You're right. Bad arguments start with bad assumptions.

You are, now I realize, a cross-dressing, lesbian, post-op transvestite space alien necrophiliac hunchback robot.(*_*)

I know I erred. But please believe me, for me this is not the first, and not the worst of instances of wrongly recognizing gender identitty.

Furthermore, (*_*) it takes one to know one. — god must be atheist

You're good. I am male (tho with a hypertrophied anima), but I do identify with something in the avatar. It's a still from a Russian movie called Mirror. The actress's name is Alisa Freyndlikh. I really like the image. I guess I'll sieze this opportunity to talk about the image, because I haven't on here before.

There's something in her face that suggests equal measures of longing and mistrust. or affection with a proportional amount of knowingness. Maybe the way you would look at someone who you know to be profoundly flawed and masking it, but for whom you nevertheless care deeply. You're going to put up a guard, and not give in to their bullshit, but behind it, you still care.

The first thing - longing + mistrust- is what makes me identify with her. The second thing - being looked at by someone who truly knows your flaws, but still cares for you, but is prepared to withstand your bullshit - would be the ideal glance meeting me.

It's a great image and a great film. :up:

Existentialism evolved - at least in the mind of one man: Colin Wilson (made famous and fashionable by his first book, The Outsider, in the 1950s, when he was 25 years old) - into The New Existentialism; a philosophy rooted in, and foil to, the Sartrean Nausea: centered on the notion of peak and plateau experiences as documented (later in the century) by Abraham Maslow.

This is one path out of existential darkness and still an existentialism. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I've never read Colin Wilson, but I did read a good article on him one time. He's fascinating. This is is the image of him I took away from it (which is sure to align with the perspective of the author who wrote the article, since that's my one window.) It seems like in the crucible of his youth he ingeniously brought a whole stew of ingredients together to express the things he was going through. After that, it seems like he continued, cyclically, to look for an outside answer explaining everything. I want to emphasize that I'm not throwing shade at mysticism, because I think mysticism is a rich and wonderful thing. But his approach to mysticism (and science and everything else) was to re-establish a connection with the world, such that his own chaotic feelings would be sanctified and codified by an authoritative para-mainstream summation. So again and again, there are these earnest grasps at some Truer explanation of things. My sense, as someone who is prone to the same kind of thing, is that he seemed to think that if he found an explanation that accorded with his own sense of the world, he would be brought back into the fold. I think that is one instance of the general structure of addiction (peaks and plateaus, even elevated outside of the peak of a drug-high, get drawn easily into the magnetic field of addict-thought). I think addiction is usually concomitant with a pathological egoism (which, while a vice that one must take responsibility for, I also see as a kind of affliction that besets a soul trying to survive). This seems to characterize Wilson.

The second thing - being looked at by someone who truly knows your flaws, but still cares for you, but is prepared to withstand your bullshit - would be the ideal glance meeting me. — csalisbury

I want to talk about this a little, even though it doesn't really fit the thread. It's where I'm at tonight. There's a book of short stories, Redeployment, by Phil Klay that I had to read it for a class. I would never have read it otherwise. The marketing is this: 'Book about the Iraq War written by a real life Iraq Veteran, who came back and did a writing workshop, and then found the human element in all of it'. That's the type of thing that makes me immediately uninterested. It fits way too neatly with a certain liberal fantasy about soldiers and war. It seems like a book fitting this description would have happened no matter what, and people would have loved it no matter what, because of that description.

The thing about it is it's really good. And what it's really about is the need to be seen, and how easy it is to manipulate how people see you, and, further, how much people want you to manipulate your story. And then how you grow to hate - or feel contempt for - the people that believe you.

If you think about it, it's wild, as a soldier coming back from Iraq to write a book about these themes for an audience looking for a book to humanize Iraq. The book is basically about how the book they want is bullshit. But the reception of the book largely bulldozed over any of that and turned it into The Award Winning Book About Iraq We Were Waiting For. He hasn't written any fiction since.

A word of caution - the ideal of needing to be truly seen by someone often accompanies narcissism. Everyone is bullshitting, everyone is being bullshitted. Only the narcissist thinks that they are a true, real, individual in a fallen world of phonies. The truth is that almost everyone understands that, and goes on to play the game with a heavy heart. There's something bordering on cruelty when you sanctimoniously call out someone for being fake, when they know they're being fake, and just really don't know what else to do.

I think Klay gets this, and the nuances of his book work this in, but then it doesn't really matter. Whatever he believes, his book does a good job of expressing the human need to be seen through at the same time one is cared for. I think most of us learn, over-time, that the two can't coexist. But that's what we're really after.

