GENIUS FORUMS

What value does truth or non-delusion inherently have that you guys think everyone should abbandon all else in its pursuit?

Is truth the end or thing in itself?! Is it perfection? Is it God? Is it your redemption from the troubling world? Your freedom from your suffering role in life?

Looks to me like you swap the Christian God with Truth and bow down to worship it. You will take on the world (by this I mean not taking anything on but being passive) with Truth's help because deep down you know that everyone else is delusional. Truth makes you feel superior in a world that by any other standards you would be inferior. Although you may be slaves in this world, by your own otherwordly standards of Truth (your "infinite" standards as compared to this world of finitudes) you are the true masters! And you want to spread Truth because it is the right thing to do to try and help all your inferiors to see your greatness. If they refuse they are ignorant fools who don't realize how great their mistake is -- they won't be going to hell, they are already there or so you have convinced yourself. If they succeed you will be pleased that you have justified your comfortable existence by "spreading wisdom" as though God commanded it of you.

Is your Truth not just another savior that comes to comfort the poor and the downtrodden and redeem their suffering existence for them because they are too weak to do it themselves?

Neil,

What value does truth or non-delusion inherently have that you guys think everyone should abbandon all else in its pursuit?

I don't understand the question. Are you asking why someone would be motivated to give up delusions for truth?

If that is your question, I would think that the question answers itself.

Is truth the end or thing in itself?! Is it perfection? Is it God? Is it your redemption from the troubling world? Your freedom from your suffering role in life?

It's true, as opposed to false.

Looks to me like you swap the Christian God with Truth and bow down to worship it.

This is false.

you may be slaves in this world, by your own otherwordly standards of Truth (your "infinite" standards as compared to this world of finitudes) you are the true masters!

Are you trying to become master over us by speaking truths?

I don't think a mirror is the best way for you to decide another person's motivations, especially when you are as arrogant as stubborn as you have been during your stay in this forum.

Humility is a virtue, and having some of your own might help you understand what's going on here better.

And you want to spread Truth because it is the right thing to do to try and help all your inferiors to see your greatness.

Spreading truth is necessary. I don't have any say in the matter; it would be arrogant of me to assume that I have power over truth. What is true and what is false has nothing to do with what I wish is true and what I wish is false.

Is your Truth not just another savior that comes to comfort the poor and the downtrodden and redeem their suffering existence for them because they are too weak to do it themselves?

No. When I am weak, I am incapable of understanding truth. When I am strong, truth defeats me.

Trevor,

I don't understand the question. Are you asking why someone would be motivated to give up delusions for truth?

I am asking why you place truth as the highest value, why you dedicate your lives to the pursuit of truth.

If that is your question, I would think that the question answers itself.

It doesn't.

Spreading truth is necessary. I don't have any say in the matter; it would be arrogant of me to assume that I have power over truth.

How is spreading truth necessary? How do you have no say in the matter? You might try giving some meat to your random assertions unless you are trying to muddy the waters.

What is true and what is false has nothing to do with what I wish is true and what I wish is false.

Can you prove this? It seems that "true" and "false" are value judgments which only exist in the eyes of some observer. Why do you think that what you hold as true is more than just what you subconsciously wish to be true?

As a value judgment what is the purpose of truth? Utility. If this was not true you wouldn't be intersted in truth. In the same way that Christians are interested in God because he solves their problems, you are interested in "Truth" because it solves your problems.

NM: Is your Truth not just another savior that comes to comfort the poor and the downtrodden and redeem their suffering existence for them because they are too weak to do it themselves?

TS: No. When I am weak, I am incapable of understanding truth. When I am strong, truth defeats me.

Sounds like something a Christian would say: "when I am weak I have no relationship with God but when I am strong God has control of me!!"

Neil, I noticed that you keep asking the same questions, this is good, you are inwardly stewing over something. But perhaps think over my replies before merely writing the first knee-jerk response that comes to your mind.

What value does truth or non-delusion inherently have that you guys think everyone should abbandon all else in its pursuit?

The more people that put their mind in order, which is the essence of a dedication to truth, will guarantee that the world is less chaotic, inefficient, wasteful, cruel, and unfair of place to live.

Is truth the end or thing in itself?! Is it perfection? Is it God? Is it your redemption from the troubling world? Your freedom from your suffering role in life?

