Nihilism and the Absolute

1.0 Existence- By existence I mean that which exhibits a temporal signature and which, thusly, makes it apparent and perceivable as a differentiation, as the relationship of the observer to the observed, such as movement, activity, or change. I have no knowledge of anything that exists which does not display such a temporal signature and so I cannot assume that one exists without contradicting the premise of existence itself or by fabricating reality{1.15} out of my own imagination {3.12} with no reference to the world around me.

1.1 The concept of the existent which does not display a temporal characteristic is more aptly expressed with the term: Absolute. It is a human invention derived from the methods man depends upon to become conscious of the world around him and which he uses to understand the reality he finds himself within. In actuality the absolute is a fabrication of the human mind which simplifies the consistent flow of appearances and, by finding a pattern(s) in them, formulates an inert mental model (abstraction) to meet its needs – it imagines an opposite to what it perceives. If these mental models, these interpretations are flawed then the mind using them will, inevitably, fail by using them.

1.2 The absolute is usually fabricated by either taking the mental models literally and not as symbols or simplified generalizations and fluid, or it is fabricated by taking sensual perceptions and then imagining, using undefined and ambiguous concepts, their opposite. Therefore whereas perception depends on the awareness of the existent, the absolute depends on nothing more than fabrication that corresponds nowhere with the existent.

1.3 Terms often used in place of the term absolute are: perfect, one, here, there, now, self, god, nothing, something, omniscience, omnipotence, emptiness, whole, complete, other, I, substance, atom etc. We can go as far as to say that the entirety of human language, which is nothing more but a symbolic representation of these mental models, is based on these artificially constructed absolutes and their cultural longevity depends upon the avoidance of pursuing precise definitions (ambiguity) and on simplifications and generalizations which seek to avoid being entrapped in an endless pursuit of precise definitions where none can ever be produced. As a result all human languages, including mathematics, eventually have to fall back on artistic expression to offer meanings to concepts that cannot be clearly or precisely expressed since they refer to static mental interpretations of a reality that is forever fluid, and they represent generalized, ambiguous, concepts whose probability is a product of its utility and its intent.

1.4 Human error is a result of instinctive and emotional effects upon rational processes and on the practice of mistaking abstractions for actuality, when they are merely metaphorical representations with no literal significance. The most intellectually handicapped lack the mental plasticity to understand that the world, as they interpret it rigidly, is far more subtle and that reality can only be gauged using indirect methods and then only measured by using patterns of repetitive, consistent, probability and possibility.

1.5 In order to be perceived the apparent must exhibit an effect upon the observer’s sensory organs. A contradiction, and differentiation, an opposition to the uniform and non-distinct is what stimulates. That which provides no such characteristics lacks the potential of being perceived by its very nature. As such, the existent, in order to be perceived at all, must exhibit a differentiation sufficient enough, in relation to the observer, to become perceptible as a negative or contradictory element in the flow – stimulation. Uniformity of flow is proven insufficient to explain perception and phenomena, and an unequal element must be posited as the only explanation for the act of perception. In fact, we can go as far as to posit uniformity as the elimination of perception and of existence itself. With no diversity there is no possibility for perception and the world, multiplicity itself, must be ignored as a chimera which, for some reason, attempts to fool us with its false wonders. Given this, all empiricism is denied as being of any importance and one is left with the question as to how such a conclusion is even possible without differentiation, as a starting point.

1.6 Differentiation is interpreted, by the mind, as possibilities and possibilities are abstracted as spatial dimensions. Space represents the hypothetical perceived possibilities of a phenomenon’s flow and so its dimensions and various physical attributes are but interpretations of its perceived potential, as they are judged by the observing mind. For this reason I can only conclude that dimensions are as many as the probabilities a particular mind can perceive and are only limited by its nature as it is determined by its environment and by the limitations imposed by the nature of consciousness.

1.7 Matter is a manifestation of temporal divergence and its varying characteristics, as interpreted by the conscious mind, represent its essence in relation to the observer. Color, sound, weight, form, texture and the many other sensual interpretations the human sense provide us with, are aspects of the phenomenon’s divergence in comparison to the one interpreting.

1.8 Multiplicity is the result of divergence and so the elimination of diversity, towards uniformity, is a desire to eliminate possibilities, towards a singularity, and so to cease existing.

1.9 The mind’s level of intelligence, its ability to project itself using the imagination, opens its consciousness up to the realization that its possibilities are but a fraction of reality accessible to it as probable. This function is an essential element in the efficient focus of energies upon the probable, as opposed to the improbable, and it is why consciousness evolved as a by-product of life.

1.10 The existent informs us, by its very presence, that it is produced by its environment as a contradiction to it, from the fact that it appears, at all. To exist is to stand in incongruity to other(s). In the turmoil of flow it is the divergent that appears, in relation to the observer, and so that which is perceived all the more clearly is all the more different than the one perceiving it.

1.11 Any ideal preaching the elimination of diversity, aiming at a greater uniformity, is really proposing the slow elimination of consciousness and the negation of existence, itself. Many such ideals contradict themselves by calling this uniformity a “higher” consciousness or a “beyond”. They often contradict the very nature of existence {1.0} by keeping the elements they consider desirable, and that make them, as living organisms, possible, while imagining away the elements that disturb their enjoyment (pleasure) of it or that confront their hopes and needs. They resort to selective reasoning which cannot be harmonized with the nature of reality.

1.12 The existent can display a temporary collusion of flow and, in so doing, be interpreted as a type, a kind, exhibiting a predictable consistency based on previously established successful methods of self-preservation, passed on in code. When, and if, this collusion of flow, reaches a level of ordering sophistication, it can be called alive or living – an organism. Its distinction will be perceived as this ordering in the disordering – a resistance to fragmentation. I call this an emerging unity, due to its perceived intent and its inability to fulfill it. A work in progress- Becoming – and a towards…

1.13 This perception of the existent must be shown to be independent from my own will and, even if an interpretation of stimulations from sources outside my wilful control, must prove to be indifferent to my interpretations of it. Although such proof can never be complete one can find some certainty in probabilities as they are derived from constant testing and comparisons between the interpretation of one mind against those of another and, most importantly of all, against the common perceived world of phenomena we call reality. Further validation of one’s interpretations, as they relate to phenomena independent from one’s will, can be found in their utility or by their success or failure in being used as models that can predict future occurrences and future behaviours. If no such verification is possible then my only sceptical response can be that the conflict of interest cannot be resolved and so I must abandon my position as improbable.

1.14 The easiest way to distinguish the improbable from the probable is by how much it adheres to our desires and our hopes, and by how little effort it demands of us. The absence of any conflict of interest. When the world can wrongly be interpreted as being shaped by our thoughts, rather than our thoughts by the world, we must wonder why we cannot achieve everlasting happiness and immortality just by wishing it to be so and why life came to be, at all, when all that is required is a slight adjustment to find perfection and stability.

1.15 From the preceding remarks we can conclude that to come to be is a product of the unceasing tumult of the flow and that life, as a particular manifestation of this flow, stands in opposition to the it as a unity, seeking to maintain itself, primarily, and then, as a result of its power in reference to its circumstances, it strives to complete itself. This is how life stands in contradiction to the attrition of time.

1.16 Reality – A shared common source of sensual stimulations which can then be shared, compared and analyzed from different perspectives and tested using multiple methods. The philosophical definitions are as follows:
a. something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
b. something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.

2.0 Life - Life is a particular manifestation of existence where a flow reaches such a degree of ordered congruity that it achieves a level where its activity, its flow, its movement, is guided by a central controlling mechanism – a nervous system - that focuses its energies and directs its activities – Will.

2.1 Will - The Will is the focus of congruity of flow, having reached a certain level of order (sophistication), upon an object/objective (desire), which is motivated by self-preservation or the maintenance of this congruity of flow. When and if this congruity is successful in its prime motive of self-preservation it seeks to grow its level of influence, its congruity, stabilize its order by completing it; this is called power. Power is but a measurement of one organism’s possibilities in reference to another’s.

2.2 The congruence of energies that manifest in an emerging unity, are focused by the will, upon an object/objective, and they are held together, as a continuity, by the storage of abstractions as experiences and memories. These stored codes determine the consistency of the unity and it produces types, based on their trials and errors (natural selection).

2.3 This emerging unity is characterized by its distinction, in relation to the flow, and it finds identity, consciousness and then self-consciousness, through the awareness of this distinction or difference. Without this discrimination the organism dilutes in a sea of otherness, losing all sense of identity other than the one it attains through association. This is measured by its productivity in relation to others and is valued as an essential surrender to the others. The unity, now, has abandoned its quest for self-completion, as an individual organism, and seeks the same thing through otherness or cooperative processes that demand a negation of large parts of its identity and distinction.

2.4 Life, as an emerging yet to be completed, towards, can also be understood as a resistance, based on exclusion, discrimination and a drive towards self-completion. Self-negation proceeds as a particular manifestation of this drive, a reaction to it, or as a reaction to the reaction, and so as self-denial. Nihilism is the drive to return the emerging unity back to incongruity, its original state of complete, unconscious, passivity. The reward is the relief from the self-responsibilities and the solitary suffering this resistance entails. It is felt as a release or an expansion of self, as the unity, now, harmonizes its essence with that of the group’s common denominator.

2.5 Dualistic thinking provides the antipode to existence as that of non-existence. In fact no such thing can be imagined, since all we perceive is that which exists. The error is based on convoluting existence with life and mistaking the disordering of order, as in a living organism, with non-existence. Death doesn’t not result in non-existence, it results in the elimination of the order that produced the consciousness of existence.

3.0 Consciousness- By the term conscious, or consciousness, I understand the phenomenon by which I, as a temporal becoming, become aware of reality, the world, and my own presence within it; the latter being a modification, sophistication, of the first and most commonly called self-consciousness.

3.1 The best way to interpret consciousness is as a piece of the flow finding a state of stability and order which enables it to perceive the flow – excluding itself – to some degree. This self-consciousness (also defined as a part of this part) of the flow then turns towards itself and comes to understand itself - excluding itself – to some degree. And so there are varying degrees of consciousness as there are of self-consciousness, which are determined by the potential of this small part to exclude as less of itself as possible so as to become aware of the remainder.

3.2 From the previous {3.1} one is lead to the understanding as to how the process can never be total, since a part is always required to perceive the rest. This results in a sense of unfulfilled awareness that strives to use the perceived so as to deduce the part that is missing - reflection, introspection, art. This sense of un-fulfilment then turns into the concept of emptiness. Due to all of this some minds sense this missing part as an otherness, a divine presence, an independent mysterious conscience watching over them, judging them, and yet unknown and unknowable - mystical. As the eye cannot see itself, the part of the mind that detaches from the rest so as to become self-conscious, is wrongly taken as evidence of a “beyond” the flesh, offering such comforting delusions as a God. The individual sometimes sense this as his helpless submission to an external force that guides its activities and inspires its thoughts.

3.3 Consciousness, as anything else existing, is not static but an ongoing stream of interpretations, fed by sensual stimulations, based on pre-existing modes of interpreting, as they have been established through repetitive and consistent success, over generations of natural selection and have proven to be successful and efficient within given environmental conditions.

3.4 Consciousness is not accidental or arbitrary or independent, it is determined and necessitated and contingent upon the conditions that bring it about. Therefore, any description of the absolute using consciousness as one of its traits, is a contradiction of consciousness itself and the absence that makes it come to be as a reaction to circumstances.

3.5 Because consciousness precedes self-consciousness identity must progress as a negation of otherness. The basic drive towards power, from powerlessness, is this drive to detach one’s self from the other(s) and make the other a reflection of self. Power is but another metaphor for the absolute, as in omnipotence. Knowledge is another, as in omniscience, and it is characterized by being aware enough to discriminate and so find patterns to be used as categories.

3.6 The basic methodology of awareness is one determined by the evolutionary limitations and the necessity for the senses. The reason for the senses, having evolved at all, is as mechanisms that facilitate the guidance of the organism to efficiently direct its energies so as to more fully take advantage of them in resisting the attrition of time. Therefore they are outwardly focused and the sensual stimulations they collect are then funnelled towards the brain where they can be used to construct mental models that make sense of the phenomena that cause these sensual stimulations.

3.7 The organism, being the product of the flow itself, exhibits the very nature of this flow and so consciousness can be understood as the flow becoming aware of itself or the part waking up to the whole. As such, the sensation of need is a direct representation of the nature of existence as that which lacks stability, perfection, the absolute. The claim can be made that the movement itself, the flow, is a manifestation of this perfection, but then one is simply positing the existent, no matter what it is, as perfect without taking into account of its necessity and then making it into an idealistic pursuit for a return to a core, an in-itself, a state of completeness, without explaining why a return is required at all if all is one and all is perfectly so. Merely re-labelling a state is easy. One can call ugliness beauty and be done with the discomfort or the implications of an absence of symmetry, but this does not explain the necessity for an aesthetic judgment or the need for the awareness of it. To call nature or the universe God may be comforting and inspiring but it contradicts the very nature of consciousness as an emergence made necessary by conditions out of its own control. Intelligence and consciousness has no meaning outside its role as a tool for aiding and guiding an emergent organism to resist the very flow it is a part of. A God, as defined by Scripture and many other religious doctrines, contradicts Himself as omnipotent and omniscient, when He is described as thinking, for what would a God think when He knows? What would a God will when He has and what would a God Be when no evidence of being is to be found?

