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Post by someNOTHING! on Mar 7, 2018 23:46:05 GMT -5
That WHAT is about love/nurturing as much as engagement with life? Are you saying the babies died, not because of the absence of love/nurture, but because of the absence of desire to engage with life? If that's the case, then it would be because of the absence of love/nurture that there is no desire to engage with life. That's the existential crisis a baby goes through. An absence of vitality and well-being, probably a sense of emptiness and loneliness. No, the absence of engagement with life. The infant can't crawl to the nearest pub and chat it up with the locals. You're with me on that, right? The original pub crawls!?
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Post by enigma on Mar 8, 2018 0:01:10 GMT -5
I wouldn't call it quality of life. The baby is stuck in a crib unable to move about, rarely interacted with, and nothing happening. That's why the baby isn't engaged with life. Without said engagement, there is no reason to live. Is that really so difficult to understand? The physical needs were meticulously provided, and we're still discussing what the non-physical needs might be. Suffering is subjective and you don't know the subjective experience of the infant, so you can't talk like suffering is a no-brainer. You are basically just repeating my point. Obviously we agree that basic requirements aren't met. But we disagree slightly on what these requirements actually are and what happens in the process of realizing that these basic requirements aren't met. You seem to be saying that the baby is having a good time until it gets bored and then the baby dies seemingly peacefully. I am saying that the baby is having a good time until it doesn't and then what we call suffering happens and then the baby dies seemingly peacefully. So we are mostly in agreement. We just disagree on the actual effect of living (over a longer period of time) without means to engage with life, without a sense of purpose or hope that things may change for the better. I say this causes suffering because that's the very definition of suffering. You say this causes boredom. We're saying the same thing right up until we get to only point I'm trying to make, and then it gets lost and distorted. The infant does not get bored and become hopeless that anything will ever change, and then suffer and die. That's coming from someone who already knows that the infant suffers and is just connecting the dots. I'm saying the infant never engages with life, and simply does not live. If you like, the vital energy withdraws and the body dies. There are no 'me' stories about boredom and hopelessness because there is no 'me'.
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Post by enigma on Mar 8, 2018 0:04:55 GMT -5
Really? You mean, like, honk the horn or sumthin? And booming voices and stuff. The booming voice would have woke up Papaji and the question of who was driving would never have arisen.
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Post by enigma on Mar 8, 2018 0:29:44 GMT -5
My point is that when you talked about your squirrel satsangs with Marie, you often talked about intimacy, love and mutual understanding and how you understand each other even without words. So obviously, on a deeper level, you know that Marie is not only sentient but also that she's actually sharing a perspective with you. And there's no doubt that you know exactly what's going on in the other. But when it comes to babies, you suddenly take the complete opposite position. You question their sentience and your ability to know what's going on in the other. Marie and I have talked about that exact issue in the squirrel satsangs, and we agree it can't be known if each other exist. You obviously see that as a contradiction or something problematic, but it's fine.
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Post by enigma on Mar 8, 2018 0:34:16 GMT -5
Some critters work collectively to support the group, like bees and ants. I don't believe there's some kind of biological communication going on, so it must be happening on another level. It makes me wonder if they are somehow self aware as a collective, and this somehow translates into individual self awareness. I've talked about the starling clouds before. I don't know how it's done, but it's not choreographed by bird brains. Wonderbeauty: Beautiful. I've never met a single person not impressed by a good murmuration! There are quite a few studies on the different kinds of "swarms" that take place in nature. We've only got grackles here, so nothing quite as spectacular (or graceful) as the starlings, but I have had the pleasure of being under and in swarming schools of fish several times. Everybody needs a good murmuration now and then. Keeps us humble.
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Post by enigma on Mar 8, 2018 0:38:11 GMT -5
No, the absence of engagement with life. The infant can't crawl to the nearest pub and chat it up with the locals. You're with me on that, right? The original pub crawls!? It didn't catch on in the infant community because nobody under 6 months old is allowed in most of those places.
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Post by Reefs on Mar 8, 2018 0:55:54 GMT -5
@ Enigma:I've already answered and explained everything on the consciousness issue in the other thread here (and the posts that follow). Please read those posts carefully. There's a significant difference in what you hear me saying and what I am actually saying.
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 3:37:05 GMT -5
This isn't about prove-ability though. I'm not trying to PROVE to you that a baby suffers....I couldn't prove it. I can't prove that adult humans suffer either. But you do accept that adult humans suffer, right? That's the context we're talking in... the assumption is that suffering happens. You know that suffering has happened to you! It's on the short list of things you can't not know. If it is an unknown as to whether other humans are suffering, I don't understand why you are talking about their suffering. Are you perhaps trying to resolve your own suffering that you do know about? I'm talking about suffering because I know beings suffer, it's not something I can't know.
