Is it okay to die?

[austintorn@aol.com]

[MikeInfinity]

I dont think the world will end in catastrophy, there is no reason a perfectly good world would just go to waste, if that were its destiny then all the powers of the universe created our sphere in vain.

My belief is the world will end with love.

[austintorn@aol.com]

There have been near extinctions; In one, over 95% of all species went extinct.

Also, at one time, the number of 'humans' was down around only 2000.

Mastodons and Extinctions

In the late 1700’s, Cuvier could take heaps of bones
And whip them into shapely forms not in the stones.
After describing and naming the fossil elephant the mastodon,
He put forward for the first time a theory on extinction.

He said that from time to time there were global catastrophes
In which some groups of creatures “became history”.
This raised many uncomfortable implications at the time,
For why would God create and destroy without reason or rhyme?

This suggested an unaccountable casualness by someone unseeing
And greatly troubled the belief in The Great Chain of Being,
Which held that the world was carefully ordered for us—
And that every living thing thus had a place and purpose.

Meanwhile, William Smith noted a correlation in fossils
In rocks to find the relative rock ages that were possible.
At every change in rock strata, certain fossils vanished,
While in others they carried on into subsequent levels.

Now it was seen that God had wiped out creatures extinct
Not only occasionally but repeatedly—which made us think
Him not only careless but as having an outright hostile distinction.
There had been more than the Biblical Noachian deluge extinction.

[melanie]

I seek to traverse every train of thought possible, with out fearing the fear of dying,
without fearing the thought of having a fear.

Is not fear natural? If there ever was an advocate who would speak on behalf of fearlessness,
that same advocate would have recognized fear and made a choice and a decision that fear is "not good".

Their every action would be a direct act of actually seeking to flee from fear.

In order to truly escape the bonds of sensory living you must react not act.
I am an advocate of that thing that stands between fear and fearlessness,
its called- "just go with the flow".
Accept all things, Believe all things,

Hope all things.

Zero resistance. Static- like the Tao.

My fear subsided with victory.

The last thing I want to be is a young man having fights in the streets and all sorts of people were around undoubtedly appalled by the display of brutality.
I don’t want to be a thug.
Yet to take actions not to be a "thug" would compromise my ascension and affect my state of staticicity.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.
A Buddhist saying is ''Hope and fear chase each other’s tails''
hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state.
Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency- it means you are essentially powerless.

When you give up on hope, the exploiter/victim relationship is broken.
You rise up.
You defend what you love.
You stand up for yourself.

Hope is a pacifier.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

Truth is the enemy of power.


_____________


A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself — and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell — you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase — not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

BY: Derrick Jensen

AM I LIMITED IN POSSIBILITIES?

If so, then:
1) free will has nothing to do with cosmic law.

2) all of our choices are illusions that make us feel like we are making choices just to entertain us

3)we are a consciousness sitting in a movie theater watching our lives from a distance with no power to affect anything.

The Emperor asked the Zen Master to paint him a picture of Mount Fuji.

A long time passed but finally the Master appeared with the picture.

The Emperor was very touched by the beauty of the painting and asked the Master,

“This little path on the mountain, where is it leading?”

“Let’s go and see,” said the Master,

and they took each other’s hands and walked into the picture,

never to be seen again.

[Mohan.C]

Of course it is okay to die. Where would be the fun in life if it was not so. Life was never a choice and death isn't too.
"I cannot die", is not hope, its an expectation, a desperate expectation in that. And life is ruined by these expectations.
Let every second be a surprise, then even death will be a surprise. So, when I die I can say "wow, its death !!! "

[MikeInfinity]

We are all students of the same master. We could never know which one of us is the master's best student.

I believe:

1) Free will has nothing to do with cosmic law.
2) All of our choices are illusions that make us feel like we are making choices.
3)We are a consciousness sitting in a movie theater watching our lives from a distance with no power to affect anything.

So I go with it.

Again I ask you...

If these three things were true, would you be okay with it???

(These three things make all ancient wisdom " N/A")

[austintorn@aol.com]

3)We are a consciousness sitting in a movie theater watching our lives from a distance with no power to affect anything.

Us it to detach from some of the crazy events on stage. This is an action that can stifle anxiety, thus affecting something.

[Mikal]

We are all students of the same master. We could never know which one of us is the master's best student.

I believe:

1) Free will has nothing to do with cosmic law.
2) All of our choices are illusions that make us feel like we are making choices.
3)We are a consciousness sitting in a movie theater watching our lives from a distance with no power to affect anything.

So I go with it.

Again I ask you...

If these three things were true, would you be okay with it???

(These three things make all ancient wisdom " N/A")

Hi Mike....we have free will and this is apparent whenever multiple decisions are possible. There is also constructed action versus responding reflexively. We have ability and capability to deal with complex situations when a response is required. If free will has anything to do with cosmic law it is only applicable if there is an "individualized self" at the center who has realized the meaning of responsibility.

Choice is real and we see this when a choice made affects one's future.

If one acquires an "individualized self" at the center it is your own personal power which is used to affect your own reality and everything that goes on in your surround.


Mikal

[MikeInfinity]

I read this after I, through experince, conclued free will was non-exsistant.

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself — because of the way you are. (2 ) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects. (3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are (for the reasons just given). (4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

Tamler: I suppose it’s the third step that people have the most trouble accepting.

Galen: Yes, although the step seems fairly clear when you look at it the right way. Sometimes people explain why number (3) is true by saying that you can’t be causa sui—you can’t be the cause of yourself, you can’t be truly or ultimately self-made in any way. As Nietzsche puts it, in his usual, tactful way:

"The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness."

There’s lots more to say about this basic argument, and there are lots of ways in which people have tried to get around the conclusion. But none of them work...

Einstein himself, in a piece written as a homage to the Indian mystical poet Rabindranath Tagore, said that ‘a Being endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.’ http://www.naturalism.org/strawson_interview.htm

There is an undeniable human tendency to see ourselves as free and morally responsible beings. But there’s a problem. We also believe—most of us anyhow—that our environment and our heredity entirely shape our characters (what else could?). But we aren’t responsible for our environment, and we aren’t responsible for our heredity. So we aren’t responsible for our characters. But then how can we be responsible for acts that arise from our characters?

--Tamler Sommers

[austintorn@aol.com]

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself — because of the way you are. (2 ) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects. (3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are (for the reasons just given).

It's true that what actually does the willing—the will—cannot itself be willed, for it is dependent on what you have become via your learning, associations, knowledge, personality, emotions and memories.

You even find out what it wills after it is done. In cases of some 'simpleton' willing, other brain areas may further 'will' and change this.

It is only those naturally accepting that learning is a good thing to do and continue that can broaden their more informed choices, although still not 'freely' willed.

'Free' would mean random and not many would wish for their actions to be undetermined.

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.