Back at you. Stalker is my all-time favorite film (your avatar was my work-desktop background for a long time)

I don't know what you're on about. What is reality to you? Is it something every philosophy till now conceived must butt against and, if I understand you correctly, find itself deficient in some way. Reminds me of having a bunch of wrong keys and trying desperately to unlock a locked door. The question for people like me is do we want to enter or do we want to exit the door both in a state of utter desperation; do we want to come to the truth of what reality is or do we want to escape from the truth? In other words do we already know what reality is and wish to escape or do we not know and wish to know it?

The best definition of reality I know is Phillip K Dick's - "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

I see Schopenhauer & Nietzsche, among others, as creating a conceptual dollhouse of sorts, where they understand the whole thing, can look into any room, and see how it all fits together. But no matter how sophisticated they get, I still feel that they're turning away from the world as it is. ( John Ashbery: "was there turning away from the late afternoon glare/as though it too could be wished away".) Systems do this inherently;systems are inherently dollhouse-thinking.

But I don't think it's something every philosophy has to butt fatally against. It all depends on whether the philosopher is aware of the finite place their philosophy occupies within a greater whole (or, if you're hip and know that totalities are bunk, what I mean by whole is not totality but something like : outflowing expanse). Again, its something the systematizers seem to fall prey to. It seems like system, rather than philosophy, is the culprit.

In terms of the door metaphor - desperately wanting to unlock is something I relate to (I touched on this a little in a previous response talking about Colin Wilson.) I think you're right to talk about it in terms of escape. There is something fearful at the heart of a lot of philosophy.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." — csalisbury

In that statement we see a hidden impulse to flee from reality as expressed in the phrase "stop believing in it" and our abject disappointment vouched for in "it doesn't go away". Maybe I'm reading this a bit too pessimistically but hey, if that wasn't Phillip K. Dick's intention then he didn't pay attention to rhetorics in philosophy school.

It seems then, if I have the correct picture, we're a dissatisfied lot, unhappy with reality as it has been exposed via philosophy or even the random musings of the average Joe. It fits quite well with how humans are in the business of changing reality as evident, in its crudest form, in the way we've changed or attempted to change our physical environment: we've invented air conditioning and heating so that we may live comfortably even in the harshest of climates. Then we discovered morality which is, at its core, about how the world ought to be, contrasted with the way the world is (reality). Reality, it seems, is hard to take in and so either we do something about it in real, practical, terms or simply invent our own personal imaginary worlds to escape to. The former route is less prone to damage/destruction than the latter and Phillip K. Dick's definition will attest to that fact.

Okay, I have a confession to make, too. I am not Charles Heston, or Moses, or God. Any similarities, real or perceived, are purely coincidental.

I can't part the Red Sea, I can't parlay with god, and I can't find my glasses most of the time.

Then again, much like Moses, I've never been to Israel, can't bake levened bread, and don't wear earrings.

Colin Wilson (made famous and fashionable by his first book, The Outsider, in the 1950s, when he was 25 years old) — ZzzoneiroCosm

I would have sworn that The Outsider had been written by Albert Camus, in French, with the original title "L'estranger". He was about 25 years old, too, in the 1950s. It was made into a really good film, too, starring that french guy, forgot his name, with the wide-set eyes and big head.

I have found that once you have found a way, or a few ways to settle back from the external things you can learn to settle. The key to this is the realisation that it is not a learning, but a relaxing, a moment of rest, a stillness.

Once you know the stillness then you can perhaps, if you wish, learn to (allow) it to remain, while you carry out your daily tasks.

Zen master Dogen wrote about this in Moon in a Dewdrop. His life was devoted to carrying out his day to day tasks, in a sense of an unhindered freedom/reverence.

I see you as El Cid, charlton Heston's greatest role. They don't make movies like that anymore.

La Kid?

I'll have to borrow El Cid from my local library and watch it.

If it's a Western, I expect him to shoot first and ask questions later.

If it's a Film Noire, he tortures himself to death to deal with his existential agony of not hearing enough good jokes.

If it's a detective film, he solves the crime, but also solves second-degree one-unknown linear equations.

If it's a comedy, mostly nobody gets the jokes.

If it's a war movie, he plays the bullet.

If it's a porno movie, he enters the Womb of Eternal Joy and Knowledge.

If it's a computer programming teaching guide, he plays the if-then-else conditional function.

If it's a film to popularize stamp collecting for young adult male iguanas, he plays the Blue Mauritius.