The more rational one is, the has less personal problems he has because he is putting his energy into living according to a masculine ideal rather than allowing his feminine desires to control his mind, he is no longer concerned with his own personal happiness, he has dedicated himself to something greater than his own biological demands.

Looks to me like you swap the Christian God with Truth and bow down to worship it.

There is no ‘truth’ as an abstraction. At the deepest level of reality there is only an emptiness of enormous energy. One can feel it in mediation. A spiritual man doesn’t prefer to see everyone so confused, deluded, and suffering because he is no longer in that state, so he choicelessly dedicates himself to the cause of wisdom. And anyone that has the strength to discuss, he discusses with. However, he always realizes that there are only a small number that are up to the task.

Truth makes you feel superior in a world that by any other standards you would be inferior.

That is the irony, a sage is too weak for the world, but strong enough to teach how to go beyond it. Feeling inferior implies that there is an ego present, but the enlightened state is beyond the ego altogether.

Is your Truth not just another savior that comes to comfort the poor and the downtrodden and redeem their suffering existence for them because they are too weak to do it themselves?

The empirical evidence is apparent. A clear-minded person suffers much less psychologically than the sage. The sage has gone beyond the cycles of neurotic thoughts that unconscious people are caught in. A sage doesn’t care about survival to the same degree as your regular joe does, who works his 9-5 job, so he doesn’t have to invest as much energy, blood and sweat into financial security. Each day he is much more free, he has no worries, nothing that is haunting his mind, he has no girlfriend to try to keep happy, he has no children to try to keep fed, he simply looks after his own small daily demands, which aren’t many because he is a simple man, with simple needs.

The sage loves his freedom just as much as the average man loves his misery and slavery. Much emphasis is placed on the psychological shortcomings of women here because most men blindly sacrifice all their freedom to please a woman. They dedicate all their energy into being a woman's workhorse, when in reality they should be putting all that energy into perfecting their minds, and becoming more logical.

Neil,

I am asking why you place truth as the highest value, why you dedicate your lives to the pursuit of truth.

If it appears that anyone is doing so, you are mistaken. Truth is the necessary value, not the highest. If you don't value truth, none of your other values matter.

Personally, my highest value is not truth. I was shocked when, in another thread, you called me a metaphysicist. I'm good at metaphysics, true, just as I am good at epistemology. But being good at a verb does not make me some sort of avatar of its corresponding noun. If anything, I would consider myself an "ethicist", since that's the part of philosophy that interests me the most.

me: If that is your question, I would think that the question answers itself.
you: It doesn't.

Take anything you know is true, and try to think of a convincing reason you would rather not know it to be true. Again: the question answers itself.

How is spreading truth necessary?

Convincing lies are difficult to produce. Unless you are a master of rhetor, it is very difficult not to tell the truth (or at least what you think is the truth).

You might try giving some meat to your random assertions unless you are trying to muddy the waters.

My assertions are not random, dickwad. You simply don't spend any effort trying to understand them.

(By the way Ryan, if you are reading this: he does "keep asking the same questions", but I disagree that it's a good thing. As I have stressed before, it's not only a sign of both arrogance and stubbornness on his part, it is a genuine fallacy. Argumentum ad nauseum: the repetition of claims has no bearing on their validity. It's really boring, since I'm forced to give him the exact same answers to his tedious claims; if he were more clever, I would suspect that he's trying to push me into commiting the same fallacy.)

Can you prove this?

Not to someone who refuses to believe in truth.

As a value judgment what is the purpose of truth? Utility.

You are getting more tedious each time you open your mouth. Think! If only for a second, use that brain of yours to see the irony of this:

Is this claim of yours true or false?

Sounds like something a Christian would say: "when I am weak I have no relationship with God but when I am strong God has control of me!!"

Perhaps there's more to Christianity than meets the eye, then.

If a Christian makes a claim like that -- unless he is merely parrot -- he is speaking with more wisdom and insight than you have shown. Perhaps you are jealous of wisdom? Knee-jerk atheists tend to be the poorest thinkers.

Trevor wrote:

(By the way Ryan, if you are reading this: he does "keep asking the same questions", but I disagree that it's a good thing. As I have stressed before, it's not only a sign of both arrogance and stubbornness on his part, it is a genuine fallacy.

