“You’re living in a dream world, a simulation, nothing is real.”
Can’t really change anything (see: Novikov Self-Consistency Principle) and I don’t believe people can enact wisdom until they are ready (i.e. whispering wise words in the ear will not make a wiser person,) and so I’m left with fucking with ourself.
I will admit that I’m quite jaded, but the only place I need my faith in people COMPLETELY restored is online. Almost anytime I interact with real people in the real world I come away with a sense that people are generally good and mostly trying to do right (in as much as they can determine what “good” and “right” mean in our complicated world.) However, as soon as one allows for anonymity, shittiness blossoms — whether that anonymity is due to the nature of the online world or because one is otherwise not interacting face-to-face or because one (while not strictly anonymous) is homogenized by life inside an echo chamber.
Huh, maybe I do need my faith in people restored because I guess I’m saying that people in the light of day are loveable but in the dark they slouch toward depravity. Maybe we’ll figure it out. For most of humanity’s existence, anonymity was not an option. There’s no hiding in a tribe. It’s all part of what our species is working out, I suppose. I suspect that most people if given the choice between having the ill-gotten gains of their anonymity or being truly and deeply seen would opt for the latter.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure we die in a reasonably robust mental and physical state.”
I don’t want my future self to get comfortable with the idea of pooping ourself in bed or forgetting the few people we know just because he’s gotten more cowardly about death in its proximity.
I’m not big on tabulating the “best” this or that. It feels like it hamstrings experience and puts one in a comparison mode in which one is always living half in the past. If it looks good, eat it, and then move on to the next experience — giving that experience your presence.
It’d be nice if schools taught people how to NOT be docile, unquestioning worker-bees.
One can come through today’s education system with a PhD without emotional intelligence, self-confidence (beyond one’s silo,) a capacity to think soundly about a range of topics outside one’s discipline such that one recognizes potential unintended consequences and counter-intuitive influences, with an intolerance of competing worldviews, and with a lack of humility about what one knows and what humanity as a whole knows.
The best advice I ever got was, “Don’t give unsolicited advice!” It surprised me a little because I wasn’t even talking to the guy. A stranger just came up to me out of the blue and shouted it in my face… but it is wise advice.
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark Twain
One can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge,
Michel de montaigne
but one cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and one must begin anew.
Julio Cortázar
Experience is not what happens to you,
Aldous Huxley
it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.s. Eliot
If we do not possess a ‘sense’ for a given energy -form,
Robert E. Ornstein in The psychology of consciousness [As quoted in the Bihar School edition of Hatha Yoga Pradipika]
we do not experience its existence.
Recognize that your experience of the world is not the world, itself. You have tremendous (potentially complete) control over the former, but virtually no control over the latter. #SakshiBhava
No. I do not think everything happens for a reason, but I do think it is beneficial to see the positive in challenging life events. Both approaches serve to keep one from feeling victimized by life, but the latter doesn’t require that one believe in some grand architect twiddling the dials on one’s life events — and isn’t a Panglossian rationalization.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 