane. A prenup prevents these kinds of horror stories that happen every day.

Perhaps you have never been is a situation where your knowledge of your self is deep enough that you know all women. It is the jeweler who knows which is glass and who is the real gem. Be a jeweler first and you will marry a gem.

In marriage a man must be a man or a zero. Sadly, the art of either has pretty much disappeared.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: shira
How can it be that when it comes to the meaning of existence, the best that modern man can do is the hundreds- or thousands-of-years-old writings of mystics and holy men, when with the same soaring intellect applied to every other area of knowledge mankind has hurtled forward at breakneck speed?

There is no shortage of thought on this, from the ancient to the semi-modern to the modern. The limitation in view begin and end with the viewer. That you're participating, though negatively, in the topic says something about you. That you find it hard to even like well-loved poets means that an answer to your difficulties, as with everyone, can likely be see in a mirror.

You're assuming I have difficulties. My question was rhetorical.

It's very clear to me why modern man is hung up on the ancients: An inability to accept that all that awaits each of us is the great void, with our vital individuality reduced to nothing more than rapidly fading memories in the minds of our progeny and companions.

Magic is a so much more pleasant a prospect than harsh reality.

Edit: Oh, and as to this "well loved" stuff, Jesus and Muhammad are adored by billions. Michael Jackson has sold orders of magnitude more music than Beethoven. To me, that says a lot about the limitations of human judgment.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: shira
Oh, and as to this "well loved" stuff, Jesus and Muhammad are adored by billions.

Yes, they are.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: shira
How can it be that when it comes to the meaning of existence, the best that modern man can do is the hundreds- or thousands-of-years-old writings of mystics and holy men, when with the same soaring intellect applied to every other area of knowledge mankind has hurtled forward at breakneck speed?

There is no shortage of thought on this, from the ancient to the semi-modern to the modern. The limitation in view begin and end with the viewer. That you're participating, though negatively, in the topic says something about you. That you find it hard to even like well-loved poets means that an answer to your difficulties, as with everyone, can likely be see in a mirror.

You're assuming I have difficulties. My question was rhetorical.

It's very clear to me why modern man is hung up on the ancients: An inability to accept that all that awaits each of us is the great void, with our vital individuality reduced to nothing more than rapidly fading memories in the minds of our progeny and companions.

Magic is a so much more pleasant a prospect than harsh reality.

Edit: Oh, and as to this "well loved" stuff, Jesus and Muhammad are adored by billions. Michael Jackson has sold orders of magnitude more music than Beethoven. To me, that says a lot about the limitations of human judgment.

The assumption is that you know who your vital individuality is. You are a song but Rumi was music. You are a river but Rumi was rain.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: shira
How can it be that when it comes to the meaning of existence, the best that modern man can do is the hundreds- or thousands-of-years-old writings of mystics and holy men, when with the same soaring intellect applied to every other area of knowledge mankind has hurtled forward at breakneck speed?

There is no shortage of thought on this, from the ancient to the semi-modern to the modern. The limitation in view begin and end with the viewer. That you're participating, though negatively, in the topic says something about you. That you find it hard to even like well-loved poets means that an answer to your difficulties, as with everyone, can likely be see in a mirror.

You're assuming I have difficulties. My question was rhetorical.

It's very clear to me why modern man is hung up on the ancients: An inability to accept that all that awaits each of us is the great void, with our vital individuality reduced to nothing more than rapidly fading memories in the minds of our progeny and companions.

Magic is a so much more pleasant a prospect than harsh reality.

Edit: Oh, and as to this "well loved" stuff, Jesus and Muhammad are adored by billions. Michael Jackson has sold orders of magnitude more music than Beethoven. To me, that says a lot about the limitations of human judgment.

The assumption is that you know who your vital individuality is. You are a song but Rumi was music. You are a river but Rumi was rain.

You're assuming an assumption on my part.