One could argue that repeatedly asking the same question (s) is an indication that the mind is inwardly trying to grapple with a very difficult spiritual matter, and depending on which way their reasoning goes, it could in fact predict the future trajectory of their entire life, so I disagree that this is merely a tedious affair.

It is absolutely necessary, and repetition has a certain value. Before Neil can truly understand my position, and come to his own conclusions, he may have to hear the reasoning for it many times, and it is of no bother or nuisance to me at all. This is not easy material to absorb, the language is only a pointer so it is very limited, and the ramifications of truth have serious psychological consequences in the beginning. As David Quinn suggests, freedom is very frightening initially, and Neil seems to have an intuitive understanding of this, therefore he is making his stand as a means to try to find loopholes in the reasoning behind a life dedicated to wisdom.

this life takes a lot of courage, and critical introspection of oneself, one needs to have the strength to see the worthlessness in what our 'thoughts' want us to do. Moreover, our genetics are working against us for the most part, and that is why the spiritual life is so difficult, and so few are able to live up to the masculine ideal.

Ryan, perhaps you are better suited to explaining these matters to him, then. It only takes a few repetitions of the same question before I go "the Victor Danilchenko route", and bring out the insults.

In the earliest stages of my philosophizing, insults worked on me. But that's probably because I spent the time trying to figure out why particular insults were chosen, and I was genuinely concerned about judging their accuracy. When an otherwise helpful philosopher insults me: well! I must be doing something wrong, I thought.

They don't seem to work here -- likely for the opposite reason. Everything I have said -- no matter how truthful or polite -- has been automatically assumed incorrect.

(Sound of a dronish sitar from far, far away. A point of light falls from the sky and materializes a rat in a tuxedo right in front of you)...

I pretty much agree with Neil, I hope y'all won't think I am an inferior being, drunk on female. (*hic*)

Truth is the best power trip going! It can also be a wonderful refuge for the pathologically egomaniac, and all sorts of other loosers. Just because you think you've got all the files in order in the upstairs file cabinet, and have perfected a rap, don't mean that you have really done much of anything, as I see things. The real test is in the artfulness with which you live life, not the skill with which you worm your way away from it.

Some of the 'truths' presented by some on this forum, look less like truths and more like a representation of personal neurosis, but they are defended with a zealot's pride. A conversation about 'truth' (these facts must be faced) is a conversation for first-graders, if you really wanted to be honest. In a sense, these grand truths don't mean fuck-all, since it really is about what you manage to pull off despite them.

"As a value judgment what is the purpose of truth? Utility."

I am inclined to believe that this is true. While I do think there are some compelling facts, if you will, about the nature of our existence here, and some might refer to them grandly as 'truths' (or absolutes), the utility of these truths is the most important thing, their usefulness to me. What is useful in my 'truths' may not at all be useful to you. Truth can be just a series of agreements that serve a useful function in moving from A to B.

"Neil, I noticed that you keep asking the same questions, this is good, you are inwardly stewing over something."

There is another possibility: a feeling of discomfort that words, ideas and terminologies are being used...dishonestly. Or there are other elements lurking behind the use of certain ideas and terminologies. Nietzsche---that devilish psychologist---was adept at putting a finger on the blind side of hypocricy and making it squirm, after all. Isn't it safe to say that we are likely, all of us, involved sometimes in our hypocricies? Doesn't that soften somewhat the edge of our so-hard truths?

It is quite possible, and it has been done so often before, and with questionable results, to 'put one's mind in order' and effectively check-out from life itself. There are many 'professor-types', heady types who, toward the end of their days, have certain second thoughts, certain remorseful sensations. I say nothing is settled until one is near the threshold of death. Up to that point, it is safe to say, we tend to believe lies, though they seem 'truthful'.

(Anyone who recommends a sort of denial of the 'feminine', in my book, is on a road that could lead to such remorse. That is just my intuitive hit, gents). (*hic*)

Two and 2 is 4 minus 3 is 1 plus (8-3) is 6 and so on and so forth. I come forth directly from the Flaming Vagina of the Goddess of the Creation herself to bark at you the following 'truth'! Life is so much more than mental and rhtorical mathematics, and it doesn't play by the rules.

"That is the irony, a sage is too weak for the world, but strong enough to teach how to go beyond it."

