Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Thought

What appears to be contradictions to me …

‘Nothing can be known with certainty’ – certainly.

‘There is no matter – only sensations produced by ‘brain!’ exist’

‘Quantum Physics for discussions/highest truth... common sense for everyday life’

‘Ancient wisdom for discussion... common sense for everyday life’

I like your observation as it demonstrates to me that you have been doing some down-to-earth thinking.

Indeed... it is delicious... Thanks to you, Vineeto and Richard. Much of it I owe to all the writings that you have done... suddenly something will make sense… suddenly something else will... the ‘me’ will try to spoil... but something will click in spite of that... it is a very interesting process.

In the beginning, I had ‘problems’ with your style and Vineeto’s – I thought you were nitpicking, confrontational etc. So I can see where others are coming from when they attack you. I have since then realized that such feelings were products of my own malicious and sorrowful world-view (which was reacting to being challenged). Now when I read yours or Vineeto’s (Richard was getting a ‘special’ treatment as a ‘Guru’ but now I think of him as an ‘expert’) make 100% sense to me.

The tendency of human beings to indulge in abstract thinking, aka philosophy, is legendary, particularly so amongst the males of the species and it has done nothing but produce a maize of contradictions and a plethora of obscurations as well as endless opportunities for argumentations.

In 1980, John Lennon, a man who had considerable wealth, fame and power, wrote a song for his son and a line from it went: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’. It strikes me that he could equally well have written ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy philosophizing about it.’

I come from a different background than you and have valued philosophy and have spent enormous time philosophizing as well as reading a lot of philosophies. However, I don’t value them anymore – given that actualism is available. It is a lot of time wasting... I could not have said this a while ago though – I guess my ‘social identity as a philosopher, thinker’ has lost his grounds.

I remember being struck by the inanity of this propensity to philosophize when contemplating my own mortality and I wrote about it in my journal at the time –

During my investigations into death over this last year, I have become aware that the most shocking thing for human beings is that we are able to contemplate our own death. It is amazing that, of all the animals on the planet, only we human beings, with our ability to think and reflect, know that we have a limited life span and, further, that we could die at any time. We know this, we can talk about it and think about it. We see other people and animals die, and we see our bodies aging and dying. We know that death is an inevitable fact. This is the fact of the situation, but we have avoided this fact largely by making ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What happens after death?’ into great religious, philosophical and scientific questions. Indeed, for many humans the pursuit of the answer to these meaningless questions is deemed to be the very meaning of life. The search for what happens after life becomes the point of life and the Search is endless. One is forever on the Path. One never arrives. That always seemed some sort of perversity to me. All that the religious and spiritual meanings of life have offered us is that they point to life after death – that’s where it is really at! ‘When you die, then you can really live!’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

In my experience there is nothing like contemplating the inevitability – the 100% certainty – of one’s own death to get one thinking back down-to-earth.

In another thread Richard has made it clear about how death takes away the ‘grimness’ or ‘seriousness’ out of living... thus ended my ‘seriousness’ to some extent :).

All the philosophies are filled with contradictions... they are not liveable, practicable at all. They are good only for idle talk. Which is okay, if there is not so much suffering. No 75 to Peter, 11.5.2005

I think I finally understand that feelings are a different mechanism and happen before thought.

So far I had been under the impression that every feeling has to be mediated by thought: IOW thought is the only mechanism by which feelings are triggered; which is the eastern viewpoint: thoughts create feelings.

Though I had bought the explanation in actualist writings that feelings are independent (though interwoven) with thoughts (this difference is important to actualism) which is consistent with LeDoux’s findings, this is the first time I have experientially understood and dropped my viewpoint that thought is the mechanism for feelings.

It is true that thought can trigger feelings; but feelings happen before thought. This I noticed when I had a jealousy reaction and the thought came afterwards explaining it. The thought fills in the gap of this ghost process of feelings and takes all the focus. So one ends up blaming thought.

So I now view feelings as a ‘black box’ mechanism of invisible, instantaneous response to stimuli (including internal stimuli such as thought) in the presence of which thought is subservient to the feeling’s goals. In other words, thought is shackled by feelings.

I just wrote down my understanding to open it for feedback and criticism. No 33

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