Recent Musings.

Yesterday I went out into the woods of Hawthorn Hollow to contemplate the universe and all the things in it. These following short statements are just a few of the mental musings to myself, and some of the conversations with my fellow philosophers. I hope you enjoy the read.

This is a string of thoughts that sprouted from Mitch's discussion of protest for social reform-
"Everyone wants a purpose, something for their entire life to be about, so that they can feel like they accomplished something, but when they get to the end of their lives, the only thing they can suggest to the new generation to make life on Mother Earth a better experience is to try and be a little bit nicer to people because if anyone were to be reborn as any other human being, you would want the you that you have already been to be nice to the you you were reborn as.
You feel like you need to save the animals that are being eaten so you chain yourself to the farm gates in protest of eating animals. Then you realize the plants are being farmed unnaturally, so you chain yourself to a farm tractor in protest of eating vegetables. There's nothing left to eat but humans, and you can't be a cannibal without eating yourself because we are all the same person in the infinite sense, so you chain yourself to yourself in protest of eating, and then you have realized the ultimate truth of Existentialism: you are chained to yourself for the duration of your stay in this space-time continuum/reality/universe, but the stay is optional."

This may come off as the cliche philosophy discussion, but it has meaning to me so it isn't as cliche as it seems.
"Everyone wants some major point to life, they want the universe to make sense, but they want the universe to explain itself and the universe has to be poetic about it: it can't be something simple. People start forming thoughts on the issue like 'Everything happens for a reason' or 'Life is what you make of it', but that's just escaping from the Existential responsibility of living. You are alive as you, and once you say you want the universe to make sense, it's your job to figure it out. Don't expect the universe to just unfold inside your head because you want it to. You have to do the mental legwork yourself.
Instead of saying 'Everything happens for a reason' and calling it a life, why don't people say 'Everything happens'? It's the truth, but because it's too simple, the human mind believes that can't really be all there is to it. As you walk through the woods though, you can point in any direction and at anything and say, 'There's the truth'. Point at a frog and say, 'That's the truth right there', because it is. The frog is a frog, and no one can argue with that. Take that farther. Point to the sky. Say, 'That's the truth'. The sky is the sky, and when you see a bird flying, understand that that action is one facet of the truth that is freedom. The frog hopping on the ground isn't free to fly in the sky, but that's how it is. Everything happens the way it is supposed to, but when you try to make things out to be something they are not, of course nothing makes sense because you've lost the simplest meaning. A bird flies. A frog hops. A fly buzzes.
Take it farther yet, and you point at yourself in intropsection and say, 'That's the truth'. I am me. Existence though, has clouded the meaning of you existing. The simplest meanings and explanations are lost, and nothing makes sense now. You live in a universe that relies predominately on causal relationships, but once you try and explain your own life, it's jibberish. Rethink it. Start over like you just picked up Cartesian Method. The universe relies on cause and effect. If I do this, this will happen, and then the statement 'Everything happens for a reason' becomes 'There's a reason Everything happens'.
If there's a reason that everything happens, then you go back to the beginning and examine again the idea that the universe doesn't make sense and you still feel you need to make sense of it. You want answers. You want understanding of the universe and all the finite pieces that make it up and all the facets that mirror everything else in the system of universal relationships. Well, how would one most easily come about an answer? The answer is asking questions. Cause: I asked a question, Effect: I thought of an answer.
It still isn't easy enough? The universe still doesn't make sense? The symbolism of a leaf representing the totality of Truth isn't understandable yet? Then think about something else. What meaning does a leaf have in the vastness of the entirety of the Universe? The leaf doesn't mean anything more than what it is. You have been taught to think that there is deeper meaning in everything you experience. Philosophy, English, and especially Art teaches you that something means more than what it really is. What is symbolism? It is simply when something represents or stands for something else. How can symbolism really exist though? Does one leaf stand for or represent another leaf or every leaf that ever existed? A leaf is a leaf is itself, and no other leaf is represented by that leaf and no other leaf represents that leaf. You are you are yourself. You do not represent any other human being, and no other human being represents you. So now you can begin to see that, yes that cloud is truth, and yes that sky is truth, and freedom is freedom, and the ocean is the ocean, and the truth is everything being itself."