3.8 That existence can be made conscious, at all, implies a necessity for this awareness to come about and this implies, in turn, a lack, an absence or need – the latter being the absent being interpreted by a conscious, living organism, as want or the sensation of this flow. Suffering is this need reaching a degree of intolerance. I seek to know because I lack knowledge, I seek power because it is absent in me and I seek life because I am mortal. As a manifestation of reality I reflect it and I sense the totality through my self and my growing awareness of it. My weakness and imperfection is a reflection of the universal one. I am not seeking God or a return to a source, I am trying to be God and the source.

3.9 The very nature of consciousness as a constant stream of thought, following neural pathways that have evolved through time and that establish a way of thinking, a behaviour and a mode of abstracting, leads to the realization that this process is forever one step behind the flow of time. By the time the brain has done its job the reality it is interpreting is no more and so, in essence, the mind is living in resistance to a flow that threatens its presence but is aware of its world by looking backwards into a reality that has already been altered. It is becoming conscious of what it has already willed. This lagging behind forces the evolution of intelligence and a more refined method of understanding; the brain collects data, constructs models and then seeks patterns, in them, so as to predict or anticipate future phenomena by projecting (imagination) these models into the unknown and formulating a strategy to deal with them. The quality of these anticipations and the strategies they result in is determined by the quality of the data collected and the quality of the mind’s ability to construct accurate models, incorporating as much detail in them as possible into a coherent model. Therefore not all projections are created equal and intelligence varies as everything else does.

3.10 The very nature of consciousness as an ordering of information in a tumultuous flux, perceived as chaos, and its dependence on pattern recognition and distinction is responsible for the linear perception of reality, as consisting of a past, present and future. It is also responsible for the manner in which spatial possibilities are restricted to the perception of a flow towards chaos rather than order - linear. The only dimensions, possibilities, that can be imagined are the ones that bear some relationship to the perceived flow towards disorder and so consciousness, as a product of life, consists in the perception of its own slow degradation (death) and its own resistance to it (suffering). But this does not mean that this awareness is in error. It only means that it is, as with everything, incomplete.

3.11 Consciousness in any other temporal direction, if it can be imagined at all, is a contradiction. It is so because to envision a universe where the flow is towards greater order would mean one would have to imagine a universe where life is not necessary and the awareness of it a contradiction of the premises of consciousness as I have presented them.

3.12 Dualistic thinking is not erroneous, unless it is taken literally as it often is, but is a natural consequence of this resistance to the flow which establishes a boundary, a force of will, that excludes phenomena as a matter of establishing order and a sense of identity – a cutting away (autopoiesis). The manner in which consciousness makes sense of the world is through a simple process of discrimination based on a binary method of separation and comparisons, using patterns. This discrimination, resulting in the Self/Other, Same/Different, In/Out, Negative/Positive, Up/Down, is based on the creation of absolutes so as to establish a grid, between which the conscious mind establishes its identity and presence. This method is directly linked to the desire to complete one’s self and so is a towards the ideal, the absolute, the perfect, which can never be reached but which characterizes the mind that strives towards it.

3.13 Intelligence – As a product of consciousness intelligence is a refinement of it. It is the capacity of the conscious mind to collect detailed sensual stimulations, form them into cohesive harmonious abstractions (data) and then, analyzing these models, find patterns and relationships.

3.14 Imagination – The ability to take mental models, combine them into unique forms and then project them into the unknown is what is most commonly referred to as imagination. When these mental models are somewhat detached form reality, they can be called fantasies or delusions.

3.15 Need/Suffering – Suffering is a need left unsatisfied for a sufficient period of time, in relation to the organism’s general health and well-being (power), so as to reach a level proportional to the threat it imposes upon the organism’s general health and well-being. As such need is never absent and so suffering is always the by-product of the organism’s struggle to satisfy itself and to resist the ongoing entropic decay it is a product of and is participating within. Need, in essence, is the conscious awareness of the flux; it is existence interpreted as a sensation.

3.16 Emotions – In due coarse, an organism may evolve such order that it establishes specific reactions to particular stimulations. This is, in effect, a strategy of increasing reaction-time so as to successfully utilize energies to maintain self-cohesion. Further evolution, necessitates, newer strategies that may, often, contradict pre-existing ones. And so emotions are sometimes conflicting or result in one being used to overcome an earlier one so as to facilitate such survival tactics as cooperation, interactions, and reproduction.

4.0 Absolute-The concept of the absolute can be expressed using multiple other words such as: Perfect, It, Here, There, I, Self, God, Now, One, Thing, Nothing/Something etc. In fact all human words are expressions of artificial absolutes in that they do not refer to reality, as a flow, but to a static mental model which is rendered possible by being a generalized, simplification that eradicates any contradictions by being ambiguous or metaphorical enough to not require further exploration. The concept of the absolute is a product of consciousness and its perception of the world; of existence itself. The only thing one can truly say about the absolute is that it is absent. Nothing more can be said about what is not.

4.1 When fabricating the concept of the absolute the mind simply takes the given, the real, and then posits the opposite as the definition of the absolute. For instance existence, as I have defined it, is a constant transformation, fluidity, an ever-changing flow and so the mind defines the absolute, in all its guises, as the static, the unchanging, the perfect, the stable. In so doing it has no experiential evidence for such a state but only takes the existent and reverses it – using a detached imagination {3.14}. This allows the mind to remain ambiguous enough to not have to explain the reasons or the justification for the imposition of such a sate on the present, other than as an explanation which comforts or makes the existent more comprehensible and often more palatable. The absolute, then, represents the opposite of the existent and so is the very definition of non-existence{dualistic comforting}. That certain select human inventions are then imposed upon it, in direct contradiction to its premises, is due to psychological motives that tries to save the organism from confronting the discomforts of existence while retaining its desirability and its possibility.

4.2 The need for the absolute is fundamental since with it the organism orients itself and translates possibilities into probabilities.

4.3 That which is perfect does not require to change, for what would it change into and would it not contradict its very essence by changing at all? Therefore existence cannot be a product of perfection, as its activity is necessitated by its lack of perfection whereas its perfection would not necessitate any movement/activity/change. To simply label all that is as perfect is an obvious desire to avoid comprehending it.

4.4 The absolute would, as an antithesis to existence, be characterized by the absence of all possibilities, since it would either encompass all possibilities simultaneously (positive, somethingness) or it would encompass no possibilities at all (negative, nothingness) and so it would have no temporal signature and, given the definition of space, it would have no dimensions – it would not exist.

4.5 Perfection can not be made up of imperfect parts, no more than the imperfect can be made up of perfect parts, for then it would contradict itself. In a like manner, but using a different metaphor for the exact same concept, the stable can not be made up of unstable parts, no more than the unstable can be made up of stable parts.

4.6 The absolute represents what is absent in existence and so can not be described or defined as anything but that which is lacking. That which is lacking, absent, is unknown and so knowing represents another label for what is desired and so that which is absent and lacking.

4.7 The foundations for the concepts of negative/positive, something/nothing, are rooted in the very essence of existence and consciousness, as an ordering in the disordering or a resistance to entropy. So, negative/positive refer to a subjective reaction to different aspects of the real. Something/Nothing are but terms that refer to the same absence and imply an absolute completion which would entail the cessation of existence, if realized, as it has been defined {1.0}. The differentiation comes from the fact that the idea of something refers to a presumed, idealized, past state of absolute order and nothing refers to a future, hypothetical, state of absolute disorder – Ying/Yang. Because order is the desirable, in relation to life which resists decay and fragmentation and is but a reaction only made possible within the temporal flow towards disordering, the one concept is considered preferable to the other and associated with such words as progress, enlightenment, oneness, God, peace, or any concept which describes a state of ordered completeness. The reverse is true for the concept of disorder. Herein lie the metaphorical religious mythologies concerning paradise, salvation, paradise lost, the fallen and absolution.

4.8 That dualism establishes a mostly false differentiation in methods and strategies of attaining completion should not confuse us to the point where we mistake the drive to find perfection by being assimilated with the drive to find completion by assimilating. Both aim at the same goal – a towards the absent absolute – but each entails a differentiation in spirit that becomes relevant when one considers the fact that no completion is possible and so what remains is the movement, the towards, the drive to. This differentiation is the reality of identity; it is the essence of the phenomenon.



5.0 Nihilism- The concept of nihilism is one associated with the negation or rejection of the world and of the self and of consciousness.

5.1 As a reaction it represents the resistance to entropy and a drive towards the cessation of existence within the attainment of the absolute state of completion - inertia. That it takes on many nuanced forms and so many idealistic hues, is a matter of cultural and psychological effects. The resistance is one and the same, and its motive and methods is all that matters.

5.2 Given {4.1} one can see that a movement towards any completion, any ideal, any metaphorical description of an end, is a hidden desire to cease becoming; therefore it is a desire to cease existing.

5.3 That the human mind prefers to negate the aspects of existence that trouble it or cause it discomfort while trying to save the aspects that retain its existence is understandable. How it is even possible, given the blatant contradictions involved, is more easily understood when considering the matter from a purely psychological perspective. Then one discovers the selective reasoning and ambiguities involved in maintaining this piece of human delusion and why it is, at all, necessary.

5.4 The difference between overt and covert nihilism, establishes the difference between pessimism and optimism. In the first case the mind cannot find the rational grounds to harmonize its awareness, producing anxiety, with its hopes, as the antidote to this anxiety, and so succumbs to the inevitability of its own existence and tumbles into the pits of psychological despair. Its awareness has reached a point where it now challenges survival rather than aids it. For it, the world has lost all purpose and so it imagines, as part of its relief, an end in total annihilation. In the second case the mind copes with its growing awareness by compartmentalizing its perceptions. This enables it to use different sets of standards in different contexts, saving itself from the need, or the intellectual integrity, to harmonize its perceptions into one cohesive model. For it, one set of rules apply in one context and a completely other set of rules apply in another. Often these sets of rules are totally in conflict with one another and so great effort is made to avoid harmonizing them or even considering the possibility. This method of dealing with existence, allows the mind to then hold onto contradictions without going mad, and it also allows the mind to selectively choose what parts of existence it accepts and which it denies as being real. Subsequently, life can be separated from suffering, the tautology avoided, and consciousness can be saved as something “beyond the flesh”.

i. As consciousness and emotions were defined the idea that awareness first emerged as a mechanism for focusing an organism’s energies and directing it efficiently becomes a logical one. Because consciousness precedes self-consciousness, it then becomes reasonable to assume that the primary emotion to have evolved must have been one that facilitated the flight/fight reaction, as the organism confronted a world it knew nothing about and which presented many threats to its cohesion. This could only have happened in more sophisticated organisms that have evolved to a point where some successful strategies were established and streamlined into intuitive reactions that did not require much thinking.
Therefore all emotions must have evolved out of this primary one {anxiety}, either as an addition, or a counter-reaction, so as to then facilitate newly developing requirements and newer survival strategies.

ii. Anxiety concerning the unknown produces this human reaction that takes on two distinct forms: The first is a pure and clear negation of self and the world that makes it possible. It is a movement towards the ideal of the absolute nothingness. The second is a more indirect, duplicitous method, where the movement towards the absolute somethingness represents a turning back to decreasing entropy, ordering, and a state of completion that amounts to the same outcome as absolute nothingness. With this imagined “turning back” the very necessity and essence of life is negated.
Once any ideal is achieved there is no distinction, because there is no existence to distinguish and no need for a consciousness to distinguish.
Non-existence has reached its end. A ludicrous proposition and one built {4.1} by taking existence and then imagining an opposite. In most cases imagination excludes any undesirable consequences.

iii. Language, as a sophisticated method of displaying mental abstractions, is a symbolic, metaphorical way of sharing mental models and personal reaction to them. Mental abstractions are interpretations of reality and so simplified, generalized models, depending on ambiguity and ill-defined ideas. To be sustainable, all languages offer a false sense of an absolute, even when they attempt to deny its existence. Taking these abstractions literally is where the error of mistaking the mental models for the absolute, begins. Language attempting to describe reality will undoubtedly find paradoxes, for this reason. It is in the description where the contradictions start, for all languages must express concepts as if they were stagnate, unchanging, stable entities.
Therefore all descriptions using any language, including mathematics, must be considered metaphorically and artistically and must be valued pragmatically.

iv. As a reaction to the flow, the organism, and the consciousness it develops to aid it, strives to remain separate and distinct, so as to better focus its energies and create some degree of order. It attempts this by constructing boundaries and by developing the consciousness to discriminate between what is useful to it (good) and what is not (bad), and to distinguish what is within its immediate wilful control (inside) and what is not (outside). From this simple methodology understanding is built and human dualistic thinking becomes an aspect of how the brain interprets existence. It’s simplicity is supposed to enhance efficiency and its underlying presupposition is one of negation, given that the universe is threatening to any order and stability.