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 3:41:39 GMT -5
"Engagement with life" is a solid pointing, but "reason to live" is abstract and implicates personal purpose. People peeps might think of it as "will to live", and they're mistaken about the source of that "will". Well, for now the point is simply that life has to be found sufficiently interesting to keep us alive. The lack of interest in engaging, and lack of desire to engage is a lack of vitality. Perhaps particularly in babies and children and young people, this lack is a form of suffering because of their youthfulness. It is basically chronic depression.
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 3:53:51 GMT -5
But again, I think that's the precise point at which contexts are being mixed. When we say a rock isn't conscious, intelligent, alive....we mean it in the same way that we mean an AI bot isn't conscious, intelligent, alive. It's a valid distinction to make, and a valid conversation. But the broader context is that all things have a consciousness, intelligence, aliveness....whether it is an electron, a rock, or a human. Hence Intelligence is intelligent, Consciousness is conscious, Awareness is aware, Aliveness is alive. See, in your perspective, if a rock/paperclip has no consciousness but a human does, then the reason has to be physical/biological structure, and then we are problematically associating consciousness directly with biology. Talking in the small context I don't have a problem with this, but it has to be situated within the broader context in which it is known that all things have consciousness. This then resolves the issue of associating consciousness with biology (in the small context). - again, this is why I have said the question of whether something has consciousness is only ever a question to be asked in the small context, which isn't the spiritually relevant one. I don't see a context in which everything has consciousness. Okay. I assume that's true for Awareness, Intelligence and Aliveness too...? You don't want to assign this kind of intrinsic 'quality' to everything. I will agree with Reefs that there is a powerful experience that cannot be denied in which you come to know that all things have this intrinsic 'quality'. I'm putting this word in parenthesis because for me, the word 'quality' doesn't fit very well. It's not like 'redness' or 'hotness', I don't know it as an overtly sensory quality. It is more a quality known and felt intuitively. But now in which case, now you have the problem in which consciousness is ONLY associated with physical structure. So a human has consciousness because of their biology, a rock has no consciousness because it does not have the biology. You see that, right?
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 3:56:30 GMT -5
Suffering isn't wholly subjective though, our physiological requirements (both tangible and intangible) mean that there is some level of objectivity to it. No, it doesn't. It means there's some level of objectivity to our physiological requirements. These physiological requirements make themselves known, and are addressed, through 'suffering'. Suffer with a headache, take a pill. Suffer with mental arguments...question your beliefs. Suffer through intense thirst, have a drink. Our physiology demands that we address suffering in some way. We are naturally drawn to wellbeing and being at ease.
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 3:59:48 GMT -5
I'm not sure we have discussed the difference between 'knowing' and 'belief' here....Can you briefly give me your definitions of 'believe' and 'know'? You 'believe' that you love Marie but don't 'know' it? Do you 'believe' or 'know' when your observe an adult human is suffering? Do you neither 'believe' or 'know' a baby is suffering when you observe him/her screaming with colic? What do you 'believe' or 'know' when you see a screaming baby? I believe the infant is not subjectively suffering. I don't know anything about that by observing how it acts, even if it's video evidence. Okay so practically speaking you see the baby screaming. Do you believe or know that the baby is in some level of distress? Do you then have the thought 'I believe the infant is not suffering'? What happens internally when you see a baby in distress? Where does the thought that the baby might not be experiencing fit in? For me what happens is...'I see the baby screaming, I know the baby is in distress, I know the baby is suffering (because distress is suffering). Then I start weighing up options on how to act.
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 4:02:04 GMT -5
I have agreed that they are associated with thought, but even in that example (which was a good example), the feeling has only gone temporarily. Whatever one has strong emotion about will come up again at some point, until the feeling has been fully allowed to have its say. In this example, the feeling is likely saying something like...''I am very sad at being abandoned, betrayed and rejected''. And this goes back to the baby's trauma. Do you mean to say you would continue to feel hurt for a while even after you find out the betrayal never happened?? No, I mean the hurt goes dormant again until we create a new trigger, which gives the feeling the opportunity to say all that it wants to say. This is what happens in counselling sometimes...though I don't believe it works very effectively, because the feeling is contrived in that context. Unfortunately, we have to work through emotional wounds as they happen in actual life experience.
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Post by andrew on Mar 8, 2018 4:03:06 GMT -5
That WHAT is about love/nurturing as much as engagement with life? Are you saying the babies died, not because of the absence of love/nurture, but because of the absence of desire to engage with life? If that's the case, then it would be because of the absence of love/nurture that there is no desire to engage with life. That's the existential crisis a baby goes through. An absence of vitality and well-being, probably a sense of emptiness and loneliness. No, the absence of engagement with life. The infant can't crawl to the nearest pub and chat it up with the locals. You're with me on that, right? I addressed this above I believe.
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Post by laughter on Mar 8, 2018 6:58:54 GMT -5
It's all super top-secret Illuminati stuff. I that Smokey bear on the ISS?? oh man. guess I shouldn't have done that. the lizard peeps are gonna' be pissed!
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