I am monumentally and crushingly in dispair, I can't believe that you haven't watched El Cid. He plays a heroic savior of the Christians in their battles with the Moors in Spain, in the same vein as Spartacus, but arguably a far better film. With Sophia Loren as support actress. Please don't tell me you haven't heard of her.

The terms I use are so often used and misused that I find most people misunderstand them at their core. I have actually thought a lot about the concepts behind these terms before settling on the terms I’m currently using, and I feel they are each still open to change. @god must be atheist mentioned ‘thinking in concepts’, which I think aptly describes my approach, but I also work in communication, so it’s important for me not to just use a word that sort of fits or simply sounds good.

Integrity, patience and self-awareness, for instance, all relate to awareness before we even begin to connect or collaborate with the world. They point to our attitude towards information. In the past I’ve used ‘self-control’ instead of self-awareness (and I’m not convinced this is the right term, either), but I’ve come to understand that it isn’t so much about ‘control’ as it is about learning how we accept and integrate information before acting, and how that affects the way we respond to the world. In a way, it’s about gathering enough information so that our predictions about future interactions are more accurate. I have noticed, for instance, that hormonal cycles change my awareness of quantitative vs qualitative information - not a great deal, but enough that either my spatial or emotional intuition is affected, for instance. Knowing this enables me to factor this uncertainty into how I then interact with the world at certain times.

Integrity is being honest with ourselves - particularly with how our past impacts on our present, and our openness to information from the world based on the sum total of our past experiences. This is basically an understanding of cause and effect in relation to who I am up to this point. With self-awareness, it doesn’t have to stay this way, but we need to interact more accurately with our past in order to start somewhere.

Which brings me to patience - which is recognising that any change we want to happen requires time, effort and attention in the present that we have to find from somewhere. The brain makes predictions about the body’s energy requirements and where our attention needs to be focused every moment of our lives, to the point that we can pretty much go through the motions without conscious effort. If we’re going to adjust this in any way, there will be internal resistance from systems that are used to working autonomously. No change happens overnight, and experiences of pain, humility, loss and lack will feature in any adjustment worth the effort. We need to be aware of how much of this is tolerable at any one time, and therefore how long it’s going to be before things improve. So it’s about an accurate interaction with our present situation.

Have more conversations with people. Step outside your given personality a little bit. Approach the threshold of being a sociopath. Be kind to others including McDonald's workers to rebuild your soul.

To csalisbury.
You must be an optimist in hoping that answer which eluded humankind for thousands of year will
found in the discourse of the Forum. Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking question/````

would have sworn that The Outsider had been written by Albert Camus, in French, with the original title "L'estranger". He was about 25 years old, too, in the 1950s. It was made into a really good film, too, starring that french guy, forgot his name, with the wide-set eyes and big head. — god must be atheist

Different book.

Do you use humility, or a correlate of humility, at all?

Do you use humility, or a correlate of humility, at all? — Punshhh

For me, humility (like pain, loss and lack) is an experience of life - not an attitude or action that we need to be striving for. It seeks us out easy enough and slaps us around a bit. The trick is to be prepared for it, to recognise it as a consequence of increasing awareness, connection and collaboration, and to manage our tolerance of it as best we can.

These experiences of suffering, such as humility or humiliation and our fear of it, are signs that we’re challenging the perceived or predicted potential of the system. In increasing awareness, an experience of humility calls for patience; in increasing connection it calls for gentleness; in increasing collaboration it calls for peace; and in relating awareness to connection, connection to collaboration and collaboration to awareness, it calls for compassion - a recognition that humility is a familiar experience for all.

QM tells us that the amount of relevant energy/information in a physical system is always finite - but that there is always new potential energy/information whose relevance is yet to be discovered. In other words, the universe is not a closed system - it only appears that way from a four-dimensional perspective. I consider humans in the same way. Managing our tolerance of humility enables us to discover this unrealised potential.

I've never read Colin Wilson... — csalisbury

"The New Existentialism" is worth a read. It's short and to the point.

Sophia Loren -- one of the icons of my youth, along with Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida, Audrey Hepburn, and Claudia Cardinale.

In my country in my youth there was no following of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando.

But there was of Paolo Bernardo, Roger Moore, and that famous French actor who had an italian name which I can't remember. Oh, scratch Paul Bernardo, he's a more modern name from my past, a guy who enjoyed torturing young virgins to death with his wife, and then getting nailed for it. The actor's name was Jean-Paul Belmondo. Sorry for the mistake.