v. As a psychological phenomenon Nihilism can be comprehended as a necessary strategy in environments of resource stresses and space limitations. With the denial of self, and with its subsequent degradation as something irrelevant, illusionary and undesirable, the mind is trained to be passive and accommodating. It’s reward is the denial of the very conduit that makes the experience of life possible, resulting in the promise of absolution from suffering. Because life, and the consciousness it evolves, eventually develops the capacity to feel the flow, the entropic decay, its very essence, as need/suffering, the idea of denying this awareness, as a kind of return to a state of blissful unconsciousness, becomes a very attractive idea. Redefining this state of growing numbness towards the nature of existence, as a state of enlightenment is another facet of this social control mechanism. An ideal of nihilistic conformity associated with humanism and holism and various dogmas needing that harmonious coexistence of heterogonous populations.
This “return” to the source, as it is often described, can also be described in many other ways such as: Nirvana, Paradise, Emptiness, Nothingness, Somethingness, Substance, Perfection, Bliss, Order etc.
With these words the absolute is given a label and so made into a concept that can only be defined as that which is absent or that which is the opposite of what is perceived.
In a universe of change, the absolute is unchanging. In a universe of imperfection the absolute is perfect. In a universe of time, the absolute is timeless. In a universe of weakness the absolute is omnipotent. In a universe of multiplicity, the absolute is one. In an unknown universe, the absolute is omniscient.
All of these ideas have no reference to reality, other than a denial of it.
With all of these descriptions, based on the dualism mentioned before, the illusion of a self-contradicting, non-existent existence is established as a vague concept whose only merit is that is stands in opposition, and so aids in the organisms resistance, to the world, as it is. An indirect, duplicitous, method towards self-completion or towards life or towards power.
A feminine one.
It offers the promise of something better or a relief or an escape from a reality that stands opposed to any unity and to any stability.
In fact these ambiguous concepts represent a turning back, as in a towards the source. Back to a greater state of order. It is the desire to cease the fragmentation and establish a unity of oneness. But given that no absolutes are anywhere evident, this desire is an unrealizable ideal meant to sooth the mind with a hope that can help it deal with its existential anxieties – its original primordial fears. Its “original sin” of being imperfect.

vi. As a political phenomenon Nihilism springs forth from this psychological state and turns into a form of population control.
The individual denied any semblance of identity with its own sense of self, its consciousness defamed and its reality degraded into a mere illusion, then becomes easily manipulated. It patiently tolerates any scarcity and any authority that imposes its will upon it.
It’s own will has been suppressed and diminished. It’s resistance weakened by ideals that teach submission as a form of balance, and self-annihilation as a higher virtue.
It represents the antithesis to hedonistic abandonment within an environment stressed by an absence of resources and spaces(possibilities). Its “turning inward” comes as a necessity where outwards little potential lies for empowerment.
At this point the individual, a product of indoctrinations over multiple generations (social selection), has lost all ability to resist or to even consider resistance desirable. What little resistance lingers may take on passive forms where a type of morality is offered as a replacement for the individual’s will.
Where hedonism is the absence of control towards the other, this extreme asceticism is the offering of control to the other – fatalism – with varying degrees in between.
The individual’s essence has been altered by this conditioning. Over time the unused elements in its nature atrophy and become undesirable remnants from a primitive past. Its present state is deemed desirable to the group and so it is made into a virtue - weakness reinterpreted as a strength and surrender made into a dominion.
It should not surprise us, then, if we discover that such ideas spring forth amongst civilizations experiencing space and resource pressures.
The nurturing of a mind that is tolerant of paucity, is willing to deny self as even being relevant, and to associate its consciousness with some transcending phenomenon outside its own control and separate from its sense of unity, is necessitated by the circumstances. The environment forces this sacrifice and its realization is made possible by a kind of self-hypnosis or self-numbing, similar to inebriation, where the mind’s resistance is weakened, leaving it vulnerable, impressionable and easily affected by the power of suggestion.
Fear is the all best thing to exploit; hope is the tool to exploit it with.
Similar to the emotion of love, that evolves as a way of overcoming earlier methods of survival and innate fight/flight reactions, facilitating more refined methods of survival, so do these ideals repress and suppress established reactions to the flow, and facilitate an adaptation which demands a sacrifice of independence.

vii. If we were to use these abstractions as they were intended to, that is as symbols or signposts our consciousness uses to establish understanding, then the concepts of something/nothing can be made sense of as the metaphorical extremities in between which existence takes place.
They are useful inventions that have served us well and continue to offer us advantages.
Our conception of the Big Bang, for instance is imagined as a point where all matter (matter being a manifestation of temporal diversity) is condensed into a space (possibility) of a suitcase, where all forces, as we know them, are as one – or almost so. This is the imagined nearest point to the possibility of the absolute which our own existence and multiplicity proves was never attained. It represents a theoretical Black Hole where a phenomenon exhibits such a differentiation that it is interpreted by the human mind as falling out of existence. In fact the Black Hole never attains absolute mass, for then it would cease becoming and absorb all existence within it, but only exhibits a diminished possibility, as juxtaposed to the observing mind’s neural synaptic speeds.
The brain, a product of specific circumstances, is characterized by a particular degree of temporality, of flow, and so interprets, and measures, its rate of change as dimensions. The Black Hole’s event horizon, is the limit where the phenomenon’s diminishing possibilities, due to its declining rate of change/flux/flow fail to be computed by a mind that has evolved to interpret higher rates of change/flux/flow relationship between the observer and the observed. The phenomenon is interpreted as falling out of reality, its possibilities and its spatial dimensions so few, its rate of change so low (increased mass), that it fails to register and is interpreted as a void.
Our brain is in the business of projecting possibilities, so as to prepare and better react to them, and so this diminishing flow, accompanied with diminishing possibility, confuses it by excluding its imagination from making any projections at all. This is what the void represents and the event horizon but the barrier where the mind can go no further.
The Big Bang, our point of existential departure, can be imagined in a similar manner.

viii. A nihilistic dogma may take on the form of hope-giver and self-numbing medication, as it uses selective reasoning and compartmentalization to offer life, eternity in many cases (timeless, and so contradicting the idea of existence), while still retaining the very awareness of existence as one of need/suffering, and also promising the perfect without justifying or defining it.
In some teachings the self-contradicting concept of a God is replaced by a bigger abstraction, that of emptiness or by the thing-in-itself. Here the abstraction becomes so extreme and so cut-off from anything in our experiences that it relies on nothing more than its promise of relief to remain viable. The word so vague and undefined that it offers the possibility for semantic obfuscations trying, desperately, to appear like something profound is being said when all that is offered is an excuse that unburdens them from the responsibilities and costs of being born. The entire thing takes on a theatrical air, as authorities, play a part, producing convoluted sentences like pearls of profound wisdom. The followers are mesmerized by the intent, and the theatre only adds to the mystical experience. A this point anything that is said, no matter how vague or nonsensical or self-contradicting, becomes a drop of alcoholic enlightenment we must drink-up to enter the state of drunken numbness we need to relieve ourselves, momentarily, from the awareness of our own resistance.
In other philosophies, the notion of the universe is forcefully infused with the implications of a Deus as a replacement for childish absurdities; a hope-transfusion for the intellectually needy; an injection of the absurd within reason to make life tolerable.
Here the absolute is retained and, once more, in contradiction to itself, consciousness is sheltered from reason, in the process.
Multiplicity, and its necessity, stands opposed to the very idea of absolute oneness, and perfection, at the very least, confronts our self-interested definitions of it.
Why diversity, at all, if all is one and harmoniously balanced, to begin with? Why play such games and in playing games why this need to play them?
The very idea of a conscious deity, possessing a will, a choice, no less, contradicts its very essence as perfect. For to have a choice your consciousness must be separate from that which you choose or the choices must pre-exist the one choosing or else what real choice is being made?
To be conscious is to negate, to discriminate, to be active, and so, what would a perfect being act upon, and why would it even have to? In order to rescue consciousness from its primal heritage, it has to be reinvented, from a tool of survival, to a transcendental, mystical concept nobody can fully grasp or explain or rationally justify. It has to be made into a metaphorical myth and so survive mortality in some bizarre state of beyond.
What would it, a Deus, a God, a perfection, think when it is all and every possibility is its nature?
In creating such feeble, imperfect creations, as us, does it not reveal its true essence?
Some have described the understanding of God as the highest virtue and the attainment of divinity as man reaching his full potential, but then did not God create the ignorant feebleness we are told we must correct and, in so doing, did He not impose His will upon us, urging us to be just as He intended us to be?
If a Deus must be invented to make mature minds more able to fool themselves with emotionally laden probabilities, then one must not also confuse this further by trying to save morality in the process and impose a “highest” virtue upon anyone. The fallback position of stating that God is incomprehensible should be proof enough that He is unattainable, even as an imaginary comfort, and that if we are manifestations of His essence then his essence has a lot of inconsistencies that are projected upon us, like a sin.

Then again, the copout of claiming that it is our conceptions that are inconsistent and weak rather than God is accessible. Why then punish those for not living up to His ideals when it is He that imposed these limitations upon them?
Such a profoundly corrupt God that is. Not even by human standards can we excuse his many failings.
If all is perfect and manifestations of His perfect Will then there is nothing to live up to or strive for, other than to be true to our nature as anxious, ignorant, violent survival machines, also capable of compassion, understanding and empathy.
To create a creator that in creating imposes a will that cannot be denied and then measures His own creations by how well they adhere to His own will, which He has already willed into them, is the height of human absurdity and a perfect way of producing the confusion and shame necessary in controlling mankind.
But then we can claim that such a God is no judge but just IS.
What a roundabout way to justify a belief in God and still reaffirm our nature as conscious rational beings.
Another instance of compartmentalization.

Within these teachings Nihilism underlies its motives, even while presenting the indifferent, or hopeful, face of benevolent bliss.
Within these teachings consciousness is denied its full scope, it is stunted, humiliated, degraded, as a way of tearing down before one constructs.
Within these teachings man is made to feel better about his self-destructive, self-abasing, self-negating tendencies – tendencies that are a result of his growing awareness and self-consciousness. Consciousness is streamlined to exclude any socially unwanted judgments and told that it is not even in the possession of the individual’s own will, that consciousness is something outside its emerging unity and so something one must discipline and surrender to, as a matter of the holiest importance.

ix. Multiplicity is the product of this going-away from the near absolute, as the act of creation implies. This is the linear direction of our consciousness, as a tool of ordering the disordering. Making a return to this near-perfect past, the source, the emptiness, is a dogma preaching a return to unconsciousness and non-existence.
In this movement towards… diversity is produced, where all ideals represent mental inventions of a final goal. It is this finality that exposes the self-negating tendencies of a mind seeking certainty and completion and an end – either in a total nil or in a total one.
Omniscience and omnipotence would entail the end of existing and make thinking superfluous. That which is all possibilities simultaneously has no possibilities left to aspire towards and in this movement becomes apparent.
It is this movement that we call existence, and to imagine any end to it is to imagine our own end. To dream of a final destination as the accomplishment of the highest order is to dream of our own release from the burden of our own existence and the awareness this results in.
Not surprising that many dogmas teach the obliteration of self as a goal resulting in a higher state of consciousness.
What they hide is that this “higher state” is but a convoluted way of describing unconsciousness. And it is this unconsciousness that offers the relief from suffering they crave. This emptiness they talk about is the void of non-existence which, like all their notions, contains self-contradiction within its elaborate premises. There is no actual non-existence. This idea, as was mentioned, is based on taking the actual and imagining an opposite. A display of real dualistic thinking.
All we know is existence and all we can do is describe it as we perceive it referencing it, and making sure our deductions hold true within its premises. To imagine anything beyond it, is to project our hopes upon what is indifferent to them.
There is no duality here. Both nil and one represent different interpretations, different views, of the same human metaphor – they both represent opposing abstractions, symbols, of the same desire: an end to need/suffering and the consciousness that makes the sensation of existence possible.
Yet, existence, life, need/suffering, are all tautologies. Deny one and you must deny them all.
Partial methods of self-inebriation, called meditative states (delusion being one of them), cannot save anybody from their own essence. They can only make him/her oblivious to it, just as a drug addict becomes oblivious to immediate reality and delves into the subconscious turmoil of an imagination not referencing sensual awareness.
Reality offers not a single instance of a singularity. Not one stable, completion. No end, at all, but a constant continuity.
There is no empty because there is nothing to be filled.

x. When the process is mistaken for a thing, it is like a photo being mistaken for reality. In actuality it is the medium that is more indicative of the process than the symbolic, frozen , depiction it uses as a representation.

xi. The deep dissatisfaction, disease, indicated by this nihilistic tendency exposes life as based on an absence of comfort, in varying degrees, and man as a creature that aims at alleviating its own growing awareness of this condition.
A deep resentment characterizes the mind that succumbs to nihilism. When it puts a positive, hopeful, twist to it, the resentment is far more intense and the mind exposes its inability to cope with it.
A complete acceptance of existence, as it is, would entail the acceptance of the inevitability of failure, forcing the mind into a state of childish exploration, with no expectations and even fewer hopes.

xii. The cults of death can be perfectly understood as a psychological phenomenon, directly related to mankind’s growing consciousness and self-consciousness and of how environmental conditions impact human needs and force an adaptation. It is part of a maturation process.

xiii. The full, honest acceptance of the world would demand an acceptance of man’s uncertainty, his fleeting existence and the awareness of it, as being that of a resistance to the inevitable. In this uncertain, constant, consistency, mankind must come to terms with the conditions that make life necessary and all the more precious.