Implicit in your response is YOUR assumption that for someone to fear oblivion they must have an accurate sense of the vital individuality that will be forgotten. That's silly. A lack of self-knowledge doesn't make our fear or our reactions to it any less real.

Whatever it is I am, I will be erased by time. And the fact that I crash about the place breaking the china whereas Rumi treads delicately doesn't make my words any less true or his any less false.

 

[Moonbeam]

Judging by your answer, my assumption was sound. The song will pass. Music will remain.

Your notion of your vital essence is a product of thought. Thought is reflecting on the past. Thought, therefore, is time and ego separation. In time you will have your death.

When one enters into the beloved time and separation end. The lover cannot die because he does not exist.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Judging by your answer, my assumption was sound. The song will pass. Music will remain.

Your notion of your vital essence is a product of thought. Thought is reflecting on the past. Thought, therefore, is time and ego separation. In time you will have your death.

When one enters into the beloved time and separation end. The lover cannot die because he does not exist.

Whoops. You've once again cited a conclusion that's not based on the information at hand.

First: "Thought is reflecting on the past."

Nope, sorry. I don't accept that. Thought can be focused on the past, present, or future. In the case of the fear of oblivion, it's focused primarily on the future.

Second: "Thought, therefore, is time and ego separation."

Sorry, there's no logical connection between this statement and anything else in our conversation - not even your previous sentence. This is merely a statement of an opinion you hold. It may or may not be valid, but it doesn't follow logically from anything you or I have said.

Third: When one enters into the beloved, time and separation end. The lover cannot die because he does not exist.

Where is this "when" coming from? The notion that lovers can "merge" into oneness is an illusion, based once again on a vast confusion between the concepts of infatuation (= "romantic love") and real love. For an outstanding commentary on this confusion, I recommend reading the first few chapters of Peck's "The Road Less Traveled." In a nutshell, romantic love - that soaring, overwhelming, intoxicating sense of oneness with the beloved - is an evolutionary trick that keeps two people close together long enough for real bonding to occur. Bonding not as one, but as two, absolutely distinct individuals. By the time those "in love" feelings have dissipated (and they most certainly will) - by the time it becomes apparent that there are real problems involved in being two individuals with different, often mutually-exclusive, wants and needs - the bond of real love ensures that the two will stay together.

Rumi has the same confusion. He writes very pretty poems, with all sorts of very appealing conceits, but that doesn't make them truthful or wise. Sorry.

 

[Moonbeam]

Well what do you think of it put this way:

Thought is language and language is words and all of it depends on meanings that were learned in the past. When you think of the future you do it with the past.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be afraid of. Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear. So can you look at death without the image of death? As long as the image exists from which springs thought, thought must always create fear. Then you either rationalize your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear of death. Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of which you are afraid. In this time-space interval there must be conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity. Thought, which breeds the fear of death, says, 'Let's postpone it, let's avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it'- but you are thinking about it. When you say, 'I won't think about it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened of death because you have postponed it.

We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear. That interval, that time, is created by fear. Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas. That is what we call living, and we are afraid to die, which is to end this misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown - the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.

We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time. But we have never questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all. We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants and to the conclusions of psychical research, but we never ask, never, how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty every day. We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully avoided. But death is extraordinarily like the life we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to live, therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same. The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die.

Thought is language and language is word and all of it depends on meanings that were learned in the past. When you think of the future you do it with the past.

 

[Perknose]

Such an unfair fight.

Moonbeam is in one ring, winning unanimously on all the judges' cards.

Shira is in another, swinging recklessly at shadows and missing like an angry drunk.

Sadly, there is no one in his arena to boo, so he hears NOTHING.

 

[Madwand1]

The Beloved

Mortal never won to view thee,
Yet a thousand lovers woo thee;
Not a nightingale but knows
In the rose-bud sleeps the rose.

Love is where the glory falls
Of thy face: on convent walls
Or on tavern floors the same
Unextinguishable flame.

