Thinking Ruins Life

[average]

Just saw a clip of Ray Bradbury talking about writing and about life. In one part he says something like,"you're here to have fun, to enjoy life, to be in love - not to think about it...I have no time for you if you're going to be self-conscious, you're going to ruin your life with thinking...I want you to make your life with feeling"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkVNK6ViJk


How do you guys interpret this? And what do you make of it?

[Carl G]

Works for him.

Is caused to work for him.

Not our bag, particularly. Most of us here value thinking.

[average]

I don't think he meant thinking literally, because obviously as a writer you have to think.

I bet he was referring to over-thinking, thinking that leads you to doubt yourself, to detach from the world, to worry, to stop doing what you enjoy and become what you do not want to become.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Aristotle believed that ignorance was the root of all evil. I somewhat agree with this. No one would consciously do something they could not justify. Voluntary ignorance, therefore, is voluntarily opening yourself up to living an inferior life.

[Carl G]

"You're supposed to be having fun. You're supposed to be living your life. You're here in this world to enjoy yourselves, to be in love, and not to think about it, and not to worry, and not to be unhappy. If you're unhappy, get the hell out of writing. Go do something else. I have no time for you, if you're going to ruin your life with thinking! I want you to make your life with feeling, with loving. That's what you're here for. You've been put in the world to love the act of being alive."

Does this sound like a man who is merely cautioning against over-thinking? No, it is a man who is advocating emotional living first and foremost. Why? Because he is an emotional man, not primarily a thinking one. Emotional living works for him. He lives from his "heart." He lives from his passions. Nothing wrong with it, if that is how you are programmed.

"There isn't a morning I wake up I'm not grateful for the gift of life... I'm 86 years old...I still have the same zest, the same love, the same passion."

All this is fine, it merely points out an emotion-based man saying what is most important to him. I wonder, though, what faith or belief system causes him to pronounce repeatedly and with certainty why we were "put here."

[Dan Rowden]

The guy is simply a moron. What else is there to say? At the very least he doesn't seem to comprehend that you can neither understand nor justify his position without having thought about it. He's just spouting henids. He's right up there with the "you're already enlightened so don't think about enlightenment" crowd.

[average]

Ya I agree Carl G, but I guess he has to be passionate to be a good writer.
I think Nietzsche was also very emotional and passionate, a poet and a philosopher.

Dan, like I said before, he isn't bashing thinking or saying we should stop thinking, thats impossible. What he is doing is advocating passion and emotion and happiness. Hes saying if you're going to overthink things and then become self-conscious and miserable, then stop it, do something else. Which I think is pretty good advice.

Enlightenment is another fantasy, a good fantasy though. Its like justice. We imagine it and then somehow it gains a life of its own in our minds. But there is no real enlightenment, just like there is no real justice. So both crowds are wrong when it comes to enlightenment, the ones who say you already are enlightened, and the ones who say you gotta work to get it.

[Dan Rowden]

Dan, like I said before, he isn't bashing thinking or saying we should stop thinking, thats impossible. What he is doing is advocating passion and emotion and happiness.

Well, firstly, I've never met a genuine thinker who wasnt' passionate about truth and reason, but apart from that his exhortations are just too nebulous to be meaningful. You can't extol passion and emotion and happiness in an intellectual or ethical vacuum. Does he even know what happiness and emotions are?

Hes saying if you're going to overthink things and then become self-conscious and miserable, then stop it, do something else. Which I think is pretty good advice.

It's advice that doesn't mean anything as far as I can tell. Those that have an anally retentive or pathological need to analyse for the sake of it will be unable to heed his message. Those who think and know why they do so have no need of it. And I'm not sure what it could possibly mean to "overthink" something.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

I dunno about anyone else, but I couldn't get past page 10 of Fahrenheit 451, when I picked it up recently. His writing sounded like a better-spoken version of my emo ex-girlfriend. I wonder if Ray Bradbury cut his arms up a little bit with a razor whenever he felt like he couldn't cope with trivial things?

When the whitewashed girl asked the fireman "are you happy?" I felt like gagging. He writes for the mob.

[Dan Rowden]

I couldn't get into that book either.

[Jamesh]

Average said:

Dan, like I said before, he isn't bashing thinking or saying we should stop thinking, thats impossible. What he is doing is advocating passion and emotion and happiness. Hes saying if you're going to overthink things and then become self-conscious and miserable, then stop it, do something else. Which I think is pretty good advice.

I agree with this. It is good advice, and I have said much the same to folks like Kelly, however it may be necessary to become extremely earnest with regard thinking for limited periods of time in order to break through the boundaries of one's established thoughts. It is a bit like having mental sex with reality - one needs intensity of action to reach an orgasm, and the more intense the action the better the orgasm. If however we tried to have mental sex with reality 16 hours a day, we just end up well and truly fucked.

[Dan Rowden]

If you have to force your thought, to what end are you really a thinker?

[Steven Coyle]

To break through a delusion or a complex.

[average]

I dunno about anyone else, but I couldn't get past page 10 of Fahrenheit 451, when I picked it up recently.

10 pages, impressive.

When the whitewashed girl asked the fireman "are you happy?" I felt like gagging. He writes for the mob.