Just want to mention that many of us have been around the block a time or two, and we have heard people who develop sophisticated, logical-seeming raps, and maybe you are taken in at least for awhile by some rap, but as time passes (I opine) one sees that raps are crude and so, so imperfect. Even the best rap cannot approach the fact of existence, and existence is so difficult to unravel, and life is so difficult to master, and those who do seem to...of not 'master' it which implies a false control...but to work with it, are oddly silent.

"A sage doesn’t care about survival to the same degree as your regular joe does, who works his 9-5 job, so he doesn’t have to invest as much energy, blood and sweat into financial security. Each day he is much more free, he has no worries, nothing that is haunting his mind, he has no girlfriend to try to keep happy, he has no children to try to keep fed, he simply looks after his own small daily demands, which aren’t many because he is a simple man, with simple needs."

This is one possible road among so many roads, and no one can privelage this model as against any other. Life is too vast for someone to force a mental model on it. I am sorry to speak harshly but someone around here has watched too many reruns of Kung Fu, because this is looking like postmodernist simulacra to me. You've got to get the Japanese pine-and-paper curtains to go along with this, a little tea set, and maybe practice calligraphy.

Oh, gotta go. GF wants servicing!

(Tuxedoed rat disappears into a point of light and light flutters up into the clouds like Tinkerbell...sound of sitar far away, then silence, rustle of wind).

God damnit, the idiocy is contagious. Good luck, Ryan. I simply refuse to respond to any more of these.

Neil Melnyk wrote:What value does truth or non-delusion inherently have that you guys think everyone should abbandon all else in its pursuit?

Nothing has inherent value. You either value something or you don't. Why does one value anything at all? Answer that and your have answered your question.

Is truth the end or thing in itself?! Is it perfection? Is it God? Is it your redemption from the troubling world? Your freedom from your suffering role in life?

It's the end of ignorance, which is the source of the suffering of one that pursues Truth. Read this.

Looks to me like you swap the Christian God with Truth and bow down to worship it.

What a silly analogy. Do you equate valuing something with worshiping it?

You will take on the world (by this I mean not taking anything on but being passive) with Truth's help because deep down you know that everyone else is delusional. Truth makes you feel superior in a world that by any other standards you would be inferior.

I'm sorry, Neil, but your ability in the realm of psyhco-analysis needs a great deal or work.

Is your Truth not just another savior that comes to comfort the poor and the downtrodden and redeem their suffering existence for them because they are too weak to do it themselves?

In a word - no.

Dan,

NM: What value does truth or non-delusion inherently have that you guys think everyone should abbandon all else in its pursuit?

DR: Nothing has inherent value. You either value something or you don't. Why does one value anything at all? Answer that and your have answered your question.

So then you are not claiming your route the best? Or are you only claiming so simply because it is yours? This confused me a little.

NM: Is truth the end or thing in itself?! Is it perfection? Is it God? Is it your redemption from the troubling world? Your freedom from your suffering role in life?

DR: It's the end of ignorance, which is the source of the suffering of one that pursues Truth. Read this.

You are running away from suffering then. Thanks for someone finally confirming this. Isn't this exactly what Jesus/God come to do in Christianity -- save people from suffering? And what do you do by idolizing truth? I already said it:

NM: Looks to me like you swap the Christian God with Truth and bow down to worship it.

DR: What a silly analogy. Do you equate valuing something with worshiping it?

Only when you place it as the highest value. You claim that you are not using truth as utility which means it must be an END rather than a MEANS for you. Thus you are worshiping truth.

NM: You will take on the world (by this I mean not taking anything on but being passive) with Truth's help because deep down you know that everyone else is delusional. Truth makes you feel superior in a world that by any other standards you would be inferior.

DR: I'm sorry, Neil, but your ability in the realm of psyhco-analysis needs a great deal or work.

Just as unquestionable faith in God made the slaves feel as though they were really the masters, so does unquestionable faith in Truth make the lost feel as though they are... how did you word it in that link above... "complete", "final".

Ryan Rudolph wrote:Neil, I noticed that you keep asking the same questions, this is good, you are inwardly stewing over something.

Yes I am trying to pinpoint why your philosophy is wrong. I have tried many angles but, honestly, people like Trevor and Dan who respond by picking apart each sentence's grammar (in an analogous way to how they pick apart reality with grammar) are impossible to debate with on these things that deny the infallibility of grammar. At any rate I am getting closer and closer. :)

NM: What value does truth or non-delusion inherently have that you guys think everyone should abbandon all else in its pursuit?

