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Post by inavalan on Jan 10, 2024 20:12:52 GMT -5
Many people would disagree with this because if this were true, many major scientific discoveries would not have been made. People can do scientific discovery out of passion and interest but no one will search the existential truth when their life is going smoothly. I did it. I thought that there must be a reason. |
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Post by zendancer on Jan 10, 2024 20:35:53 GMT -5
Many people would disagree with this because if this were true, many major scientific discoveries would not have been made. People can do scientific discovery out of passion and interest but no one will search the existential truth when their life is going smoothly. Definitely untrue! My life was going smoothly, but I was still interested in resolving what I perceived as issues that indicated the concensus paradigm was somehow flawed. Some people are simply more curious than others. |
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Post by inavalan on Jan 10, 2024 21:35:23 GMT -5
People can do scientific discovery out of passion and interest but no one will search the existential truth when their life is going smoothly. Definitely untrue! My life was going smoothly, but I was still interested in resolving what I perceived as issues that indicated the concensus paradigm was somehow flawed. Some people are simply more curious than others. In my case, I felt a very strong need. It wasn't curiosity. Looking back, the need was there for much-much longer, but there was a moment when I realized it. |
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Post by laughter on Jan 10, 2024 21:39:18 GMT -5
People search for the truth to end their suffering. And the truth is simple. When we chase something other the present moment, we are in a trap, we are creating problems for ourselves to solve, and they can never be solved. CHASING OTHER THAN WHAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW IS THE CAUSE OF ALL THE PROBLEM. ONE HAS TO DIRECTLY SEE THIS. Yes, I used to think that most people, like this character, were motivated solely by curiosity, but I now think that a desire to escape suffering may be a much more common motivator. I've always thought of it as a mixture looking back. Mostly curiosity, but sometimes questions like "why is this all messed up like this?" .. they blend and blur into the existential.  Guess it depends on how and where one looks for answers. |
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Post by laughter on Jan 10, 2024 21:42:44 GMT -5
Perhaps so, but it certainly feels a lot more IMpersonal than someone who's psychologically suffering from negative thoughts about self or wanting to escape some hellish personal situation, etc. I think before the search for truth begins there is an uneasy feeling that ‘something doesn’t add up’ and no amount of ‘thinking’ will ever make it… (which puts people in a bind since that’s the only way they know how to figure things out… and it seems quite normal to continue doing so) But if ‘truth at any cost’ really takes hold… the habit of constantly thinking loses its grip eventually Existential dread, a low level of anxiety .. I think most people aren't even really aware of these most of the time. Not to say that there aren't naturally happy campers either, they're always fun to be around no matter whatever they may or may not have realized. |
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Post by justlikeyou on Jan 10, 2024 21:47:05 GMT -5
What I meant was that you were not content with the status quo. It drove you to seek answers. That discontent was the Self trying to understand its predicament. I see that as a form of suffering, albeit a very subtle one. Perhaps so, but it certainly feels a lot more IMpersonal than someone who's psychologically suffering from negative thoughts about self or wanting to escape some hellish personal situation, etc. Yes, It is different on the surface of it, by degrees. When This experiences a sense of limitation/separation via the human experience, there is also its opposite: a deep drive to be free of limitation. Whether that expresses as a quiet angst or some "hellish personal situation" or anything in between, it is all "suffering", differing only by degrees, as I see it. |
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Post by Gopal on Jan 10, 2024 22:11:59 GMT -5
People can do scientific discovery out of passion and interest, but no one will search the existential truth when their life is going smoothly. I did it. I thought that there must be a reason. People always start to look for a way to escape the suffering, so they start to search. |
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Post by Gopal on Jan 10, 2024 22:16:01 GMT -5
People can do scientific discovery out of passion and interest but no one will search the existential truth when their life is going smoothly. Definitely untrue! My life was going smoothly, but I was still interested in resolving what I perceived as issues that indicated the concensus paradigm was somehow flawed. Some people are simply more curious than others. I don't know. But it always means finding a way to escape the suffering. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jan 10, 2024 22:52:31 GMT -5
Definitely untrue! My life was going smoothly, but I was still interested in resolving what I perceived as issues that indicated the concensus paradigm was somehow flawed. Some people are simply more curious than others. I don't know. But it always means finding a way to escape the suffering. Gopal, suffering is continually going to the imaginary-oasis-mirage to fill up your canteen, with imaginary water. Gurdjieff said a man will give up everything, except his suffering. And he said too, suffering is the only thing you have to give up. emphasis sdp "I have already said before that sacrifice is necessary," said Gurdjieff. "Without sacrifice nothing can be attained. But if there is anything in the world that people do not understand it is the idea of sacrifice. They think they have to sacrifice something that
they have. For example, I once said that they must sacrifice 'faith,' 'tranquility,' 'health.' They understand this literally. But then the point is that they have not got
either faith, or tranquility, or health. All these words must be taken in quotation marks. In actual fact they have to sacrifice only what they imagine they have and
which in reality they do not have. They must sacrifice their fantasies. But this is
difficult for them, very difficult. It is much easier to sacrifice real things."Another thing that people must sacrifice is their suffering. It is very difficult also to sacrifice one's suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so much attached to anything as he is to his suffering. And it is necessary to be free from suffering. No one who is not free from suffering, who has not sacrificed his suffering, can work. Later on a great deal must be said about suffering. Nothing can be attained without suffering but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering. Now, decipher what this means." In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky page 274 |
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Post by laughter on Jan 11, 2024 1:49:29 GMT -5
