Yes, I broadly agree with your distinction, and also that stress is generally harmful. By analogy with the engineer's understanding, I would suggest that stress is what results from a conflict of emotions, just as stress in materials are the result of opposing forces. I want a cup of tea, but I don't want to get out of my comfy chair to make it, to give a trivial example.

And then there's the self-imposed stress of looking more closely. I mean, stop stressing me, man. ;)

If the options are boredom or stress, and stress is boring and boredom is stressful, then there is little I can do to benefit anyone, and no good reason to either bore or stress them with my interventions. But if your tooth aches, go to the dentist, even if you are frightened.

So now you have a general answer and two exemplary answers to your original question. Let me ask you one: what is the difference between stress and distress?

For example, "I'm afraid your leg is gangrenous, and it needs to be amputated or else you will die." Generally, whenever causing them stress is the only way to benefit them in some important way. That this has been used to justify all sorts of cruelty (e.g. spare the rod and spoil the child) does not invalidate it, but should lead to a careful questioning of less stressful methods, and the reality and proportionality of benefits.

Yeah I support terrorism, don't I?

You know me so well, arsehole.

We left wing milk and water liberal political correctness fanatics do not need to agree with the arseholes whose human rights we defend.

I've been thinking about your Zen Master's classification of anger: - attached, reflected, perceived, loving.

"Attached anger sometimes lasts for three hours, sometimes three days, and does not quickly return to love-mind. When you were crying, you had reflected anger; it did not last long. Soon you returned to your mind that loves your son, and you knew what to do to help him… After more hard training, your reflected anger will change to perceived anger. You will feel anger but not show it; you will be able to control your mind. Finally, you will have only loving anger, ager only on the outside to hep other people — “You must do this!” — but no anger on the inside. This is true love-mind."

It is not altogether clear to me, so perhaps I am missing something, but it looks as though we have the same two distinctions, between inner and outer ( feeling and behaviour), and primary and secondary. There is the typical zen paradox of training to be spontaneous, but I don't think I can go further without all the details of both letters.

But I'll say something about how one feels feelings, provoked by the term 'perceived anger'. I think it makes sense to say that one has to become angry first, before one can become cognisant thereof. There is a rush of blood to the head, and then one notices the rush. So, on the face of it, it is an angry person that notices his anger. And yet one is not, in the first instance angry about one's anger. One might become so, calling myself an idiot for becoming angry, but that is later again.

So there is a perception of anger that is not separate from being angry, and yet is not itself angry. Does this make any sense? That there is always a calm at the centre of the storm of feeling. Now if one can start to notice that, perhaps it will grow. Perhaps one can live from that, and not from one's periphery.

I want to find another purpose to life because that one we have is just absurd and downright foolish. — intrapersona

So you have an ambition to stop being absurd and foolish. Well death doesn't seem to fulfil that ambition. A fool does not become wise in death.

And yet I suggest to you that it is not wise to be so ambitious.

Can you catch this snake before it eats itself?

I am not talking about the meaning of life here but a purpose that sustains one from avoiding inevitable death — intrapersona

Can you explain the difference for me? It certainly seems that one sustains oneself with the purpose to avoid death, and that death is inevitable, yet you seem to want another purpose for sustaining life. Well I offer the purpose of overcoming one's need to sustain oneself, one's need for the the personal continuation that then requires in turn a purpose.

Death is inevitable for physical beings, but it has no significance except to that which sustains itself. Self has no purpose, it is unnecessary and harmful to life. So life's purpose is to end self before death ends life.

Who's been reading Krishnamurti, then?

I am not talking about the meaning of life here but a purpose that sustains one from avoiding inevitable death. — intrapersona

I thought everyone knew.



It does only last once, time. Sustained by the need to relinquish. The requirement that life should have meaning to me, personally, seems unreasonably self-centered. It's not for me.

Your purchases are not really my concern. However, if you look both ways before crossing the street, you are implicitly valuing not getting run down, and you don't need to explicitly articulate this value to yourself.

In that case you have already answered the question implicitly without having thought about it. If philosophy has value of whatever jectivity, then life has value of that jectivity, since life is necessary to philosophy.

But you weren't experiencing pain or death (beyond the pain of anxious apprehension) waiting. in the hallway, to be caned. So why be frightened? What did the suffering of a boy, not in the hallway, have to do with you? — csalisbury

Reason is the slave, not the master, so your question has no rational answer. One might say that psychological time is created by identification; and identity becomes the centre of experience. Anticipation just is identification with an imagined future - myself continues. The alternative is to live now completely and end now completely, to be dying all the time. Then there is no fear but the immediate.