RR: The more people that put their mind in order, which is the essence of a dedication to truth, will guarantee that the world is less chaotic, inefficient, wasteful, cruel, and unfair of place to live.

So you believe that since truth would make the world less chaotic, inefficient, wasteful, cruel, and unfair, it is inherently good? These effects themselves are not inherently good so I don't see how it follows.

NM: Is truth the end or thing in itself?! Is it perfection? Is it God? Is it your redemption from the troubling world? Your freedom from your suffering role in life?

RR: The more rational one is, the has less personal problems he has because he is putting his energy into living according to a masculine ideal rather than allowing his feminine desires to control his mind, he is no longer concerned with his own personal happiness, he has dedicated himself to something greater than his own biological demands.

To understand something one must be detached from it. Rational people are always detached. Yet rationality in itself is the big flaw here. Rationality needs empiricism to create language in the first place. Rationality evolved as a tool for humans and when it turns into an ultimate end one must end up ultimately detached from life -- dead.

NM: Looks to me like you swap the Christian God with Truth and bow down to worship it.

RR: There is no ‘truth’ as an abstraction. At the deepest level of reality there is only an emptiness of enormous energy. One can feel it in mediation. A spiritual man doesn’t prefer to see everyone so confused, deluded, and suffering because he is no longer in that state, so he choicelessly dedicates himself to the cause of wisdom. And anyone that has the strength to discuss, he discusses with. However, he always realizes that there are only a small number that are up to the task.

So the point to your life is to experience this emptiness? Why why why? My hypothesis: you are afraid to suffer or running away from suffering. How do you do this? By detaching and becoming completely rational and basking in "nothingness" until you die and can join with the true nothingness.

NM: Truth makes you feel superior in a world that by any other standards you would be inferior.

RR: That is the irony, a sage is too weak for the world, but strong enough to teach how to go beyond it. Feeling inferior implies that there is an ego present, but the enlightened state is beyond the ego altogether.

As I said to Trevor this sounds just like how a Christian would respond to an attack on his religion: "How ironic... too weak for reality and accused of running away from it but strong enough for doing God's will and going to heaven!!!"

The sage loves his freedom just as much as the average man loves his misery and slavery.

The sage loves having no responsibilities or troubles and being detached from everything. Is this not the same as a dead man? Is living not about having responsibilities and troubles? About struggling and growing and accomplishing something regardless of whether or not there is some ultimate purpose in life?

Much emphasis is placed on the psychological shortcomings of women here because most men blindly sacrifice all their freedom to please a woman. They dedicate all their energy into being a woman's workhorse, when in reality they should be putting all that energy into perfecting their minds, and becoming more logical.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy to discover and become enchanted by what you guys are teaching here. :(

Alex,
I agreed with that whole post. :) Thanks for the insight in general on the philosophy of this forum.

Trevor,

God damnit, the idiocy is contagious. Good luck, Ryan. I simply refuse to respond to any more of these.

Praise God... I mean Truth. Please hold to this and don't argue ad nauseum stupid things with me.

Alex,

these grand truths don't mean fuck-all, since it really is about what you manage to pull off despite them.

slow down Alex, absolute truths make one realize that all things are determined, and that the self is an illusion, so what exactly are you planning to pull off? Is it only the ego is can fantasize about pulling something off?

What is useful in my 'truths' may not at all be useful to you.

Don’t get relative on me, how postmodern of you, I’m referring to absolute truths that align one with a deep spiritual existence. I’m referring to truths that drastically change the very structure of the psyche itself.

involved sometimes in our hypocricies? Doesn't that soften somewhat the edge of our so-hard truths?

I would say that all humans are imperfect to some degree, but many of those imperfections can be overcome in deep thinkers if the energy is invested, and that is how masculine progress is measured.

I say nothing is settled until one is near the threshold of death.

Why wait until death to die? there is so much more urgency to die to all ones femininity in the now.

and existence is so difficult to unravel, and life is so difficult to master.

by keeping those conclusions firmly in your mind, this allows you to justify your decisions to keep postponing the total mastery over life. Surely you don’t believe this do you? deep down… you know that life can be mastered, life doesn’t have to be a constant struggle - the pain, the pleasure, the constant strife, the loneliness, the dissonance, the desire for attention, security, fame, surely this cycle of samsara can be brought to a gradual end through strict discipline, change of thinking, and a dedication to wisdom.