In response to the previous musing, I was asked if a dichotomy/dialectical relationship can be represented in more than one way like saying 'Why does it have to be so black and white?', and the following is my response-
"The concept of the dichotomy or a dialectical relationship isn't real. Mankind created the idea that hot and cold are opposed or opposite of each other, but they lost the simplest meaning of temperature: hot feels hot and cold feels cold. You experience them both the same way, but they are not opposed to one another. I have heard the statement, 'Those two are like night and day', and I had to ask what kind of system they created by being associated. I don't see night and day as being opposite, I see them as a system. The sun helps the plants grow, and the night gives a time for animals to rest. The animals help plants carry seeds and pollen etc. throughout the world, but if there was no night time for the animals to rest, there would be no animals to carry seeds. Eventually, there would be no plants, and then there would be no us. Why do night and day have to stand for people who don't get along? Why can't people get along? It's unnatural to me to think that human beings enjoy killing and war for the pleasure of performing the action. If everyone had all the free time they wanted and all the necessities of life, would you feel the urge to go out and slaughter, maim, rape, pillage, and destroy?
Conflict can only exist in a world that believes in dichotomies because good and evil and right and wrong are both dichotomies, and these two dichotomies lead to disagreement. Saying, 'I'm right' naturally makes anyone of any other conviction or philosophy wrong. Who can really say that they are ever right? This is a major problem at the masses level such as countries and religions because when one billion people are 'right', 5 billion plus other people are wrong. Then we fight. You'll accept my nonviolent religion once I start killing your family. You'll accept my form of government when I kill all your political leaders and start starving your country with overtaxation on your exports. Who has it right though? Look at any flavor of government, and there are people in the country starving. Governments rise and fall. Countries schism. People die in civil war and revolution. No government is perfect, so no government has the right to use the falsity of the good/evil right/wrong dichotomy to run any other government. People then look to religion. Man may be flawed, but God is perfect. Your God is perfect, but all of the other gods of other people are heathens, false-gods, or demons. Your god has it right? Even if you are right, and your god is right, you still don't follow his commands. Religion is primarily another excuse for human beings to misbehave when they can't figure out reality for themselves. If you really do truly believe in your god, then follow his word to the letter. Follow his writings, his speeches, his example, and never stray from any of that. If you truly believe your god is the god of all gods and you stray from his teachings, then you are just, if not more, fucked than the rest of us because you actually had deep knowledge of your god and it's teachings.
This applies to atheists and/or philosophers as well. Philosophers are human, and even the most adept thinkers get caught up in human hubris. Philosophy doesn't claim to have it totally right, because if it did, the world could and would be changed. Not a single person on this planet is right, and I'm the least right of all of us. Not a single person on this planet is smart or intelligent, and I'm the stupidest out of all of us. There are so many books I haven't read. There are so many conversations that I haven't yet had with people I haven't yet met. I make no claim to any understanding that makes any sense to anyone but myself because I don't believe that any other person can see things the way I see them because they are not me, but when it comes down to it, I'll spend my entire life laying in the grass talking to you about how YOU see things. Eventually, hopefully, you will come to the understanding you've been seeking, and I will as well, but never will I say my philosophy is the one that you should hold. A great man with an even greater mind once said, 'You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility because the only understanding that will be of any use to you is your own understanding' (Terence McKenna is the speaker), and this is true, but I will help you find your own understanding as you will for me."