Premise 1 seems like a necessary truth, give or take.
— unenlightened

I don't agree with that. Let's say that you've never at all considered whether life was worth living, but you engage in/with philosophy and you value it a lot. In that case, the value of philosophical questions has nothing to do with considering whether life is worth living. — Terrapin Station

That is certainly possible. However, if, as a matter of fact, and unknown to you since you haven't considered it, life has no value, then it surely turns out that your philosophising has no value, and you have mis-valued it.

1. If life is not worth living, then philosophy is not worth doing.
Therefore, the worth of every other philosophical question is dependent on the question of whether life is worth living.

2. The question of whether life is worth living is worth answering.
Therefore philosophy is worth doing.
Therefore life is worth living.

Premise 1 seems like a necessary truth, give or take.
Premise 2 is controversial, and only needs to be accepted by those thread participants who wish to avoid the performative contradiction of posting worthlessly.

No, no reason, no proof, no method, no effort. It is so.



Of course, to be happy all the time, one needs to be happy to be unhappy.

1. Yes.
2. One does not prove it, one sees it.

Like everyone else, I have no idea about the answer to your question, but feel a fatuous comment is in order.

I used to use coffeecup (free version) which was difficult at first but not impossible. Of what's on your list, Joomla looks good, but I've no experience and most of them I've never heard of.

that is a good point. There is virtually no free speech at all in the workplace, and no free speech way short of insulting the boss. As it happens, many bosses are richly deserving of insult, but... — Bitter Crank

Normally, I tend to favour workers rights, but I think when you sell your labour carrying dinners to diners, or whatever, you are selling your freedom of speech as well as your freedom of movement, so I support a bosses' right to dispense with potty-mouths and layabouts equally.

Talking of arrogance, both sheer and wooly...

How do I make sure I stay dead and reality doesn't bother me again? — dukkha

In the gospel of the Egg-man it is sung:

"I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun see how they fly
I'm crying."

There is no escape, settle down and be kind to your other incarnations.

Ah, so it's insight that makes one blind.

We have eyes, therefore we cannot see; we have minds, therefore we cannot understand; we have fingers therefore we cannot touch.

See also Stove's Gem.

Welcome home. :)

I generally tolerate all the stuff I can't do anything about, and all the stuff I can't be arsed to do anything about. Since I am extremely lazy and extremely weak, that means I'm extremely tolerant. But I do like to moan and pontificate about it all.

I'd say the key to being genuine is to make no effort to be genuine or not to be genuine. There is something inauthentic about the whole approach - as if the genuine being is far away and hard to find. Who, then is trying to find it? It can only be the counterfeit being. Poor thing, the counterfeit being can never be genuine.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 76

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

My song is love unknown.

My song is love unknown,
my Savior's love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.
O who am I
that for my sake
my Lord should take
frail flesh and die?

He came from his blest throne
salvation to bestow,
but men made strange, and none
the longed-for Christ would know.
But O my friend,
my friend indeed,
who at my need,
his life did spend.

Sometimes they strew his way,
and his strong praises sing,
resounding all the day
hosannas to their King.
Then "Crucify!"
is all their breath,
and for his death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
themselves displease,
and 'gainst him rise.

They rise, and needs will have
my dear Lord made away;
a murderer they save,
the Prince of Life they slay.
Yet steadfast he
to suffering goes,
that he his foes
from thence might free.

Here might I stay and sing,
no story so divine:
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.
Words: Samuel Crossman (1624-1683), 1664

... you can also cause unnecessary pain to yourself depending on your relationship to said suffering, or that you can relate to the suffering of others in such a way that you are not responding compassionately, but from a role or identity you hold dear (I really think that compassion runs contrary to identity, though I could be wrong on that). So, for instance, I think of myself as a loving father, and a loving father expresses outrage in these situations, so I then express outrage in such-and-such a manner to satisfy my self-image of a loving father vs. approaching the suffering of your daughter with an ear towards their suffering. — Moliere

I agree, this happens. And in such a case one is performing, and conforming to the image. So it is the image one is attached to, and the image that is harmed, and it really has nothing to do with the daughter at all. But I think - am I deceiving myself? - that it is possible to form an attachment to one's daughter, not just to an image of oneself being attached.