Definitely untrue! My life was going smoothly, but I was still interested in resolving what I perceived as issues that indicated the concensus paradigm was somehow flawed. Some people are simply more curious than others. I don't know. But it always means finding a way to escape the suffering. Nah, some folks are pretty happy with their lives, and still curious about the truth. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jan 11, 2024 7:22:19 GMT -5
I don't know. But it always means finding a way to escape the suffering. Nah, some folks are pretty happy with their lives, and still curious about the truth. One day, I came across the lines of Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he wrote in Walden in 1854. Thoreau's writing—a reflection on human nature's tendency to reside in a “quiet desperation”—helped me to pinpoint my own misgivings about... |
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Post by zendancer on Jan 11, 2024 9:05:03 GMT -5
I don't know. But it always means finding a way to escape the suffering. Nah, some folks are pretty happy with their lives, and still curious about the truth. Exactly. One late afternoon I came hiking down a mountain trail and saw an unusual animal run across the trail in front of me and disappear into the trees. I wondered, "What was that?" I had never seen anything like it before and was curious about what it was. After I returned to town, I called a biologist at the local university and described what I had seen. I was curious, but I certainly wasn't suffering. (It turned out to be a fisher, a nocturnal carnivore that had gone extinct in my state 50 years earlier but had been reintroduced by the wildlife department.) In college I was told that a subatomic particle can move from one point to another WITHOUT crossing the intervening space, and I wondered how that could possibly be. I was curious. I was also curious about the observer paradoxes in many fields of science and what a subatomic particle actually IS. I was curious but I wasn't suffering by any usual definition of that word. I could list a dozen other things that I became curious about that were existential in nature, and most of them were related to seeing logical inconsistencies, incongruities, or paradoxes related to the concensus paradigm--things that didn't make sense. When a four-year old child asks, "Why is the sky blue?" (which is actually an informal Zen koan) does that mean that the child is suffering? Not in my book. |
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Post by laughter on Jan 11, 2024 9:13:36 GMT -5
Nah, some folks are pretty happy with their lives, and still curious about the truth. One day, I came across the lines of Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he wrote in Walden in 1854. Thoreau's writing—a reflection on human nature's tendency to reside in a “quiet desperation”—helped me to pinpoint my own misgivings about... Yes, the flip side to what I wrote to gopal is quite significant, no doubt. |
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Post by laughter on Jan 11, 2024 9:20:21 GMT -5
Nah, some folks are pretty happy with their lives, and still curious about the truth. Exactly. One late afternoon I came hiking down a mountain trail and saw an unusual animal run across the trail in front of me and disappear into the trees. I wondered, "What was that?" I had never seen anything like it before and was curious about what it was. After I returned to town, I called a biologist at the local university and described what I had seen. I was curious, but I certainly wasn't suffering. (It turned out to be a fisher, a nocturnal carnivore that had gone extinct in my state 50 years earlier but had been reintroduced by the wildlife department.) In college I was told that a subatomic particle can move from one point to another WITHOUT crossing the intervening space, and I wondered how that could possibly be. I was curious. I was also curious about the observer paradoxes in many fields of science and what a subatomic particle actually IS. I was curious but I wasn't suffering by any usual definition of that word. I could list a dozen other things that I became curious about that were existential in nature, and most of them were related to seeing logical inconsistencies, incongruities, or paradoxes related to the concensus paradigm--things that didn't make sense. When a four-year old child asks, "Why is the sky blue?" (which is actually an informal Zen koan) does that mean that the child is suffering? Not in my book. Absolutely. I've come to think of the entire endeavor of science as a sort of "collective neti-neti". Humanity, as a whole asking "what is all .. THIS??  ". It's fascinating and poignant all at the same time how all the answers will just keep leading to more questions, ever onward. But for the individual seeker, the curiosity can end. At some point, near the end, all the search became for me was a sort of very passionate and naked, raw curiosity. A glorious sense of confusion.  |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Jan 11, 2024 10:01:37 GMT -5
Nah, some folks are pretty happy with their lives, and still curious about the truth. Exactly. One late afternoon I came hiking down a mountain trail and saw an unusual animal run across the trail in front of me and disappear into the trees. I wondered, "What was that?" I had never seen anything like it before and was curious about what it was. After I returned to town, I called a biologist at the local university and described what I had seen. I was curious, but I certainly wasn't suffering. (It turned out to be a fisher, a nocturnal carnivore that had gone extinct in my state 50 years earlier but had been reintroduced by the wildlife department.) In college I was told that a subatomic particle can move from one point to another WITHOUT crossing the intervening space, and I wondered how that could possibly be. I was curious. I was also curious about the observer paradoxes in many fields of science and what a subatomic particle actually IS. I was curious but I wasn't suffering by any usual definition of that word. I could list a dozen other things that I became curious about that were existential in nature, and most of them were related to seeing logical inconsistencies, incongruities, or paradoxes related to the concensus paradigm--things that didn't make sense. When a four-year old child asks, "Why is the sky blue?" (which is actually an informal Zen koan) does that mean that the child is suffering? Not in my book. Gopal hasn't gotten past the tendency to think that everyone sees the world as he does. This is pretty common. It's kind of a shock to get out into the real world and see that there are people who see the world completely differently than you do. Or maybe put another way, we all think our view of the world is the correct view. It's difficult to get past the view that we are correct about most things. We don't realize the subjectivity of our own view. For most people this attitude is stubbornly persistent. Of course we can see other people have other views. But they don't see that I have the correct view. So for Gopal it's all about suffering, and ending suffering. And then we collect in tribes. My problem is, I'm a tribe of one. But I of course don't consider it a problem. From one of the Janwillem van de Wetering books, I think the first, The Empty Mirror, "When a pickpocket sees a priest, all he sees are his pockets". 3 books on Zen, he was a pretty cool writer of detective/murder mystery fiction too, about 14 novels. He should have written more with the Commissaris as the central character, he was the wise old master. The best book, The Japanese Corpse. |
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Guess it depends on how and where one looks for answers.