This is one possible road among so many roads, and no one can privelage this model as against any other. Life is too vast for someone to force a mental model on it.

The road to heaven is a narrow one I’m afraid, and there is only one road to be totally and unconditionally free. All other roads are emotional compromises. It is ironic that you label my reasoning as postmodern because your thinking is precisely that – very relative and inconsistent, which basically defines the aims of postmodernism – to make life seem so vague, relative and hidden that no absolute conclusions can be made, and this fuzziness allows one to continue living in samsara addicted to both the pleasures and pains of existence.

As humans we are afraid to lose what makes us miserable, we are afraid to lose our pleasure. Where there is an attachment to pleasure, fear follows close behind like a shadow.

We are not afraid of the unknown, that is absurd, we cannot know the unknown, we are afraid of losing the known. We are afraid of losing our fantasies in the future, our preferences for excitement, all the ideas that make us feel secure, comfortable, and so on. The entire network of thoughts going on in our brains is not the real, we always see the world through a filter of knowledge and memory. Rarely do we ever see reality raw without the filter of the self, without the filter of time, thought and abstraction.

When one is in a state of emptiness, there is no self, no memory, no time, nothing at all. And that is the way of the sage.

So our entire self is a construction, a psychological mirage. For most of us, we all live in our own little dream worlds, pleasurably drinking sand, while unwittingly believing that we are drinking cold mineral water.

However, my words are the genuine cold, the genuine masculine, and they are the only tools adequate for putting out the fire called femininity, which is a psychological conflagration that has our planet in a stranglehold.

Neil,

So you believe that since truth would make the world less chaotic, inefficient, wasteful, cruel, and unfair, it is inherently good? These effects themselves are not inherently good so I don't see how it follows.

It is inherently good to minimize suffering, and keep a balance on the planet. If you are unwilling to recognize the importance of developing a strong conscience capable of determining right and wrong then I’m at a loss.

To understand something one must be detached from it.

A rational person is beyond detachment, he is in a psychological state where there is no separation between the observer and the observed. There is no self there to be detached. Detachment implies a self that has detached itself.

Rational is just a dead word. A pointer. All words are just symbols, maps to point to something, however all things are created as a function of consciousness, it is a function of consciousness to divide reality into things, but there are really no things there.

So the point to your life is to experience this emptiness? Why why why? My hypothesis: you are afraid to suffer or running away from suffering. How do you do this? By detaching and becoming completely rational and basking in "nothingness" until you die and can join with the true nothingness.

Intelligence implies the ability to prevent suffering. If one is suffering, this is usually an indication that a stupid action has occurred. Suffering is an indicator to tell the spiritual seeker what not to do. For instance: Romantic relationships involve a lot of unnecessary suffering because they are based on emotional attachment, which is one of the more stupid actions to take in a spiritual context.

As I said to Trevor this sounds just like how a Christian would respond to an attack on his religion: "How ironic... too weak for reality and accused of running away from it but strong enough for doing God's will and going to heaven!!!"

Civilization is not a fair and just place at the moment. Work conditions are horrid, and humans have no sensitivity for the suffering of others, essentially people's lack of conscience prevents work conditions from becoming more fair. If humans had better developed consciences then perhaps a sensitive intelligent individual like myself could tolerate working in the society.

The sage loves having no responsibilities or troubles and being detached from everything. Is this not the same as a dead man?

Yes, he is literally a dead man, that is the essence of enlightenment, dying to the world. The most important responsibility one has is to perfect ones own mind, this activity has much more worth than dedicating oneself to doing some tedious task for society for years and years.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy to discover and become enchanted by what you guys are teaching here. :(

There is nothing to be enchanted by here. The truth is cold, stark, and shocking to the ego’s pleasures and comforts. We are genetically programmed to be ignorantly happy behaving like animals, but the spiritual man is beyond the worldly realm altogether.

Most men are so enchanted and addicted to a woman’s pleasure that to even consider the idea is so frightening that they automatically dismiss the idea as outlandish.

The world is run by women, not men. Men are blindly and ambitiously enslaved to her feminine desires, men do everything for her. All his actions are to please his woman, and the femininity within himself. Most men move in the total opposite direction of god.