xiv. Nothing does not stand in opposition to Something. Both represent different perspectives of the same absence. To them only existence stands as their contradiction. There is no dualism here. The concepts are human inventions with no actual existence except as vague ideas meant to aid in understanding by ordering it using the method of simplification. In fact their common essence is in describing that which is non-existent. Their differences arise in how they come about them and how honest one is.
Of the two the concept of an absolute something is the most disingenuous. It not only promises what it cannot deliver, but it does so by selectively contradicting itself and hiding, this fact, from the mind that accepts it as a viable possibility; it offers what is needed to the needy.
These tautologies, amongst many others produced by human language, are responsible for much of this misunderstanding concerning the human condition.
Existence is all that we do know; the apparent, the phenomenon, as a distinction representing a historical becoming, a process, with patterned predictability, is all we can claim as our access to reality.
To invent, out of thin air and with no reference to anything in our experiences, a thing-in-itself, an underlying unmoving, stable, core, a God or a concept replacing Him, the absolute, represents the height of human folly. It’s only function is to placate fears, using hope, or by pretending knowledge where there is only fantasy. It’s only virtue is that it maintains peace amongst the myriads of dimwitted dolts that would have no reason to remain reasonable, and so easily malleable, if it were not for these humbling, if not humiliating, self-effacing dogmas.

xv. The movement towards a something or a nothing represents the same motive using a different strategy to accomplish the same goal. Therefore to seek God so as to unite with Him is no different than to abandon yourself to the ideal of humanism and immerse yourself in its comforting promise, and this is no different than the Will to Power or the extreme ascetic denial of self towards a return to a source.
Self is the absent we strive to complete and so we must come to terms with the idea that the self, as with any other conceptualization of the absent absolute, is this movement that can never be found but only sought after. But this does not negate the reality of the self - no more than any of the other metaphors we use to understand a fluid reality, like the number one, are negated by this truth. The conscious self, as a process of negation, a rejection, as a distancing, as multiplicity manifesting in a momentary separation from the entropic decay, is, exactly, what make consciousness possible and necessary. The completion of this process or the negation of it through denial, is the elimination of this consciousness not an enhancement of it or an expansion of it.
As was stated, the absolution from this truth is what is commonly felt as a relief, predicated by the self-hypnotic state one must place one’s mind in so as to remain alive and, yet, still numb enough to be unaffected by the environment you are in. It is a self-induced trance offering many benefits on a psychosomatic level. One such benefit, as with athleticism, is the habituation of the mind with stress and so the increase potential for pleasure, and the self-discipline this results in.
Despite this, the entire practice of extreme asceticism for asceticism’s sake, is dependent on a contradiction, as the mere fact that the body remains alive contradicts its uncaring state of self-denial. What is actually occurring is that care, resistance, is pushed down into the unconscious where it cannot bubble up as need/suffering, and the mind enjoys a momentary respite from the sensation being alive, all the while clinging onto it tooth and nail. The indifference power implies is in degree or, often, faked.

xvi. Herein lies the tragic comedy of life, as it was understood by the Hellenes and taken far too seriously by the eastern nihilistic, death cults. Balance is prescribed in both traditions, only in the west, as we’ve inherited our traditions from the ancients, it is a means towards an earthly end not some promise for eternal absolution or a worship of unconsciousness and death as our most enlightened state. Athleticism and asceticism become instruments of empowerment where life is celebrated and not denied and where existence is not slandered or degraded as an illusion one must strive to never repeat.
Then population pressures forced this disease upon the west, via the Jewish peoples, and perhaps even directly from the east via the Persians, before that.
The body was dishonoured as sinful, man shamed and the human spirit dwindled into an atrophying miasma that was supposed to be “overcome” and neglected and denied as even having relevance.
Love, then, ceased to be man’s greatest gift he possessed and became a transcendental force which all deserved and none merited.

xvii. It is in this positioning between these twin peaks of human understanding that man establishes his sense of self – his identity. The movement towards is where man finds his traits and it is his intent that produces his character.
The attraction towards more towards one or the other can best be explained as a product of metabolic rates or systolic/diastolic cellular functions, and the neurological speeds this establishes.

xviii. Modern social trends towards growing uniformity are entirely based on this drive towards self-negation.
The individual feeling vulnerable and weak, in relation to then unknown and to the human condition of need/suffering, seeks to be assimilated within a greater whole and lose himself there.
Not an easy task when millions of years of evolution have nurtured a tendency towards independence and natural selectivity and a growing consciousness to facilitate this exclusion of what is alien or detrimental to individual health.
To accomplish it one must tear down what was so as to build something new.
Nature evolves the mechanism of chemical inebriation to overcome this primordial drive, and so manages to produce self-destructive behaviours or very dangerous ones.
The advantages offered as recompense for the self-sacrifice are numerous and so this adaptation becomes a value and is established as a socially desirable tendency.
Human social structures take up this natural disposition and manufacture moral systems and cultural ideals.
Assimilation and harmonious integration becomes the highest human standard and those most willing to give in are the ones with the least to lose. Mediocrity is a natural result of this.

xix. The fundamental underlying factor, for all of this, is man’s own fallibility and weakness. It is mortality that imposes this human condition and the various reactions to it.
A coming to terms with it would demand a childlike, forgetfulness and loss of expectations; it would entail acceptance.

xxi. The organism commences as this cutting away, as this attempt at exclusion. In its act of living the organism begins to discriminate between what is useful and good for it and what is not, and what is like it and what is not like it.
The membrane, that makes up the beginning and end of its desire to break-off and construct this bubble of existence where it has some control, is the very realization of this process of exclusion. A process that is never complete, as it can never be, and so is porous, constantly defecating unwanted materials out of its premises, constantly defending against alien invasions that make it ill, constantly correcting the effects of this struggle upon its ordering, constantly trying to find stability.
Toward this end the evolution of a method of deciding what is “good” and what is “bad” becomes a matter of survival or a more efficient usage of energies.
It eventually leads to a more sophisticated method of categorization and discrimination.
Life is a snobbish unity and its sensual awareness determines that extent of how discerning it is.
That this simple process is then cast as this transcending concept where this particular manifestation relates to it as an illusion with no necessity, and that this discriminating survival tactic is then turned into a power that excludes those that do not discipline themselves to a universal code, speaks of the self-deprecating coping mechanism the eventually development of self-consciousness, results in.
Consciousness is made into a mysterious force that has no other purpose but to discriminate against its own parts, which it casts as players in a play and then decides which ones played their part the best, even if it is it that has written the script they must follow.
There is little difference between the major religions that contaminate the post-modern world, today.
All degrade consciousness as either an illusion or as that which is supposed to find its way back to the divine or the source, which has cast it out for being guilty of being exactly as it was created to be.
All consider existence as a testing phase one must earn their way out of and the world as a process of finding their way back to their “better self”. A vast narcissistic farce where the universal consciousness self-gratifies itself with itself and then admonishes its parts for not going beyond the limits it has set for them.
A sadomasochistic theatrical drama.
A forever disappointed parent, filling its children with an endless sense of shame or punishing them with reincarnation into lower forms or with suffering when they cling to this sense of exclusionary ego.
The self is made more porous with this method and so it can then be infected more easily with whatever idea that makes it a blind follower of an alien will.
That this crap is considered enlightenment is truly an expression of self-hatred and a dissatisfaction with reality as it is; a symptom of degradation.
Consciousness is stripped of its necessity as a survival tool meant to categorize and facilitate continuance, and is made into a beyond, looking upon creation, which it has created, and discriminating between which parts deserve its grace and which ones do not.
Even Spinoza’s conception of the Deus smells of this self-denial where the highest goal is to know God that has purposefully made us ignorant of Him with incomplete ideas, or to live-up to the divine that has set the rules and placed the limits which we must break without insulting Him who set them.
Only a Jew would imagine a process that results in varying degrees of failure, making shame the natural condition of the mind and humility its only outcome.
When the necessity for consciousness, as an outward focused tool of categorization, is turned into an inward looking tool of self-flagellation, then the result can only be nihilism.

xxii. Think hard; live light.

Satyr, stay tuned for the second half of my argument against your theses.

I want to take a stab at your judgments within the next few days.

Interesting...

I have moved more towards strong nihilism since being diagnosed and treated for a severe mental illness... In the absence of the reasonability of self-harm, my denial of existence has become comforting. Is this what you are driving at, or am I off-base?

misterhamtastic wrote:

Interesting...

I have moved more towards strong nihilism since being diagnosed and treated for a severe mental illness... In the absence of the reasonability of self-harm, my denial of existence has become comforting. Is this what you are driving at, or am I off-base?

You are correct.

You would be surprised as to how many of your fellow "healthy" neighbours are really suffering from a mental disease.

Dis-ease.
Ill at ease.
If existence makes you uneasy then are you really healthy and to what extent are you so?

That some, like you presumably, crack further is a matter of degree and of individual traits.

Perhaps I am not mentally ill at all, but those around me who cannot cope with their existence, and so they ignore it's absurdity...

misterhamtastic wrote:

Perhaps I am not mentally ill at all, but those around me who cannot cope with their existence, and so they ignore it's absurdity...

Absurdity is the result of personal delusions coming up against reality.

When our wrong conceptions, built on hopes and expectations, come face to face with a reality that jut does not give a shit about how we wish it was, then we are faced with a paradox and this is absurdity.

Red, bold highlights mean: not necessarily true by definition.

Satyr wrote:

i. As consciousness and emotions were defined the idea that awareness first emerged as a mechanism for focusing an organism’s energies and directing it efficiently becomes a logical one. Because consciousness precedes self-consciousness, it then becomes reasonable to assume that the primary emotion to have evolved must have been one that facilitated the flight/fight reaction, as the organism confronted a world it knew nothing about and which presented many threats to its cohesion. This could only have happened in more sophisticated organisms that have evolved to a point where some successful strategies were established and streamlined into intuitive reactions that did not require much thinking. Therefore all emotions must have evolved out of this primary one {anxiety}, either as an addition, or a counter-reaction, so as to then facilitate newly developing requirements and newer survival strategies.

The 'self' may precede all definition, even before consciousness. In other words, if you raise a child never to identify his/her name (gendered or not), then anybody may qualify that the "person" still exists (except unidentified). Thus, the consciousness being referred to may be a collective one and not an individual. The qualitative difference is the key.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that lifeforms are born into the world "knowing nothing about it". For example, when a fawn or calf is born, do they not already know how to walk? Where did this 'knowledge' come from except for what is ingrained into them genetically? This applies to humans too. Then, we can conclude that almost *all* knowledge, if not all of it completely, is genetic. What adds to or takes away from this knowledge is applied memetically, which may or may not scratch the surface on what is commonly known as Knowledge.

Satyr wrote:

ii. Anxiety concerning the unknown produces this human reaction that takes on two distinct forms: The first is a pure and clear negation of self and the world that makes it possible. It is a movement towards the ideal of the absolute nothingness. The second is a more indirect, duplicitous method, where the movement towards the absolute somethingness represents a turning back to decreasing entropy, ordering, and a state of completion that amounts to the same outcome as absolute nothingness. With this imagined “turning back” the very necessity and essence of life is negated. Once any ideal is achieved there is no distinction, because there is no existence to distinguish and no need for a consciousness to distinguish. Non-existence has reached its end. A ludicrous proposition and one built {4.1} by taking existence and then imagining an opposite. In most cases imagination excludes any undesirable consequences.

iii. Language, as a sophisticated method of displaying mental abstractions, is a symbolic, metaphorical way of sharing mental models and personal reaction to them. Mental abstractions are interpretations of reality and so simplified, generalized models, depending on ambiguity and ill-defined ideas. To be sustainable, all languages offer a false sense of an absolute, even when they attempt to deny its existence. Taking these abstractions literally is where the error of mistaking the mental models for the absolute, begins. Language attempting to describe reality will undoubtedly find paradoxes, for this reason. It is in the description where the contradictions start, for all languages must express concepts as if they were stagnate, unchanging, stable entities. Therefore all descriptions using any language, including mathematics, must be considered metaphorically and artistically and must be valued pragmatically.

There is no reason that I see, to believe a person should assume their mental abstractions are a "false sense" of any potential trend towards absolutism. Even if their abstractions were retarded, it does not necessarily make them 'false'. In fact, it is probably the opposite. People believe in what they see, sense, and feel! Why is it then "false"? It is more likely to be "true" instead, merely miscommunicated by that respective person's lack of cogency regarding Language-itself and Metaphor. Furthermore, when a distinction between what is Literal and what is Metaphorical remains undefined, people must depend more & more on their "feeling" rather than their Reason. When Mankind does not master his own language, then error is possible. -- It becomes probable as well.

Perhaps it is most truthful to state the contrary: Taking the abstractions literally is where the absolute truth for absolutism begins.

And what is humanity's primary definition for absolutism? -- God.

Satyr wrote:

iv. As a reaction to the flow, the organism, and the consciousness it develops to aid it, strives to remain separate and distinct, so as to better focus its energies and create some degree of order. It attempts this by constructing boundaries and by developing the consciousness to discriminate between what is useful to it (good) and what is not (bad), and to distinguish what is within its immediate wilful control (inside) and what is not (outside). From this simple methodology understanding is built and human dualistic thinking becomes an aspect of how the brain interprets existence. It’s simplicity is supposed to enhance efficiency and its underlying presupposition is one of negation, given that the universe is threatening to any order and stability.

This is false.

The brain may also presuppose positivity and neutrality in the same degree (or sometimes more or less) as negation.