There is a fairly respectable thread in psychology going back to Bowlby that holds attachment to be a crucial feature of the development of the child. Now such an attachment will be asymmetric; dependence on the child's part, and dependability on the parent's. Here is Gabor Mate talking about it, (and mentioning Buddhism). It takes a while to get to attachment.

Because the image of a loving father must have a real source, surely?

This is Utopia, nor am I out of it.

But, masking one's emotions is natural and real. My dreams are just as real as I experience reality. So too are emotions as real as the one's being masked. In other words, let's the ego/super-ego do it's job in masking the primitive aspect of one's psychology.

Is your solution to feel more or feel more adequately? How does one measure this all with the qualitative facets of emotions and their 'unreasonableness'? — Question

For sure, anger is very real; one has only to look at the world. I should emphasise that I am not suggesting in this thread that one should let it all hang out. I need to reemphasise the distinction between feeling and expression.

So it is quite normal to get angry from time to time, (though it may not be necessary) and it is to be recommended that one bite one's tongue, and restrain one's fist. All I am saying is that one should not try to change one's feelings, but simply to understand them. Certainly the measuring of one's feelings is out of the question on this view, that one cannot separate oneself from them. It would be like a ruler trying to measure itself; the whole thing is that it takes another ruler to do that. So to the extent that one manages it, one has created a division in oneself.

This is important because the state of detachment isn't one of indifference, but rather a state of compassion. So detachment isn't to turn oneself into an emotional rock, but rather to calm the mind into a state of loving-kindness, as the terminology has it. — Moliere

Attachment causes pain, but as I see it it is unnecessary pain. The sort of pain that you cause to yourself. — Moliere

I wonder if we are saying the same thing or not. I suppose compassion comes from empathy, whereas attachment comes from self image. So are you saying that my compassion for my daughter's suffering is necessary, but the extra 'weight' of pain that comes from my attachment is unnecessary and self inflicted? I'm not terribly happy with that analysis.

Attachment is good, and pain is necessary. You can avoid it, and not feel the pain of absence, or you can protect yourself from the pain by either focusing on their flaws, or eulogizing them -- none of which I think is healthy. I think that you should love fully, and miss deeply. — Wosret

This is much more where I find myself. And it leads me to a great suspicion of the current fads for 'mindfulness' in schools, and 'time out' in the home. Children especially need to attach, and these processes of detachment imposed upon them lead them to feel abandoned and turn to each other and to material things as inappropriate attachments.

Those things are not sacred but a mere manifestation of our limited mind. So what is sacred? — Benjamin Dovano

Anything I post is but a mere manifestation of my limited mind. So do not expect either a definition or an answer. But perhaps in the silence that follows, the sacred will manifest itself.

Or maybe the controller and analyst aren't fictional people. They're aspects of your psyche which have a history of doing a fabulous job of protecting you and keeping you functional. They aren't going to come into view as "unnecessary fictions" until they aren't needed anymore. Then they can be taken off the way a cast is taken off a broken limb.

There's no benefit at all from trying to force a broken leg to support you. But a cast on a healthy limb is crippling you. — Mongrel

Maybe. 'Fictional' is probably misleading, but my suggestion is that the situation is more like putting a broken cast on a broken leg, which doesn't do a fabulous job - not in the sense you mean. The controller of anger is angry, so he functions to sustain anger and does not protect against it.

That would be a wonderful world to live in where one can dissociate oneself from one's emotions like that; but, my intuition tells me that that is not the case. — Question

I agree with your intuition. Perhaps I should emphasise the role of time in this. Suppose you say something that hurts me, intentionally or not. So first I feel hurt. Quick as a flash, I defend against my hurt by getting angry. Then, I feel my anger. Then there is a thought, 'I mustn't be angry'.

So here, in the space of maybe a second, is dissociation happening; there is a hurt me, an angry me, and a controlling me. Now these fragments are operating as if they are independent, and in particular controlling me is operating on angry me as if it (controlling me) is not angry. But this is a fiction; controlling me is still hurt, and still angry.

Now the obvious question at this point is, who is saying this: "But this is a fiction; controlling me is still hurt, and still angry."? And there are two possible answers. It might be the controller of the controller, another dissociation, another fragment. Let's call him 'the analyst'. Or it might be simply an expression of my feeling.