I am too old to accept legends, I am too skeptical, jaded and woodened. El Cid may have been a heroic Christian warrior, but only by the viewpoint of Christians; the Muslims most likely viewed him as the Devil Incarnate.

Much like the political tortures, murders and heroitizing the victims these days don't work for me. While I abhor torture, and would abolish it if I were the Lord of the World, I also recognize that if Party A is getting tortured by party B, then given the opportunity, Party B would be torturing with equal vehemence Party A.

There is no justice, no heroism, no legends, and there is no evil, no despicable enemy, no nuttin', without first taking sides in a contentious international political issue. Therefore I don't condone epic movies of heroic Christians, of heroic Muslims, of heroic communists, of heroic Nazis, of heroic Americans, of heroic Germans, of heroic Jews, Tamil Tigers, Black Panthers, White Supremacists, French Undeground Resistance, Russian partizans, Yugoslavian and Greek partizans, Bolshevik Red Army, Menshevik White Army, and any movie heroitizing any of these or the likes of these.

Oh boy, you really are a Charlton Heston.

In increasing awareness, an experience of humility calls for patience; in increasing connection it calls for gentleness; in increasing collaboration it calls for peace; and in relating awareness to connection, connection to collaboration and collaboration to awareness, it calls for compassion - a recognition that humility is a familiar experience for

Interesting you seem to be saying that humility is an affliction, an unfortunate feeling, like sadness, or grief. You are the first person I have come across in a thread like this who sees it this way. Perhaps in the passage above if you substitute the word engenders, or something like that for "it calls for" it would be more appropriate.

For me humility is the most powerful means of affecting change in oneself. In spiritual development personal humility is the cornerstone of the spiritual life. In most forms of self help, or personal development processes personal humility is the first lesson, the first step.

"When all else fails
We can whip the horse's eyes
And make them sleep
And cry"
~JDM

What I really want is techniques for how to live, and techniques for how to approach life as it is. — csalisbury

"How to live" in what way? to what end?

"Approach life" from within or without? (i.e. immanently or transcendently)

"Life as it is" what?

That's hard - some inner instinct bucks and shies from that - but what else to do?

When all else fails ... question your questions?

Oh boy, you really are Charlton Heston. — Punshhh

Oh, drat. My cover's off.

"How to live" in what way? to what end? -- Well, death, obviously.
"Approach life" from within or without? (i.e. immanently or transcendently) You can't approach life without life. Unless you are a train or a meteorite.

"Life as it is" what? You know, shining shoes, doing math homework, getting the older child back from the police station, paying mortgage, and washing the shit off of your 86-year-old mother-in-law's inner thighs.

question your questions? And the question shalt answer. — 180 Proof

Yeah, question my questions sounds about right. Approach life as something to be lived rather than something to be theorized about, I think is what I'm after. I notice I usually go into these bursts of posting a whole lot and in overly flowery prose when I'm avoiding something irl. Tidy little self-defense of posting abstractly about concrete changes, probably to avoid change, it bewilders me how easily i slip back into it, even tho ive been here many times before.

Interesting you seem to be saying that humility is an affliction, an unfortunate feeling, like sadness, or grief. You are the first person I have come across in a thread like this who sees it this way. Perhaps in the passage above if you substitute the word engenders, or something like that for "it calls for" it would be more appropriate.

For me humility is the most powerful means of affecting change in oneself. In spiritual development personal humility is the cornerstone of the spiritual life. In most forms of self help, or personal development processes personal humility is the first lesson, the first step. — Punshhh

I understand that most spiritual language encourages one to actively ‘seek humility’. I guess I’m a little resistant towards instructing subservience without qualification. I think people tend to also distinguish between humility they choose for themselves and humiliation thrust upon them unwillingly. I think it’s important to recognise the experience of humility as inclusive of experiences in which humility is not explicitly sought. Humiliation is more the affliction: only one’s attitude towards the experience determines which term we use.

If I said that ‘experiencing humiliation engenders patience’, would you agree? Sometimes I think it gives rise to anger, frustration or even violence. We don’t like the idea of not being able to choose our experiences of humility freely. Like with unwanted pain and loss, we often feel entitled to retaliate - this is where our spiritual development can be challenging.

Personal humility is a starting point - I agree with this. Self-awareness, patience and integrity together enable us to recognise the potential distance between where we are and where we aim to be. There is not only humility in this, but also an awareness of lack, perhaps even pain. When we experience all three, we are ready to take the first step.

I like the term engenders, by the way. Thank you.

"Approach life" from within or without? (i.e. immanently or transcendently) — 180 Proof

I think these converge at the limit.