Satyr wrote:

v. As a psychological phenomenon Nihilism can be comprehended as a necessary strategy in environments of resource stresses and space limitations. With the denial of self, and with its subsequent degradation as something irrelevant, illusionary and undesirable, the mind is trained to be passive and accommodating. It’s reward is the denial of the very conduit that makes the experience of life possible, resulting in the promise of absolution from suffering. Because life, and the consciousness it evolves, eventually develops the capacity to feel the flow, the entropic decay, its very essence, as need/suffering, the idea of denying this awareness, as a kind of return to a state of blissful unconsciousness, becomes a very attractive idea. Redefining this state of growing numbness towards the nature of existence, as a state of enlightenment is another facet of this social control mechanism. An ideal of nihilistic conformity associated with humanism and holism and various dogmas needing that harmonious coexistence of heterogonous populations.
This “return” to the source, as it is often described, can also be described in many other ways such as: Nirvana, Paradise, Emptiness, Nothingness, Somethingness, Substance, Perfection, Bliss, Order etc.
With these words the absolute is given a label and so made into a concept that can only be defined as that which is absent or that which is the opposite of what is perceived.
In a universe of change, the absolute is unchanging. In a universe of imperfection the absolute is perfect. In a universe of time, the absolute is timeless. In a universe of weakness the absolute is omnipotent. In a universe of multiplicity, the absolute is one. In an unknown universe, the absolute is omniscient.
All of these ideas have no reference to reality, other than a denial of it.
With all of these descriptions, based on the dualism mentioned before, the illusion of a self-contradicting, non-existent existence is established as a vague concept whose only merit is that is stands in opposition, and so aids in the organisms resistance, to the world, as it is. An indirect, duplicitous, method towards self-completion or towards life or towards power.
A feminine one.
It offers the promise of something better or a relief or an escape from a reality that stands opposed to any unity and to any stability.
In fact these ambiguous concepts represent a turning back, as in a towards the source. Back to a greater state of order. It is the desire to cease the fragmentation and establish a unity of oneness. But given that no absolutes are anywhere evident, this desire is an unrealizable ideal meant to sooth the mind with a hope that can help it deal with its existential anxieties – its original primordial fears. Its “original sin” of being imperfect.

vi. As a political phenomenon Nihilism springs forth from this psychological state and turns into a form of population control.
The individual denied any semblance of identity with its own sense of self, its consciousness defamed and its reality degraded into a mere illusion, then becomes easily manipulated. It patiently tolerates any scarcity and any authority that imposes its will upon it.
It’s own will has been suppressed and diminished. It’s resistance weakened by ideals that teach submission as a form of balance, and self-annihilation as a higher virtue.
It represents the antithesis to hedonistic abandonment within an environment stressed by an absence of resources and spaces(possibilities). Its “turning inward” comes as a necessity where outwards little potential lies for empowerment.
At this point the individual, a product of indoctrinations over multiple generations (social selection), has lost all ability to resist or to even consider resistance desirable. What little resistance lingers may take on passive forms where a type of morality is offered as a replacement for the individual’s will.
Where hedonism is the absence of control towards the other, this extreme asceticism is the offering of control to the other – fatalism – with varying degrees in between.
The individual’s essence has been altered by this conditioning. Over time the unused elements in its nature atrophy and become undesirable remnants from a primitive past. Its present state is deemed desirable to the group and so it is made into a virtue - weakness reinterpreted as a strength and surrender made into a dominion.
It should not surprise us, then, if we discover that such ideas spring forth amongst civilizations experiencing space and resource pressures.
The nurturing of a mind that is tolerant of paucity, is willing to deny self as even being relevant, and to associate its consciousness with some transcending phenomenon outside its own control and separate from its sense of unity, is necessitated by the circumstances. The environment forces this sacrifice and its realization is made possible by a kind of self-hypnosis or self-numbing, similar to inebriation, where the mind’s resistance is weakened, leaving it vulnerable, impressionable and easily affected by the power of suggestion.
Fear is the all best thing to exploit; hope is the tool to exploit it with.
Similar to the emotion of love, that evolves as a way of overcoming earlier methods of survival and innate fight/flight reactions, facilitating more refined methods of survival, so do these ideals repress and suppress established reactions to the flow, and facilitate an adaptation which demands a sacrifice of independence.

vii. If we were to use these abstractions as they were intended to, that is as symbols or signposts our consciousness uses to establish understanding, then the concepts of something/nothing can be made sense of as the metaphorical extremities in between which existence takes place.
They are useful inventions that have served us well and continue to offer us advantages.
Our conception of the Big Bang, for instance is imagined as a point where all matter (matter being a manifestation of temporal diversity) is condensed into a space (possibility) of a suitcase, where all forces, as we know them, are as one – or almost so. This is the imagined nearest point to the possibility of the absolute which our own existence and multiplicity proves was never attained. It represents a theoretical Black Hole where a phenomenon exhibits such a differentiation that it is interpreted by the human mind as falling out of existence. In fact the Black Hole never attains absolute mass, for then it would cease becoming and absorb all existence within it, but only exhibits a diminished possibility, as juxtaposed to the observing mind’s neural synaptic speeds.
The brain, a product of specific circumstances, is characterized by a particular degree of temporality, of flow, and so interprets, and measures, its rate of change as dimensions. The Black Hole’s event horizon, is the limit where the phenomenon’s diminishing possibilities, due to its declining rate of change/flux/flow fail to be computed by a mind that has evolved to interpret higher rates of change/flux/flow relationship between the observer and the observed. The phenomenon is interpreted as falling out of reality, its possibilities and its spatial dimensions so few, its rate of change so low (increased mass), that it fails to register and is interpreted as a void.
Our brain is in the business of projecting possibilities, so as to prepare and better react to them, and so this diminishing flow, accompanied with diminishing possibility, confuses it by excluding its imagination from making any projections at all. This is what the void represents and the event horizon but the barrier where the mind can go no further.
The Big Bang, our point of existential departure, can be imagined in a similar manner.

I agree.

The universe is in the human mind & consciousness, because each half eternally conceives the other what it is and becomes.

Unreasonable wrote:

Satyr wrote:

i. As consciousness and emotions were defined the idea that awareness first emerged as a mechanism for focusing an organism’s energies and directing it efficiently becomes a logical one. Because consciousness precedes self-consciousness, it then becomes reasonable to assume that the primary emotion to have evolved must have been one that facilitated the flight/fight reaction, as the organism confronted a world it knew nothing about and which presented many threats to its cohesion. This could only have happened in more sophisticated organisms that have evolved to a point where some successful strategies were established and streamlined into intuitive reactions that did not require much thinking. Therefore all emotions must have evolved out of this primary one {anxiety}, either as an addition, or a counter-reaction, so as to then facilitate newly developing requirements and newer survival strategies.

The 'self' may precede all definition, even before consciousness. In other words, if you raise a child never to identify his/her name (gendered or not), then anybody may qualify that the "person" still exists (except unidentified). Thus, the consciousness being referred to may be a collective one and not an individual. The qualitative difference is the key.

What?!
What does the name, the label used, have to do with the basic self-awarenes that even a chimp has, when looking in the mirror?

How does self-consciousness come about if it does not come from consciousness and why do higher life forms display self-consciuosness whereas lower ones, less sophisticated ones, do not.

Quote :

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that lifeforms are born into the world "knowing nothing about it". For example, when a fawn or calf is born, do they not already know how to walk?

Is not genetic information a kind of knowledge?
Do not these innate abilities, like emotions, come from a past that has ingrained certain reactions because it has proved effective?

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Where did this 'knowledge' come from except for what is ingrained into them genetically?

Exactly.
And how does that contradict what I am saying, or you think i/ am saying?

Quote :

This applies to humans too. Then, we can conclude that almost *all* knowledge, if not all of it completely, is genetic. What adds to or takes away from this knowledge is applied memetically, which may or may not scratch the surface on what is commonly known as Knowledge.

And experience?
Is not nature the sum of all nurturing?
How does this contradict what I am saying?
You think self-consciousness just appears on the scene magically or is it a built upon a slow process proceeding from consciousness?

Quote :

Satyr wrote:

ii. Anxiety concerning the unknown produces this human reaction that takes on two distinct forms: The first is a pure and clear negation of self and the world that makes it possible. It is a movement towards the ideal of the absolute nothingness. The second is a more indirect, duplicitous method, where the movement towards the absolute somethingness represents a turning back to decreasing entropy, ordering, and a state of completion that amounts to the same outcome as absolute nothingness. With this imagined “turning back” the very necessity and essence of life is negated. Once any ideal is achieved there is no distinction, because there is no existence to distinguish and no need for a consciousness to distinguish. Non-existence has reached its end. A ludicrous proposition and one built {4.1} by taking existence and then imagining an opposite. In most cases imagination excludes any undesirable consequences.

iii. Language, as a sophisticated method of displaying mental abstractions, is a symbolic, metaphorical way of sharing mental models and personal reaction to them. Mental abstractions are interpretations of reality and so simplified, generalized models, depending on ambiguity and ill-defined ideas. To be sustainable, all languages offer a false sense of an absolute, even when they attempt to deny its existence. Taking these abstractions literally is where the error of mistaking the mental models for the absolute, begins. Language attempting to describe reality will undoubtedly find paradoxes, for this reason. It is in the description where the contradictions start, for all languages must express concepts as if they were stagnate, unchanging, stable entities. Therefore all descriptions using any language, including mathematics, must be considered metaphorically and artistically and must be valued pragmatically.

There is no reason that I see, to believe a person should assume their mental abstractions are a "false sense" of any potential trend towards absolutism.

There is if they are taken literally, as many nihilists do.
There is no evidence of a nothing but you still beleive there is one, just as there is no evidence of a supreme something, a God, and billions beleive there is.

I explained all tis within the text.
Did you read it?
The concept of an absolute rests entirely on the mental abstraction, with no reference to reality, except as a simplification, a generalization, and reliant on remaining ambiguous because nihilists do not dare define the words they use to delude themselves.

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Even if their abstractions were retarded, it does not necessarily make them 'false'. In fact, it is probably the opposite. People believe in what they see, sense, and feel! Why is it then "false"?

who are you debating here?
Did I say they were false?
Can you read?

Quote :

Satyr wrote:

iv. As a reaction to the flow, the organism, and the consciousness it develops to aid it, strives to remain separate and distinct, so as to better focus its energies and create some degree of order. It attempts this by constructing boundaries and by developing the consciousness to discriminate between what is useful to it (good) and what is not (bad), and to distinguish what is within its immediate wilful control (inside) and what is not (outside). From this simple methodology understanding is built and human dualistic thinking becomes an aspect of how the brain interprets existence. It’s simplicity is supposed to enhance efficiency and its underlying presupposition is one of negation, given that the universe is threatening to any order and stability.

This is false.

The brain may also presuppose positivity and neutrality in the same degree (or sometimes more or less) as negation.

Positivity, as pleasure, is simply a negative term. Read some Schopenhauer.
It designates the absence of suffering, or the absence of the sense of need/.suffering, to be more precise because suffering/need never end, they just diminish to a degree where we become unconscious of them.

Neutrality is the negation of both extremes.

Consciousness is a negation because it establishes identity on negating uniformity.
The apple is not the orange.
I am not you.
I do not know, as of yet, what I am. I just know that I am not you. I am other.
Furthermore it is a negation because it discriminates. Life places a barrier between it and the other, a negation of unity, and then discriminates between good and bad.

It is a movement in antithesis to the flow, a breaking away so as to become, a resistance. A will towards is a negation of what is.
I do not wish to be like...I wish to be not like, the other - identity - independence.

Ironically this to, if taken to the extreme is a nihilistic trend.
The lover of life distances himself from the other, but does not wish to complete the separation, for this would make it obsolete.
This is where the true "middle way" the "balance" lies.

To be in opposition to both avenues toward the absolute, which is impossible to begin with, and to exist as a reaction to them both.
This is where duality commences.
Duality is this denial of uniformity and the acceptance of multiplicity as a necessary aspect of existence.

"I am part of it all, but I do not wish to be a part of it all. I wish to decide what to identify with."

In essence the pessimistic and the optimistic nihilists are not each other's opposite they are merely different psychological manifestations of the same self-annihilating desire.

It is the lover of life that stands against them as their antagonist. It is the egotist and the denier of them both.
He is the true positive. The negation of the negation. Existence.

I added a piece, near the end.

I repost it below.

xxi. The organism commences as this cutting away, as this attempt at exclusion. In its act of living the organism begins to discriminate between what is useful and good for it and what is not, and what is like it and what is not like it.
The membrane, that makes up the beginning and end of its desire to break-off and construct this bubble of existence where it has some control, is the very realization of this process of exclusion. A process that is never complete, as it can never be, and so is porous, constantly defecating unwanted materials out of its premises, constantly defending agaisnt alien invasions that make it ill, constantly correcting the effects of this struggle upon its ordering, constantly trying to find stability.
Toward this end the evolution of a method of deciding what is “good” and what is “bad” becomes a matter of survival or a more efficient usage of energies.
It eventually leads to a more sophisticated method of categorization and discrimination.
Life is a snobbish unity and its sensual awareness determines that extent of how discerning it is.
That this simple process is then cast as this transcending concept where this particular manifestation relates to it as an illusion with no necessity, and that this discriminating survival tactic is then turned into a power that excludes those that do not discipline themselves to a universal code, speaks of the self-deprecating coping mechanism the eventually development of self-consciousness, results in.
Consciousness is made into a mysterious force that has no other purpose but to discriminate against its own parts, which it casts as players in a play and then decides which ones played their part the best, even if it is it that has written the script they must follow.
There is little difference between the major religions that contaminate the post-modern world, today.
All degrade consciousness as either an illusion or as that which is supposed to find its way back to the divine or the source, which has cast it out for being guilty of being exactly as it was created to be.
All consider existence as a testing phase one must earn their way out of and the world as a process of finding their way back to their “better self”. A vast narcissistic farce where the universal consciousness self-gratifies itself with itself and then admonishes its parts for not going beyond the limits it has set for them.
A sadomasochistic theatrical drama.
A forever disappointed parent, filling its children with an endless sense of shame or punishing them with reincarnation into lower forms or with suffering when they cling to this sense of exclusionary ego.
The self is made more porous with this method and so it can then be infected more easily with whatever idea that makes it a blind follower of an alien will.
That this crap is considered enlightenment is truly an expression of self-hatred and a dissatisfaction with reality as it is; a symptom of degradation.
Consciousness is stripped of its necessity as a survival tool meant to categorize and facilitate continuance, and is made into a beyond, looking upon creation, which it has created, and discriminating between which parts deserve its grace and which ones do not.
Even Spinoza’s conception of the Deus smells of this self-denial where the highest goal is to know God that has purposefully made us ignorant of Him with incomplete ideas, or to live-up to the divine that has set the rules and placed the limits which we must break without insulting Him who set them.
Only a Jew would imagine a process that results in varying degrees of failure, making shame the natural condition of the mind and humility its only outcome.
When the necessity for consciousness, as an outward focused tool of categorization, is turned into an inward looking tool of self-flagellation, then the result can only be nihilism.