Are you happy, Trevor Salyzn? Are you?

[Dan Rowden]

What is happiness?

[average]

What is happiness?

Something you must find.

;]

[Nick]

Never really knew too much about the guy, but after seeing that I'd say that puts him on par with all the other dimwits in my family. No wonder his work never caught my interest.

[Jamesh]

Dan

If you have to force your thought, to what end are you really a thinker?

To force one's though then there must be a goal in mind. Why doo you have an emotional attachment to the concept of a thinker. Why is such a thing more grand than anything else?

I'd say an earnest idiot like Kierkegaard was a psuedo-thinker* who forced himself to think because he had an illusionary goal in mind, a goal caused by his religious upbringing, like a women who does well because of her father to me so to does this apply to Kierkegaard, whereas a truly philosophically-inventive person like Nietzsche was caused to think because of his physical suffering.

*He was pretty good on herdliness, but all the other stuff of his on Davids site is crap.

[average]

Never really knew too much about the guy, but after seeing that I'd say that puts him on par with all the other dimwits in my family. No wonder his work never caught my interest.

What makes him and your family dimwits? And what makes you so special and bright?

[Jamesh]

What is happiness?

From the http://theuntitleddocument.org/ link you provided to Trevor in relation to black/white web pages, in which I noticed this "Baron d’Holbach was the Richard Dawkins of the eighteenth century", I looked up this dude and found The System of Nature in Gutenberg

It is equally so with man, who in all his motion, all the changes he
undergoes, never acts but according to the laws peculiar to his
organization, and to the matter of which he is composed.

The _physical man_, is he who acts by the causes our faculties make us
understand.

The _moral man_, is he who acts by physical causes, with which our
prejudices preclude us from becoming perfectly acquainted.

The _wild man_ is a child destitute of experience, incapable of
proceeding in his happiness, because he has not learnt how to oppose
resistance to the impulses he receives from those beings by whom he is
surrounded.

The _civilized man_, is he whom experience and sociality have enabled to
draw from nature the means of his own happiness, because he has learned
to oppose resistance to those impulses he receives from exterior beings,
when experience has taught him they would be destructive to his welfare.

The _enlightened man_ is man in his maturity, in his perfection; who is
capable of advancing his own felicity, because he has learned to
examine, to think for himself, and not to take that for truth upon the
authority of others, which experience has taught him a critical
disquisition will frequently prove erroneous.

The _happy man_ is he who knows how to enjoy the benefits bestowed upon
him by nature: in other words, he who thinks for himself; who is
thankful for the good he possesses; who does not envy the welfare of
others, nor sigh after imaginary benefits always beyond his grasp.

The _unhappy man_ is he who is incapacitated to enjoy the benefits of
nature; that is, he who suffers others to think for him; who neglects
the absolute good he possesses, in a fruitless search after ideal
benefits; who vainly sighs after that which ever eludes his pursuit.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

I dunno about anyone else, but I couldn't get past page 10 of Fahrenheit 451, when I picked it up recently.

10 pages, impressive.

When the whitewashed girl asked the fireman "are you happy?" I felt like gagging. He writes for the mob.

Are you happy, Trevor Salyzn? Are you?

Grow up.

[Nick]

What makes him and your family dimwits? And what makes you so special and bright?

Their thinking is superficial and scant, so failing to penetrate all layers of any particual issue or subject at hand they remain ignorant, and therefore dimwitted. My thinking is deep and thorough as I penetrate to the heart of of matters leaving myself on the other hand enlightened.

[Jamesh]

Their thinking is superficial and scant, so failing to penetrate all layers of any particual issue or subject at hand they remain ignorant, and therefore dimwitted. My thinking is deep and thorough as I penetrate to the heart of of matters leaving myself on the other hand enlightened. [grammatically incorrect]

I doubt that. You've just got delusions of granduer, which seems to happen to virtually everyone as they investigate reality.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Some of Bradbury's short stories belong to my favorites. Like ""Getting Through Sunday Somehow"", "The Blue Bottle" and especially "Long After Midnight". It's all about weaving a mood through the words though, a longing - and Bradbury is skilled at this.

Why he would start saying things like "I want you to make your life with feeling" after having spend most of his young life in libraries himself and always remained emerged in words being obsessed with writing more than anything else, appears as a riddle.

It makes perfect sense though - for Bradbury his thoughts, and especially his cloudy, murky and moody thoughts have become life. As it is with so many people. The sensation of experiencing an emotion ridden thought becomes separated from the colder, calmer parts of the mind and one names one "life" or "body" and the other "mind", "thought" or intellect. But you reap what you sow of course: the mind becomes infertile, emasculated and numb when one squeezes off the very fuel that could take it higher, when one chooses to remain in diapers and suck the milk - so easy to swallow, so comforting to read.

[Boyan]

Just saw a clip of Ray Bradbury talking about writing and about life. In one part he says something like,"you're here to have fun, to enjoy life, to be in love - not to think about it...I have no time for you if you're going to be self-conscious, you're going to ruin your life with thinking...I want you to make your life with feeling"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkVNK6ViJk


How do you guys interpret this? And what do you make of it?

He wants to make people more stupid.