And this is the end point of my whole thread and analysis, and it is what is strongly resisted by the controller and the analyst; that they are unnecessary fictions. Rather, it is possible to feel one's feelings and not try to operate on them to control or defend, and in fully feeling as one feels, there is no dissociation, no contradiction, and no stress.

So the relating is the relating which promotes growth or flourishing? — apokrisis

That's a reasonable generalisation, but it's a bit vague. Dung beetles don't promote the growth or flourishing of dung. I seem to recollect a species of squid that finds a crack somewhere to lay it's eggs and is then consumed by it's children. Presumably that's good for squid in general, but the mother doesn't flourish. But that's ok, proximity has the same ambiguity; Mercury is close to the sun and Q is close to W on my keyboard.

I'd guess that flourishing is another relational term. It is associated with eco-philosophy in my mind, which I suppose fits fairly well with your systems approach. Diversity, stability, resilience, flexibility, I can't really remember the details, but the ecosystem rather than the species, let alone the individual, is the POV that has a significant relation of flourishing or not in relation to a world, according to such views.

We tend to identify with the way we feel and that in turn causes a cascade of events to happen in the mind. One does wonder though, can one dissociate from the way they feel, for example being depressed over being depressed ad nausium. Or if dissociating oneself from their emotions is even a healthy thing to do and what does that in turn lead to... — Question

I think in order to identify with the way one feels, one has first to dissociate from it.

I don't know if that is clear? I am not depressing, but I have got depression which I am trying to escape or cure by pressing it down. So I would say that to reason about one's feeling, or to act on it to change it is to have dissociated from it - the reasoner is dealing with a feeling separate from the reasoner, and then identified with the reasoner. It's always 'I have a problem', and not 'I am a problem'.

Well dung is good for dung beetles and rose growers, affection is good for humans.

I suggest that 'the good' a relational term. Like 'proximity'. It would be a mistake to look for a property of proximity either in oneself or in certain objects, or events. It would also be a mistake to think that proximity is not real.

But actually rereading your post -- anger is a secondary emotion to primary pain, either empathetic or egoistic.

What, then, are the primary emotions? — Moliere

I was wondering when this would become an explicit question. It has been given answers in various comments that I have avoided responding to, and has hovered in the background of the discussion of the toddler video. One might look at infants or animals, one might look to evolutionary psychology. But I don't want to answer, because I don't want to start from there, I want to start from here.

So my only answer is that the primary feeling is the feeling I have before I make a judgement or have a feeling about my feeling. It may well be that such feelings do not even have a name of their own, because they are so universally masked. Or maybe it is some list - fear, disgust, curiosity, affection, or whatever. I don't want to preempt what anyone might uncover, or force feelings into categories.

I don't think of anger as egoistic. I agree with your approach that it is a result of an internal configuration, but I'm less prone to think of anger as attached to identity. I'm more prone, in general now and not just with anger, to think in terms of attachment. And this may just be a way of restating what you're getting at, but it's the verbal pattern I'm accustomed to. — Moliere

This is difficult to tease out; we may need to go into it again, but for the moment let's hope it is just a matter of terminology.

But were I not attached in the first place -- or were I to detach ahead of time -- anxiety and anger would go away. (at least when it comes to things I have no control over, which will inevitably come and go, causing excitement and disappointment)

Which isn't to say one should always detach. While I do think anger is a nullity on compassion, I'm less certain about saying compassion is something we should always have. — Moliere

Can I say that to be attached is to be vulnerable to hurt? This immediately prompts one to see the benefit of detachment. But to me, detachment is a curse, it is a state of unreality in which my relationship to the world is denied. There is no feeling more destructive of the person and the other than indifference.

Well, I think what I was getting at is a little different from what you're stating here. All consuming anger, as I meant to refer at least, is not something which is momentary or which you can't have divided internal conflicts about. It is all consuming precisely in the way that even if you have divided feelings you continue to feel the anger. It is an anger in the long-term, and is all consuming in that it centers your awareness of the world. Akin to hatred, but different too -- because it is easy to hate, but it is hard to hold anger. It is the sort of anger one desires revenge out of, because of the harm you are causing yourself. — Moliere

Right, that is something different. I imagine that somehow anger becomes integrated into the self-image, so that one is constantly evoking anger with a circle of thoughts, rather as a plumber constantly evokes his identity as plumber by going to work and joining pipes every day. But I confess I have little experience of this.