Satyr wrote:

viii. A nihilistic dogma may take on the form of hope-giver and self-numbing medication, as it uses selective reasoning and compartmentalization to offer life, eternity in many cases (timeless, and so contradicting the idea of existence), while still retaining the very awareness of existence as one of need/suffering, and also promising the perfect without justifying or defining it.
In some teachings the self-contradicting concept of a God is replaced by a bigger abstraction, that of emptiness or by the thing-in-itself. Here the abstraction becomes so extreme and so cut-off from anything in our experiences that it relies on nothing more than its promise of relief to remain viable. The word so vague and undefined that it offers the possibility for semantic obfuscations trying, desperately, to appear like something profound is being said when all that is offered is an excuse that unburdens them from the responsibilities and costs of being born. The entire thing takes on a theatrical air, as authorities, play a part, producing convoluted sentences like pearls of profound wisdom. The followers are mesmerized by the intent, and the theatre only adds to the mystical experience. A this point anything that is said, no matter how vague or nonsensical or self-contradicting, becomes a drop of alcoholic enlightenment we must drink-up to enter the state of drunken numbness we need to relieve ourselves, momentarily, from the awareness of our own resistance.
In other philosophies, the notion of the universe is forcefully infused with the implications of a Deus as a replacement for childish absurdities; a hope-transfusion for the intellectually needy; an injection of the absurd within reason to make life tolerable.
Here the absolute is retained and, once more, in contradiction to itself, consciousness is sheltered from reason, in the process.
Multiplicity, and its necessity, stands opposed to the very idea of absolute oneness, and perfection, at the very least, confronts our self-interested definitions of it.
Why diversity, at all, if all is one and harmoniously balanced, to begin with? Why play such games and in playing games why this need to play them?
The very idea of a conscious deity, possessing a will, a choice, no less, contradicts its very essence as perfect. For to have a choice your consciousness must be separate from that which you choose or the choices must pre-exist the one choosing or else what real choice is being made?
To be conscious is to negate, to discriminate, to be active, and so, what would a perfect being act upon, and why would it even have to? In order to rescue consciousness from its primal heritage, it has to be reinvented, from a tool of survival, to a transcendental, mystical concept nobody can fully grasp or explain or rationally justify. It has to be made into a metaphorical myth and so survive mortality in some bizarre state of beyond.
What would it, a Deus, a God, a perfection, think when it is all and every possibility is its nature?
In creating such feeble, imperfect creations, as us, does it not reveal its true essence?
Some have described the understanding of God as the highest virtue and the attainment of divinity as man reaching his full potential, but then did not God create the ignorant feebleness we are told we must correct and, in so doing, did He not impose His will upon us, urging us to be just as He intended us to be?
If a Deus must be invented to make mature minds more able to fool themselves with emotionally laden probabilities, then one must not also confuse this further by trying to save morality in the process and impose a “highest” virtue upon anyone. The fallback position of stating that God is incomprehensible should be proof enough that He is unattainable, even as an imaginary comfort, and that if we are manifestations of His essence then his essence has a lot of inconsistencies that are projected upon us, like a sin.

To be conscious is also to posit, to indiscriminate, and to be inactive/reactive; women exist too.

You're right about God. If He made us in His image, then he is necessarily imperfect and Mortal ... unless Man is perfect and Immortal.

Christianity is a Lie, a good one, but a lie nonetheless. The better question becomes: what isn't a Lie?

Satyr wrote:

Then again, the copout of claiming that it is our conceptions that are inconsistent and weak rather than God is accessible. Why then punish those for not living up to His ideals when it is He that imposed these limitations upon them?
Such a profoundly corrupt God that is. Not even by human standards can we excuse his many failings.
If all is perfect and manifestations of His perfect Will then there is nothing to live up to or strive for, other than to be true to our nature as anxious, ignorant, violent survival machines, also capable of compassion, understanding and empathy.
To create a creator that in creating imposes a will that cannot be denied and then measures His own creations by how well they adhere to His own will, which He has already willed into them, is the height of human absurdity and a perfect way of producing the confusion and shame necessary in controlling mankind.
But then we can claim that such a God is no judge but just IS.
What a roundabout way to justify a belief in God and still reaffirm our nature as conscious rational beings.
Another instance of compartmentalization.

Within these teachings Nihilism underlies its motives, even while presenting the indifferent, or hopeful, face of benevolent bliss.
Within these teachings consciousness is denied its full scope, it is stunted, humiliated, degraded, as a way of tearing down before one constructs.
Within these teachings man is made to feel better about his self-destructive, self-abasing, self-negating tendencies – tendencies that are a result of his growing awareness and self-consciousness. Consciousness is streamlined to exclude any socially unwanted judgments and told that it is not even in the possession of the individual’s own will, that consciousness is something outside its emerging unity and so something one must discipline and surrender to, as a matter of the holiest importance.

Might I add too; Christian-Secular-Humanism (i.e. Atheism) is both an escape from God's hypocrisy into a much more advanced form. Under the banner of Feminism, the new Anti-Christs rise up to preach their feminism, indoctrination, insemination, and institutionalization to all others without a second-thought. The Humanists go so far as to infiltrate every bunker, every bottom, and every birth canal. Amerika's children, Humanists, have the ability to freely negate & posit Absolutism as their claimed: "free will". Islam, Judaism, Christianity all then become bottom-feeders to the Atheist's wet dream, Humanism, because, at heart, are we all not ... humans?

This ideology is failed insofar as it is the next evolution of human ignorance & stupidity. It creates a new breed of Nihilist that knows-no-bounds through Reason, becoming Unreasonable. -- a man you cannot trifle with by God's reason & will: the Atheist, born again and again, further away from "God" with ever new birth. And every lifetime, the spaces to flee to become fewer and fewer until the end. -- Globalization of non-thought, ignorance, bliss, stupidity, weakness, hedonism, femininity. The strong become weak. The willed become docile. It becomes easier and easier to turn them all against one another, but Hitler, Man, was defeated by History. The next Hitler will be of a different kind: Woman, impossible to hate, Mommy. Nevermind the men she keeps at her side and through whom whisper into her ear.

Satyr wrote:

ix. Multiplicity is the product of this going-away from the near absolute, as the act of creation implies. This is the linear direction of our consciousness, as a tool of ordering the disordering. Making a return to this near-perfect past, the source, the emptiness, is a dogma preaching a return to unconsciousness and non-existence.
In this movement towards… diversity is produced, where all ideals represent mental inventions of a final goal. It is this finality that exposes the self-negating tendencies of a mind seeking certainty and completion and an end – either in a total nil or in a total one.
Omniscience and omnipotence would entail the end of existing and make thinking superfluous. That which is all possibilities simultaneously has no possibilities left to aspire towards and in this movement becomes apparent.
It is this movement that we call existence, and to imagine any end to it is to imagine our own end. To dream of a final destination as the accomplishment of the highest order is to dream of our own release from the burden of our own existence and the awareness this results in.
Not surprising that many dogmas teach the obliteration of self as a goal resulting in a higher state of consciousness.
What they hide is that this “higher state” is but a convoluted way of describing unconsciousness. And it is this unconsciousness that offers the relief from suffering they crave. This emptiness they talk about is the void of non-existence which, like all their notions, contains self-contradiction within its elaborate premises. There is no actual non-existence. This idea, as was mentioned, is based on taking the actual and imagining an opposite. A display of real dualistic thinking.
All we know is existence and all we can do is describe it as we perceive it referencing it, and making sure our deductions hold true within its premises. To imagine anything beyond it, is to project our hopes upon what is indifferent to them.
There is no duality here. Both nil and one represent different interpretations, different views, of the same human metaphor – they both represent opposing abstractions, symbols, of the same desire: an end to need/suffering and the consciousness that makes the sensation of existence possible.
Yet, existence, life, need/suffering, are all tautologies. Deny one and you must deny them all.
Partial methods of self-inebriation, called meditative states (delusion being one of them), cannot save anybody from their own essence. They can only make him/her oblivious to it, just as a drug addict becomes oblivious to immediate reality and delves into the subconscious turmoil of an imagination not referencing sensual awareness.
Reality offers not a single instance of a singularity. Not one stable, completion. No end, at all, but a constant continuity.
There is no empty because there is nothing to be filled.

This is not entirely correct.

The drugged state makes Reality queer, but this does not mean that reality is being non-referenced. It is, still. The drugged mind merely attempts to collapse within itself fully: entering the black hole to be smashed by the singularity inside. When the body cannot handle this mind-state, it collapses and the body ODs (overdoses). The brain shuts off and may become permanently damaged by the physical drug.

All of this is merely an inflection of what actually occurs: the brain is thinking/feeling.

The overdose mimics a real occurrence even without drugs: abstract thought.

Satyr wrote:

x. When the process is mistaken for a thing, it is like a photo being mistaken for reality. In actuality it is the medium that is more indicative of the process than the symbolic, frozen , depiction it uses as a representation.

A photo is a 'reality' Satyr! That is what you have yet to see, a freeze-frame. It is very realunoriginal.

Have you ever wondered why women take tons & tons of photos? Could it be that they lack the mental capacity to recall such memories of their own volition, because they lack the abstraction necessary to recall those 'realities' in a way the male-mind does? They need the photos to remind them of the memory, because to them, that memory was just a feeling. It was never 'real' or 'actual'. The photo makes it one or the other for a woman. For men, our (male) minds may not actually need the photo at all. We may recall the vivid memory through abstraction of thought, something women may not have at all.

Satyr wrote:

xi. The deep dissatisfaction, disease, indicated by this nihilistic tendency exposes life as based on an absence of comfort, in varying degrees, and man as a creature that aims at alleviating its own growing awareness of this condition.
A deep resentment characterizes the mind that succumbs to nihilism. When it puts a positive, hopeful, twist to it, the resentment is far more intense and the mind exposes its inability to cope with it.
A complete acceptance of existence, as it is, would entail the acceptance of the inevitability of failure, forcing the mind into a state of childish exploration, with no expectations and even fewer hopes.

xii. The cults of death can be perfectly understood as a psychological phenomenon, directly related to mankind’s growing consciousness and self-consciousness and of how environmental conditions impact human needs and force an adaptation. It is part of a maturation process.

xiii. The full, honest acceptance of the world would demand an acceptance of man’s uncertainty, his fleeting existence and the awareness of it, as being that of a resistance to the inevitable. In this uncertain, constant, consistency, mankind must come to terms with the conditions that make life necessary and all the more precious.

xiv. Nothing does not stand in opposition to Something. Both represent different perspectives of the same absence. To them only existence stands as their contradiction. There is no dualism here. The concepts are human inventions with no actual existence except as vague ideas meant to aid in understanding by ordering it using the method of simplification. In fact their common essence is in describing that which is non-existent. Their differences arise in how they come about them and how honest one is.
Of the two the concept of an absolute something is the most disingenuous. It not only promises what it cannot deliver, but it does so by selectively contradicting itself and hiding, this fact, from the mind that accepts it as a viable possibility; it offers what is needed to the needy.
These tautologies, amongst many others produced by human language, are responsible for much of this misunderstanding concerning the human condition.
Existence is all that we do know; the apparent, the phenomenon, as a distinction representing a historical becoming, a process, with patterned predictability, is all we can claim as our access to reality.
To invent, out of thin air and with no reference to anything in our experiences, a thing-in-itself, an underlying unmoving, stable, core, a God or a concept replacing Him, the absolute, represents the height of human folly. It’s only function is to placate fears, using hope, or by pretending knowledge where there is only fantasy. It’s only virtue is that it maintains peace amongst the myriads of dimwitted dolts that would have no reason to remain reasonable, and so easily malleable, if it were not for these humbling, if not humiliating, self-effacing dogmas.

Nothing & Something stand in opposition when their paths cross. The two entities simply do not enjoy the presence of one another, because they represent each other's weakness, as well as strength. The Ego makes us forget this 'strength' though and we are left with only weakness...