The following writing is a discussion about death, and how death helps a person find meaning in life. It stemmed from a conversation of seppuku (ritual disembowelment) performed by samurai in Japan.
"Death is pretty cool you know. I never really understood why people are scared of it. Humans experience, and death is also an experience. It's something I look forward to whenever it finally decides to come for me. There is something to be learned in the moments leading up to your final demise, your ultimate end, that you can't learn from any other perspective. When you are finally taking the plunge off the deep end of existing, that is a perspective you only get once, and you don't get a lifetime to see from that perspective. When you are dying, multiple things change in your worldview: 1) Death is coming quickly so there is an urgency in your thought. 2) Death is coming so there is a clarity of thought that comes with realizing there is no more 'future' for you, and you only get to think of the past and the moment you are in. 3) 'End' takes a personal meaning to you instead of being applied to the outside world. It applies to you directly, and it is your personal experience to experience. Appropriately, years ago today(it was 9/11 when I was in the woods) many people had to face death. I was amused, not in the sense of entertainment, but in an Existential sense. Yes, it is morbid and sadistic, but there is something in the perspectives of all the people that died that day that I and anyone reading this can not understand because we are alive. I can burn to death, or I can jump from the building, and you and I haven't been confronted with that decision because we are both still alive. I remember the discussion of the bleakness of the conditions that led to people jumping to their deaths, but consider this, you can burn to death or die of toxic smoke inhalation, or you can fly in the sky just before you die. The immediacy of imminent and approaching death will put your mind into such a state that it can only consider life, death, beginning, and end. Only in that moment can you truly come to a final or complete understanding of life."

To follow up the conversation of death, I thought about the concept of what the meaning of life is yet again, but from a different perspective.
"Really, the meaning of life is simple. Consider this. If time was infinite, and human beings lived forever, there would be no importance to anything. 'I'll live forever so today i'm just going to sleep, tomorrow I'll skydive, and next week I'll go climb Mt. Everest. Of course, this is all if I feel like it. I don't have to worry about getting anything done in a timely manner or on a schedule. I'll be here forever. We aren't immortal or invincible, and time is finite. The average human being has about seventy or eighty years, 20-25 or so of those years are under constraints of youth and old age, and in that short time, you have to decide what is most important to you. What things are you going to achieve in your short blip of an existence? What are you going to have to cut from your schedule, and what are you going to have to hope you live long enough to be able to enjoy. Like retirement.
We are blessed with a short life because it helps to put things in perspective. People wonder what the meaning of capital-L Life is, but they forget to wonder what the meaning of lowercase-l life is. Capital-L Life is the totality of all living things past, present, and future, but lowercase-l life is your life. You have a finite life. Sorry to break the news, but you are a dead person walking. It's all over for you one day. It may even be all over tomorrow, or five minutes from now, so what are you going to do? You're going to do something. You still exist so even if you do nothing, you are still existing.
This is where it becomes clearest to me. I know I'm going to die one day, and honestly, I can't wait for it because it is an experience that interests me greatly. What lies beyond, and what will I experience if I so happen to continue existing in one way or another in a different, or after-, life. That's best left to me that exists then, in the future in another or different life, and that which is most important in this life is experiencing this life. Putting the reigns back in my hands to experience the life I want to experience. I want to experience this existence because one day it'll end, and at that time I may not have the option to come back tbecause no one else is going to make a useful decision that you can be happy with. It's your life, go experience it. Who wants to get to the end of their life and realize they aren't happy or satisfied with what they did?"
If this is my only shot at experiencing this life, then I'm going to live it pursuing the experience of existing here. That is where the meaning of lowercase-l comes to me. I have a finite life, so what I decide to do with this short life is what this life means to me. The meaning of life being 'Life is what you make of it' becomes 'Life is what you experience while you are here'. The meaning of life is what you find important to do. You find architecture interesting? Go build stuff. You find plants interesting? Go grow plants. You find thinking interesting? Go think, but don't ever forget that what you are doing is not just how you are passing the time or how you are making your money, it is also what you are deciding to do with this short life you've stumbled into or have been given. What you decide to do with your life is the meaning you give to your own life. Decide wisely, because no one else can make a decision for you that you can be happy or satisfied with. Who wants to get to the end of their life and realize they aren't satisfied with what they did in their life?"

There was a lot more, but this note has already become a massive endeavor for any reader, so I'm cutting it short now. Thanks for reading though.