Essentially men live for pleasure, not truth. And that is what makes all men dishonest. They desire to accumulate more wealth, power and recognition to please women, wars are fought over women, men go to bars and spend thousands of dollars for women, they work jobs they hate to please women, they get in loads of debt to buy fast cars and over-sized houses to please women, almost everything a man does is to secure his sex with women. He behaves like a total baboon.

He goes to extraordinary lengths to compete for her affection, and what is she? for the most part, women are unconscious, selfish, emotional, silly creatures incapable of any sort of deep intellectual conversations. So men sacrifice their entire lives for the lie that is woman, and their lives and deaths are a tragedy in the eyes of a sage.

He is incapable and unwilling to admit that all the pleasure his women gives him is responsible for his suffering, pain, strife, hatred, jealousy, envy, greed and all the rest of it. A sage never loves a woman because he has no desire to experience that sort of psychological disorder in his mind, he knows that love cannot exist without intense suffering. He knows the danger of living inside the cycles of yin and yang, as all great spiritual sages before him have warned.

Neil and Alex are making some great points.

Could enlightenment exist without language to facilitate it? No, because all this logic talk is based on definitions of words. Basically I see this as a glorified dictionary.

Its kinda dissapointing really, I was hoping there to actually be an egoless condition, but this place is kinda ridiculous. One one hand we have Trevor who admits he's not enlightened, but then tries to explain enlightenment to people. Both he and Dan Rowden basically act like rude, spoiled children having a temper tantrum. David and Diebert were the only ones that really impressed me, but David, who is more or less the leader of this entire Enlightenment meme on this site, got caught lying more or less in that whole QRS fiasco. D and D still impress me, but it leads me back to my previous conviction that no one is perfect. Everyone has ego-caused faults. There is no finish line to ethics because ethics is about consistent ACTION based on personal and not universal values, and if they were my personal values and I were David, I would be spending time with my son, not preaching on an internet message board.

It is good to be rational. We need A LOT more of that in this world and this is why this site has some value. But we as humans can never be 100% rational and ethical. All of you here are smart. None of you are even close to perfect.

skipair:

Both he and Dan Rowden basically act like rude, spoiled children having a temper tantrum. David and Diebert were the only ones that really impressed me....

I wasn't here to impress anyone. I was speaking the truth to people who have no interest in truth, and got sick and tired of dealing with the arrogance and hypocricy of my audience. The only thing that ever irritates me is bad philosophy; that their poor thinking impressed you is actually sufficient evidence that you, too, are bad at philosophy. Your opinion on these matters is thus irrelevant.

If you can't do anything but parrot the mindless opinions of Neil and Alex, I recommend that you keep your mouth firmly closed. I don't appreciate getting sniped at after I have made the decision to exit a conversation; Neil has already done so, and it took some restraint not to slap him upside the head for being a jackass.

Now, that you call me childish in a post that is designed solely to snipe at me as I leave is fucking ironic. Grow up, and don't act like a dipshit. Your unwillingness to swear does not hide the fact that you, like any troll, are just trying to cause trouble. If you have something to say to me, take it to Worldly Matters -- or better yet, PM me. If and only if you have a unique thought should you add your insight to this debate.

Last, when you say shit like "none of you are even close to perfect", I fail to see any point to it. Are you trying to be a nuisance? It adds nothing but a steaming pile of your own shit to the conversation, and it's not pretty to look at. There's no value to it. It's an attempt to insult people through a tautology, which is fucking stupid.

Neil Melnyk wrote:Is your Truth not just another savior that comes to comfort the poor and the downtrodden and redeem their suffering existence for them because they are too weak to do it themselves?

haha!! I just made a reply to your 'absolute truth' thread, exactly with this thing in mind without knowing about this thread.

I said:

philosophers sometimes have a keen habit of needing to see sickness in other people in order to make their knowledge and egotistical self-importance seem valuable and precious. Very similar to priests and Christians.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Humility is a virtue, and having some of your own might help you understand what's going on here better.

hmm, David thinks arrogance is perfectly fine if one is 'wise.' the whole Christian 'humility is a virtue' thing has its sickly Christian connotations to it as Nietzsche would say. That's if by 'humility' you mean, 'critical passionately controlled thinking' which isn't really 'humility' in the traditional sense of the word.