Unreasonable wrote:

Satyr wrote:

viii. A nihilistic dogma may take on the form of hope-giver and self-numbing medication, as it uses selective reasoning and compartmentalization to offer life, eternity in many cases (timeless, and so contradicting the idea of existence), while still retaining the very awareness of existence as one of need/suffering, and also promising the perfect without justifying or defining it.
In some teachings the self-contradicting concept of a God is replaced by a bigger abstraction, that of emptiness or by the thing-in-itself. Here the abstraction becomes so extreme and so cut-off from anything in our experiences that it relies on nothing more than its promise of relief to remain viable. The word so vague and undefined that it offers the possibility for semantic obfuscations trying, desperately, to appear like something profound is being said when all that is offered is an excuse that unburdens them from the responsibilities and costs of being born. The entire thing takes on a theatrical air, as authorities, play a part, producing convoluted sentences like pearls of profound wisdom. The followers are mesmerized by the intent, and the theatre only adds to the mystical experience. A this point anything that is said, no matter how vague or nonsensical or self-contradicting, becomes a drop of alcoholic enlightenment we must drink-up to enter the state of drunken numbness we need to relieve ourselves, momentarily, from the awareness of our own resistance.
In other philosophies, the notion of the universe is forcefully infused with the implications of a Deus as a replacement for childish absurdities; a hope-transfusion for the intellectually needy; an injection of the absurd within reason to make life tolerable.
Here the absolute is retained and, once more, in contradiction to itself, consciousness is sheltered from reason, in the process.
Multiplicity, and its necessity, stands opposed to the very idea of absolute oneness, and perfection, at the very least, confronts our self-interested definitions of it.
Why diversity, at all, if all is one and harmoniously balanced, to begin with? Why play such games and in playing games why this need to play them?
The very idea of a conscious deity, possessing a will, a choice, no less, contradicts its very essence as perfect. For to have a choice your consciousness must be separate from that which you choose or the choices must pre-exist the one choosing or else what real choice is being made?
To be conscious is to negate, to discriminate, to be active, and so, what would a perfect being act upon, and why would it even have to? In order to rescue consciousness from its primal heritage, it has to be reinvented, from a tool of survival, to a transcendental, mystical concept nobody can fully grasp or explain or rationally justify. It has to be made into a metaphorical myth and so survive mortality in some bizarre state of beyond.
What would it, a Deus, a God, a perfection, think when it is all and every possibility is its nature?
In creating such feeble, imperfect creations, as us, does it not reveal its true essence?
Some have described the understanding of God as the highest virtue and the attainment of divinity as man reaching his full potential, but then did not God create the ignorant feebleness we are told we must correct and, in so doing, did He not impose His will upon us, urging us to be just as He intended us to be?
If a Deus must be invented to make mature minds more able to fool themselves with emotionally laden probabilities, then one must not also confuse this further by trying to save morality in the process and impose a “highest” virtue upon anyone. The fallback position of stating that God is incomprehensible should be proof enough that He is unattainable, even as an imaginary comfort, and that if we are manifestations of His essence then his essence has a lot of inconsistencies that are projected upon us, like a sin.

To be conscious is also to posit, to indiscriminate, and to be inactive/reactive; women exist too.

Who said women do not exist?

Who are you debating?
When I say consciousness I include all consciuosness.

Quote :

You're right about God. If He made us in His image, then he is necessarily imperfect and Mortal ... unless Man is perfect and Immortal.

Christianity is a Lie, a good one, but a lie nonetheless. The better question becomes: what isn't a Lie?

A lie is a concept an abstraction that has no reference to reality.
The absolute is an inventive lie because there is not one single instance of an absolute.

Quote :

This is not entirely correct.

The drugged state makes Reality queer, but this does not mean that reality is being non-referenced. It is, still. The drugged mind merely attempts to collapse within itself fully: entering the black hole to be smashed by the singularity inside. When the body cannot handle this mind-state, it collapses and the body ODs (overdoses). The brain shuts off and may become permanently damaged by the physical drug.

All of this is merely an inflection of what actually occurs: the brain is thinking/feeling.

The overdose mimics a real occurrence even without drugs: abstract thought.

You are simply replacing my words with yours.
"Collapse within itself" is self-referencing.
It is falling away from reality, as all deluded stated do, and numbing the sense so as to cut off all avenues towards reality.

This is what dumbing-down does.
This is what institutionalization does.
One's own senses are no longer trusted, and one's own mind has not been trained to analyze reality directly.

The mind, now depends on another's senses to tell it what it sees and how to interpret it.
The end of philosophy.

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A photo is a 'reality' Satyr! That is what you have yet to see, a freeze-frame. It is very realunoriginal.

Oh jeez...

A photo, as the elements that make up the photograph is a part of reality, the depiction, the symbols, the picture itself, is nothing more than a simplification of reality. A representation.
A word, the same thing.
An abstraction, the same thing. The last is part of reality as it is a congruence of mental processes forming into a model. the model itself is a simplification, a symbol.

You cannot alter reality by manipulating a photo, but you can use it to aid you in manipulating reality.

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Have you ever wondered why women take tons & tons of photos? Could it be that they lack the mental capacity to recall such memories of their own volition, because they lack the abstraction necessary to recall those 'realities' in a way the male-mind does?

Or they enjoy the idea of freezing reality when they were young and pretty and happy.

Quote :

They need the photos to remind them of the memory, because to them, that memory was just a feeling. It was never 'real' or 'actual'. The photo makes it one or the other for a woman. For men, our (male) minds may not actually need the photo at all. We may recall the vivid memory through abstraction of thought, something women may not have at all.

That too. An abstraction, a metal model, is only as good as the mind that produces it.
This is why for many, some concepts are gross generalizations, when for others they are not.

Quote :

Satyr wrote:

xi. The deep dissatisfaction, disease, indicated by this nihilistic tendency exposes life as based on an absence of comfort, in varying degrees, and man as a creature that aims at alleviating its own growing awareness of this condition.
A deep resentment characterizes the mind that succumbs to nihilism. When it puts a positive, hopeful, twist to it, the resentment is far more intense and the mind exposes its inability to cope with it.
A complete acceptance of existence, as it is, would entail the acceptance of the inevitability of failure, forcing the mind into a state of childish exploration, with no expectations and even fewer hopes.

xii. The cults of death can be perfectly understood as a psychological phenomenon, directly related to mankind’s growing consciousness and self-consciousness and of how environmental conditions impact human needs and force an adaptation. It is part of a maturation process.

xiii. The full, honest acceptance of the world would demand an acceptance of man’s uncertainty, his fleeting existence and the awareness of it, as being that of a resistance to the inevitable. In this uncertain, constant, consistency, mankind must come to terms with the conditions that make life necessary and all the more precious.

xiv. Nothing does not stand in opposition to Something. Both represent different perspectives of the same absence. To them only existence stands as their contradiction. There is no dualism here. The concepts are human inventions with no actual existence except as vague ideas meant to aid in understanding by ordering it using the method of simplification. In fact their common essence is in describing that which is non-existent. Their differences arise in how they come about them and how honest one is.
Of the two the concept of an absolute something is the most disingenuous. It not only promises what it cannot deliver, but it does so by selectively contradicting itself and hiding, this fact, from the mind that accepts it as a viable possibility; it offers what is needed to the needy.
These tautologies, amongst many others produced by human language, are responsible for much of this misunderstanding concerning the human condition.
Existence is all that we do know; the apparent, the phenomenon, as a distinction representing a historical becoming, a process, with patterned predictability, is all we can claim as our access to reality.
To invent, out of thin air and with no reference to anything in our experiences, a thing-in-itself, an underlying unmoving, stable, core, a God or a concept replacing Him, the absolute, represents the height of human folly. It’s only function is to placate fears, using hope, or by pretending knowledge where there is only fantasy. It’s only virtue is that it maintains peace amongst the myriads of dimwitted dolts that would have no reason to remain reasonable, and so easily malleable, if it were not for these humbling, if not humiliating, self-effacing dogmas.

Nothing & Something stand in opposition when their paths cross. The two entities simply do not enjoy the presence of one another, because they represent each other's weakness, as well as strength. The Ego makes us forget this 'strength' though and we are left with only weakness...

They do in that they both represent what is non-existent, and that which, if realized, would entail an end to existence.

The only place they exist is in the human mind that can entertain both concepts, simultaneously, by not really defining them.
They are what is absent or non-existent and so the antithesis to existence.

Satyr wrote:

xv. The movement towards a something or a nothing represents the same motive using a different strategy to accomplish the same goal. Therefore to seek God so as to unite with Him is no different than to abandon yourself to the ideal of humanism and immerse yourself in its comforting promise, and this is no different than the Will to Power or the extreme ascetic denial of self towards a return to a source.
Self is the absent we strive to complete and so we must come to terms with the idea that the self, as with any other conceptualization of the absent absolute, is this movement that can never be found but only sought after. But this does not negate the reality of the self - no more than any of the other metaphors we use to understand a fluid reality, like the number one, are negated by this truth. The conscious self, as a process of negation, a rejection, as a distancing, as multiplicity manifesting in a momentary separation from the entropic decay, is, exactly, what make consciousness possible and necessary. The completion of this process or the negation of it through denial, is the elimination of this consciousness not an enhancement of it or an expansion of it.
As was stated, the absolution from this truth is what is commonly felt as a relief, predicated by the self-hypnotic state one must place one’s mind in so as to remain alive and, yet, still numb enough to be unaffected by the environment you are in. It is a self-induced trance offering many benefits on a psychosomatic level. One such benefit, as with athleticism, is the habituation of the mind with stress and so the increase potential for pleasure, and the self-discipline this results in.
Despite this, the entire practice of extreme asceticism for asceticism’s sake, is dependent on a contradiction, as the mere fact that the body remains alive contradicts its uncaring state of self-denial. What is actually occurring is that care, resistance, is pushed down into the unconscious where it cannot bubble up as need/suffering, and the mind enjoys a momentary respite from the sensation being alive, all the while clinging onto it tooth and nail. The indifference power implies is in degree or, often, faked.

Self is never absent. -- absent of what??? I don't see how you can even mention that it is possible for the self to be absent.

I know where I came from; did you forget yourself perhaps???


A thought came to me yesterday night: Knowledge is the sigh of relief between two storms whereas the diluted mind would calm the sea forever.

Satyr wrote:

xvi. Herein lies the tragic comedy of life, as it was understood by the Hellenes and taken far too seriously by the eastern nihilistic, death cults. Balance is prescribed in both traditions, only in the west, as we’ve inherited our traditions from the ancients, it is a means towards an earthly end not some promise for eternal absolution or a worship of unconsciousness and death as our most enlightened state. Athleticism and asceticism become instruments of empowerment where life is celebrated and not denied and where existence is not slandered or degraded as an illusion one must strive to never repeat.
Then population pressures forced this disease upon the west, via the Jewish peoples, and perhaps even directly from the east via the Persians, before that.
The body was dishonoured as sinful, man shamed and the human spirit dwindled into an atrophying miasma that was supposed to be “overcome” and neglected and denied as even having relevance.
Love, then, ceased to be man’s greatest gift he possessed and became a transcendental force which all deserved and none merited.

xvii. It is in this positioning between these twin peaks of human understanding that man establishes his sense of self – his identity. The movement towards is where man finds his traits and it is his intent that produces his character.
The attraction towards more towards one or the other can best be explained as a product of metabolic rates or systolic/diastolic cellular functions, and the neurological speeds this establishes.

xviii. Modern social trends towards growing uniformity are entirely based on this drive towards self-negation.
The individual feeling vulnerable and weak, in relation to then unknown and to the human condition of need/suffering, seeks to be assimilated within a greater whole and lose himself there.
Not an easy task when millions of years of evolution have nurtured a tendency towards independence and natural selectivity and a growing consciousness to facilitate this exclusion of what is alien or detrimental to individual health.
To accomplish it one must tear down what was so as to build something new.
Nature evolves the mechanism of chemical inebriation to overcome this primordial drive, and so manages to produce self-destructive behaviours or very dangerous ones.
The advantages offered as recompense for the self-sacrifice are numerous and so this adaptation becomes a value and is established as a socially desirable tendency.
Human social structures take up this natural disposition and manufacture moral systems and cultural ideals.
Assimilation and harmonious integration becomes the highest human standard and those most willing to give in are the ones with the least to lose. Mediocrity is a natural result of this.

xix. The fundamental underlying factor, for all of this, is man’s own fallibility and weakness. It is mortality that imposes this human condition and the various reactions to it.
A coming to terms with it would demand a childlike, forgetfulness and loss of expectations; it would entail acceptance.

xxi. The organism commences as this cutting away, as this attempt at exclusion. In its act of living the organism begins to discriminate between what is useful and good for it and what is not, and what is like it and what is not like it.

Yes! -- this is the Individual opposed to Society, and why Man & Woman come to hate and despise one another. It is a mimicry of the love-hate relationship between God and His Children, between Husband & Wife over the affection of their children. It is a constant competition for the Other attention. It is the human ego, the male Id, the female Entity, all attempting to one-up one another in a desperate move to say, "God!!! -- choose me, not them!".

Have you ever witnessed small children competing in this manner: "I want to sit next to mom! No, I get to! No, I get to! I do! I do!"

Who is closer-to-God? Who sits next to the throne? Human hierarchy and discrimination then plays out. Distance from God implies a guaranteed resentment. Closeness implies Moral Authority: a "holier than thou" attitude. The Nihilist rejects all of this and wanders off alone, to die, because this Game is Cruelty-incarnate. God set us up to be Evil? How can this be? Yet, there it is, in the writing. Children behave as animals. Then, the whole system falls over.