Where the turban'd anchorite
Chanteth Allah day and night,
Church-bells ring the call to prayer,
And the Cross of Christ is there.

Hafiz, trans., R. A. Nicholson

 

[Stuxnet]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
I got halfway through the first paragraph and the noticed the author was moonbeam and decided it wasn't worth finishing because most of

lol

 

[LumbergTech]

I don't believe in marriage period.

I think people become married in their minds and the ceremony is just a ritual to reinforce it, if they want to celebrate , fine,. but I don't think it should be a legal matter.

I've been with the same woman for quite a long time...We have a child together....We support each other in life and try to tackle the difficulties.

I call this love. No ceremony or piece of paper is going to enhance this relationship for me. So I choose to never get married.

To me, marriage is someone elses morbid interpretation of love.

If we ever part ways, we will divide our assets how we agree to, not based on the opinion of someone else.

If I did not feel that there was a possibility of loving this person, I would not have entered into the situation that we are in.

To be honest, I question whether a lot of people are capable of truly loving someone else.

I also think that it takes many years to begin to truly love someone..for who they are , and not just the illusion that you create of them. I think it is a long term process , not a state that you reach and then ride it out.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Well what do you think of it put this way:

Thought is language and language is words and all of it depends on meanings that were learned in the past. When you think of the future you do it with the past.

This is just specious. The fact that knowledge is a product of experience doesn't mean that thought is focused on the past. Knowledge is just part of the human memory bank - data - which has been accumulated over time. The human mind uses this data and engages in thought, with the FOCUS of the thought virtually anything in the past, present, or future.

As an analogy, consider a computer: We can install programs and data in minutes, much as the human brain acquires thinking skills and information over a period of many years. By your reasoning, when a computer program runs, it is "therefore" unavoidably focused on the few minutes of time during which the program and data were obtained. That's ludicrous.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be afraid of. Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear. So can you look at death without the image of death? As long as the image exists from which springs thought, thought must always create fear. Then you either rationalize your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear of death. Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of which you are afraid. In this time-space interval there must be conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity. Thought, which breeds the fear of death, says, 'Let's postpone it, let's avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it'- but you are thinking about it. When you say, 'I won't think about it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened of death because you have postponed it.

This paragraph is utterly irrelevant to what is being discussed.

We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear. That interval, that time, is created by fear. Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas. That is what we call living, and we are afraid to die, which is to end this misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown - the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.

Well, I'm sure we could agree and disagree on many things you've written in this paragraph, but again this is irrelevant to the discussion.

We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time. But we have never questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all. We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants and to the conclusions of psychical research, but we never ask, never, how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty every day. We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully avoided. But death is extraordinarily like the life we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.

Again, irrelevant. But those parts I've bolded point up another aspect of your confusion: The frequent reference to bizarre concepts that are NEVER explained. As an example,

You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute.

Come on, man, you can do better than this. These are words that sound impressive but mean nothing. If you're going to throw phases like that into a conversation, you have a duty to state clearly what you mean. But I don't think you can, because like so many other true believers wrapped up in coping mechanisms disguised as religions, you'd find it too easy to see the BS in clearly-stated versions of these concepts. Better to delude oneself and keep the concepts all muddled and indefinite and mystical. If one can't understand, it must be because the truth is just so profound. How comforting.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to live, therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same. The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die.

Hey, if it floats your boat, . . . .

Thought is language and language is word and all of it depends on meanings that were learned in the past. When you think of the future you do it with the past.

At last. Back on topic. Unfortunately, this is just a repeat of your first sentence. I could repeat my response, but what's the point?

I don't mean to sound so disrespectful, but you have a lot of Sara Palin in ya. It's almost impossible to engage in a discussion with you because every time you feel threatened, you throw all this mystical stuff into the mix.

But I am glad you've found something that gives you comfort. I'm glad you've found a way to deal with all that pain. My own life isn't perfect, but I don't need so much self-subterfuge.