We are animals. After that shit hits the fan, then there is no reason to really do anything anymore. Instincts take over.

Satyr wrote:

The membrane, that makes up the beginning and end of its desire to break-off and construct this bubble of existence where it has some control, is the very realization of this process of exclusion. A process that is never complete, as it can never be, and so is porous, constantly defecating unwanted materials out of its premises, constantly defending against alien invasions that make it ill, constantly correcting the effects of this struggle upon its ordering, constantly trying to find stability.
Toward this end the evolution of a method of deciding what is “good” and what is “bad” becomes a matter of survival or a more efficient usage of energies.
It eventually leads to a more sophisticated method of categorization and discrimination.
Life is a snobbish unity and its sensual awareness determines that extent of how discerning it is.
That this simple process is then cast as this transcending concept where this particular manifestation relates to it as an illusion with no necessity, and that this discriminating survival tactic is then turned into a power that excludes those that do not discipline themselves to a universal code, speaks of the self-deprecating coping mechanism the eventually development of self-consciousness, results in.
Consciousness is made into a mysterious force that has no other purpose but to discriminate against its own parts, which it casts as players in a play and then decides which ones played their part the best, even if it is it that has written the script they must follow.
There is little difference between the major religions that contaminate the post-modern world, today.
All degrade consciousness as either an illusion or as that which is supposed to find its way back to the divine or the source, which has cast it out for being guilty of being exactly as it was created to be.
All consider existence as a testing phase one must earn their way out of and the world as a process of finding their way back to their “better self”. A vast narcissistic farce where the universal consciousness self-gratifies itself with itself and then admonishes its parts for not going beyond the limits it has set for them.
A sadomasochistic theatrical drama.
A forever disappointed parent, filling its children with an endless sense of shame or punishing them with reincarnation into lower forms or with suffering when they cling to this sense of exclusionary ego.
The self is made more porous with this method and so it can then be infected more easily with whatever idea that makes it a blind follower of an alien will.
That this crap is considered enlightenment is truly an expression of self-hatred and a dissatisfaction with reality as it is; a symptom of degradation.
Consciousness is stripped of its necessity as a survival tool meant to categorize and facilitate continuance, and is made into a beyond, looking upon creation, which it has created, and discriminating between which parts deserve its grace and which ones do not.
Even Spinoza’s conception of the Deus smells of this self-denial where the highest goal is to know God that has purposefully made us ignorant of Him with incomplete ideas, or to live-up to the divine that has set the rules and placed the limits which we must break without insulting Him who set them.
Only a Jew would imagine a process that results in varying degrees of failure, making shame the natural condition of the mind and humility its only outcome.
When the necessity for consciousness, as an outward focused tool of categorization, is turned into an inward looking tool of self-flagellation, then the result can only be nihilism.

xxii. Think hard; live light.

Think hard; live hard; die hard.

Unreasonable wrote:

Satyr wrote:

xv. The movement towards a something or a nothing represents the same motive using a different strategy to accomplish the same goal. Therefore to seek God so as to unite with Him is no different than to abandon yourself to the ideal of humanism and immerse yourself in its comforting promise, and this is no different than the Will to Power or the extreme ascetic denial of self towards a return to a source.
Self is the absent we strive to complete and so we must come to terms with the idea that the self, as with any other conceptualization of the absent absolute, is this movement that can never be found but only sought after. But this does not negate the reality of the self - no more than any of the other metaphors we use to understand a fluid reality, like the number one, are negated by this truth. The conscious self, as a process of negation, a rejection, as a distancing, as multiplicity manifesting in a momentary separation from the entropic decay, is, exactly, what make consciousness possible and necessary. The completion of this process or the negation of it through denial, is the elimination of this consciousness not an enhancement of it or an expansion of it.
As was stated, the absolution from this truth is what is commonly felt as a relief, predicated by the self-hypnotic state one must place one’s mind in so as to remain alive and, yet, still numb enough to be unaffected by the environment you are in. It is a self-induced trance offering many benefits on a psychosomatic level. One such benefit, as with athleticism, is the habituation of the mind with stress and so the increase potential for pleasure, and the self-discipline this results in.
Despite this, the entire practice of extreme asceticism for asceticism’s sake, is dependent on a contradiction, as the mere fact that the body remains alive contradicts its uncaring state of self-denial. What is actually occurring is that care, resistance, is pushed down into the unconscious where it cannot bubble up as need/suffering, and the mind enjoys a momentary respite from the sensation being alive, all the while clinging onto it tooth and nail. The indifference power implies is in degree or, often, faked.

Self is never absent. -- absent of what??? I don't see how you can even mention that it is possible for the self to be absent.

I know where I came from; did you forget yourself perhaps???

This comment on its own, tells me you have understood nothing of what I say.

I say:

Nothing/Something, God, Here/Now, Self are human conceptions of the absolute, which is nowhere in evidence and so must be considered the absent in the need/suffering of existence.
We seek that which we do not have.

This does not make Self non-existent, but only a concept that must be redefined as not a thing, implying a static, thing-in-itself, perfect, stable, unmoving, inert, a being, but as soemthing dynamic, ongoing, becomnig, a process.

If we succumb to the first we then are lead to the absurdity of taking the mental models as evidence of real things - and God becomes the product of a simple mind wishing to escape the flow of reality that fills him with anxiety and fear.
God then becoems a stable ground to find shelter in, a harbour that protects the boat from the stormy seas of existence.

So self is not static but dynamic and this means that the person you are today is not the person you were a year ago or will be a year from now.
The only thing maintaining this process as a unity of continuity, is memory - both experiential and genetic.

The information passed onto me, as an organism, constitutes my identity as a species, and sets the limits of my appearance.
My experiences determine how this inheritance will manifest itself and continue, or not, on.

The only thing making me a cohesive, individual with a past and a future is my brain that abstracts phenomena into models, codes, that can be shard and passed on.
There is, obviously, also biological memory as genes prove.

The Core of Being, Self, remains unchanged in the end, until you die, Satyr.

You are wrong.

Unreasonable wrote:

The Core of Being, Self, remains unchanged in the end, until you die, Satyr.

You are wrong.

That proves it. You are an absolutist thinker.
you can't wrap your mind around anything unless it is static.

I am truly wrong, just because you declare it, and you mistake the abstractions in your mind for reality.

THAT, is what makes you a simplistic thinker.

The "core of being"...that is funny.
Why don't you just stop pretending you are thinknig and call it "spirit".

Satyr wrote:

That proves it. You are an absolutist thinker.

That proves it to you, big deal.

I can think in absolutes. I can think in non-absolutes, practicality. So what is your point? -- that I can go either direction?

Satyr wrote:

you can't wrap your mind around anything unless it is static.

Neither can you do such a thing.

Satyr wrote:

I am truly wrong, just because you declare it, and you mistake the abstractions in your mind for reality.

THAT, is what makes you a simplistic thinker.

According to you maybe, I am aware of what my declarations mean and what they entail.

You assume that there's only "1" reality in this world, when there are an infinite amount of them.

Satyr wrote:

The "core of being"...that is funny.
Why don't you just stop pretending you are thinknig and call it "spirit".

If the metaphor suffices me, then I will.

What have you been doing all this while, spiriting your stuff onto the page?

Oddly, you claim to 'think' you know what you are talking about...

Unreasonable wrote:

Satyr wrote:

That proves it. You are an absolutist thinker.

That proves it to you, big deal.

To me?
Anyone with a brain can see the "core" as being a reference to a soul or a spirit.
You are a closet Christian or an absolutist of another kind.

In other words: Simple.

Quote :

I can think in absolutes. I can think in non-absolutes, practicality. So what is your point? -- that I can go either direction?

No you can't. You just said that there is a "core of being".
Now, this either makes you a simplistic thinker or a coward..or a waffler.

You reject the notion of uncertainty or of an ongoing process of self because it frightens you.

Quote :

According to you maybe, I am aware of what my declarations mean and what they entail.

You assume that there's only "1" reality in this world, when there are an infinite amount of them.

And you believe in mutiple realities?

Add perspectivism to the mix.
The desire to prove a perspective on the basis that it may be true, since all is perspective.

Perspective of what?

Reminds me of tentative.
no matter how ridiculous an opinion, he could fall back on the:
"It's all a matter of perspective" and be done with any burden of proof.

Quote :

If the metaphor suffices me, then I will.

What have you been doing all this while, spiriting your stuff onto the page?

Well I imagined it there.
I constructed a perspective where it was there and, voila, there it is.

Quote :

Oddly, you claim to 'think' you know what you are talking about...

Oddly, you think this tactic is effective.

If you imitate me further, you might just become me.
Just alter your perspective where you are me, and there you go.

Think of it as taking over my spirit; occupying my soul.

It took you this long to expose yourself.

How many monikers do you have, and why?
Do you have to reinvent yourself every time you embarrass yourself?

I know...why do you not just declare victory and be done with it?
You've done it often enough.

A "core self"?!!
Shit man you are fuckin' insane.

You "defeated" your daddy?

Methinks you took too much from your mommy's side.
It's too bad.

I ain't your daddy, little boy.

Satyr wrote:

To me?
anyone with a brain can see the "core" as being a reference to a soul or a spirit.
You are a closet Christian or an absolutist of another kind.

In other words: Simple.

I am a descendant from Roman Catholics and Germanic Paganism.

Yet, you pretend like your own Hellenic roots aren't so shallow? Granted, yours may dig a little deeper old goat, that doesn't mean much to me. We come from the same place. The difference between you and I is that I plan to go higher.

Satyr wrote:

No you can't. You just said that there is a "core of being".
Now, this either makes you a simplistic thinking or a coward.

You reject the notion of uncertainty or of an ongoing process of self because it frightens you.

You are wrong, yet again. I am uncertain almost all of the time. That's how I learn from the best, friend.

And even if the Self is static at the center, that does not mean that consciousness does not move around it and that it does not contain a sphere of influence, because the Self does contain these things. The fundamental mistake in your Metaphysic was/is not accounting for a static Self which is repeatedly negated by the male-mind. However, this negation is never complete. It only forces the singularity into a tighter center, which, not coincidentally, empowers the influence of that Self.

In the end, what can I say, other than that you are (just a tad) diluted?

Cheer up ol'chap. Has arthritis set in yet? Calm down when you let loose on your keyboard next time.

Satyr wrote:

And you believe in mutiple realities?

Add perspectivism to the mix.
The desire to prove a perspective on the basis that it may be true, since all is perspective.

Perspective of what?

Perspectivism is for fools. Realities are contingent upon individual and collective 'selves', which contribute to one another differently.

Not all thoughts are equal; remember that Satyr? You were right about that one. Here's a *gold star* for you.

Satyr wrote:

Well I imagined it there.
I constructed a perspective where it was there and, voila, there it is.

Well done Satyr, let us call the chronicles and news stations! -- hot off the press!

Satyr wrote:

Oddly, you think this tactic is effective.

If you imitate me further, you might just become me.
Just alter your perspective where you are me, and there you go.

Think of it as taking over my spirit.

It took you this long to expose yourself.

How many monikers do you have, and why?
Do you have to reinvent yourself every time you embarrass yourself?

I know...why do you not just declare victory and be done with it?

A "core self", shit man you are fuckin' insane.
You "defeated" your daddy?

Methinks you took too much from your mommy's side.
It's too bad.

I ain't your daddy, little boy.

My feelings ... so hurt!

P.S. I win, LOL!

Unreasonable wrote:

I am a descendant from Roman Catholics and Germanic Paganism.

Yet, you pretend like your own Hellenic roots aren't so shallow? Granted, yours may dig a little deeper old goat, that doesn't mean much to me. We come from the same place. The difference between you and I is that I plan to go higher.

You can plan all you like.
Flap those wings, planning to fly, does anyone care?

Your Germans took from the Hellenes the best parts.
But what does that matter?
You, YOU, are in question here.

Quote :

You are wrong, yet again. I am uncertain almost all of the time. That's how I learn from the best, friend.

The only thing you learn is how to defend your weakness.

Quote :

And even if the Self is static at the center, that does not mean that consciousness does not move around it and that it does not contain a sphere of influence, because the Self does contain these things.

Was that a sci-fi film?

Quote :

The fundamental mistake in your Metaphysic was/is not accounting for a static Self which is repeatedly negated by the male-mind. However, this negation is never complete. It only forces the singularity into a tighter center, which, not coincidentally, empowers the influence of that Self.

If you can point to a static anything, you might have a point.
Replace this static self with purple...same shit.

Quote :

In the end, what can I say, other than that you are (just a tad) diluted?

Cheer up ol'chap. Has arthritis set in yet? Calm down when you let loose on your keyboard next time.

Arthritis?
God, can you project your need any more clearly?
Can you display your weakness any more?

Quote :

Perspectivism is for fools. Realities are contingent upon individual and collective 'selves', which contribute to one another differently.

Not all thoughts are equal; remember that Satyr? You were right about that one. Here's a *gold star* for you.

Yet, you've learned nothing.
In your haste to destroy the idol, you swing away like a moron, and hit nothing but air.
Then you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and, trying to hide your shame, you declare a direct hit!!!

Quote :

My feelings ... so hurt!

P.S. I win, LOL!

Like I said, you can imitate all you want, but you look like a caricature than the real thing.

Get your own character.

Grow a spine.

You fucking idiot Satyr...

The center of a wheel in motion DOES NOT MOVE!!!


And now this thread is over.

Ta ta!