Ryan Rudolph wrote:There is nothing to be enchanted by here. The truth is cold, stark, and shocking to the ego’s pleasures and comforts. We are genetically programmed to be ignorantly happy behaving like animals, but the spiritual man is beyond the worldly realm altogether.

wait a minute, so is the sage trying to escape suffering through removing delusion or not? Ending suffering is a will-to-pleasure and happiness.

Most men are so enchanted and addicted to a woman’s pleasure that to even consider the idea is so frightening that they automatically dismiss the idea as outlandish.

The world is run by women, not men. Men are blindly and ambitiously enslaved to her feminine desires, men do everything for her. All his actions are to please his woman, and the femininity within himself. Most men move in the total opposite direction of god.

Essentially men live for pleasure, not truth. And that is what makes all men dishonest. They desire to accumulate more wealth, power and recognition to please women, wars are fought over women, men go to bars and spend thousands of dollars for women, they work jobs they hate to please women, they get in loads of debt to buy fast cars and over-sized houses to please women, almost everything a man does is to secure his sex with women. He behaves like a total baboon.

He goes to extraordinary lengths to compete for her affection, and what is she? for the most part, women are unconscious, selfish, emotional, silly creatures incapable of any sort of deep intellectual conversations. So men sacrifice their entire lives for the lie that is woman, and their lives and deaths are a tragedy in the eyes of a sage.

He is incapable and unwilling to admit that all the pleasure his women gives him is responsible for his suffering, pain, strife, hatred, jealousy, envy, greed and all the rest of it. A sage never loves a woman because he has no desire to experience that sort of psychological disorder in his mind, he knows that love cannot exist without intense suffering. He knows the danger of living inside the cycles of yin and yang, as all great spiritual sages before him have warned.

alas! something of substance has been said on this thread.

Skipair wrote:

Could enlightenment exist without language to facilitate it? No

But this isn’t an argument against the pursuit of enlightenment. An infinite number of things are necessary for enlightenment - the trees, the earth, the sun, human language, human brains….

However, if a spiritual seeker achieves a certain degree of enlightenment, and then lost his ability to speak using language, he would still be just as enlightened. The subjective state of enlightenment is not dependent on words to exist, it is beyond words altogether.

The word is only a pointer. The signifier is not the signified.

Skipair wrote:

None of you are even close to perfect.

But there is a spectrum of imperfection, and some are closer than others. And many imperfections can be overcome. Each seeker has the potential to perfect himself if he is willing to put the energy in, and criticize the contents of his own mind.

wait a minute, so is the sage trying to escape suffering through removing delusion or not? Ending suffering is a will-to-pleasure and happiness.

Its a different type of happiness, it is not the emotional happiness derived from delusions, drugs, attachments and so on. It is much more subtle. It is beyond the gross cycles of pleasure and pain that people generally get caught in. For instance: For some, gambling away a large percentage of their pay check after working a hellish work week is a form of happiness.

Or climbing financially to have a well-paying job with lots of stress, responsibility and headaches just to keep the wife happy, and be able to have sex with her once and a while is a form of happiness for some.

Basically, people are incapable of seeing when there actions require a huge amount of pain just to experience a little amount of pleasure. And the sage realizes that this sort of life isn't logical.

Ryan, you're talking about the workings of sageness without being a sage. How do you know what you say about it is true?

faust,

hmm, David thinks arrogance is perfectly fine if one is 'wise.'

I'm not David. Arrogance is only virtuous when its appearance is calculated to humble one who is being arrogant. In that case, however, it is not arrogance -- it is discipline.

the whole Christian 'humility is a virtue' thing has its sickly Christian connotations to it as Nietzsche would say.

I am not Nietzsche. I think that his views on Christianity were flawed, because he had difficulty looking at the religion objectively.

That's if by 'humility' you mean, 'critical passionately controlled thinking' which isn't really 'humility' in the traditional sense of the word.

By humility, I mean the opposite of arrogance. Arrogance is the unfounded belief that one is superior to another. Humility is being able to admit that somebody else is correct when you dislike him, being able to hold your tongue when you have been slighted, or being able to (in the words of Lao Tzu), "know the male, but keep to the female".

Humility is a virtue, and there are only two ways to it. One is self-abnegation, which Nietzsche despised for its inauthenticity; the other is being humbled by another (or by Truth), which no philosopher has ever criticized.

skipair,

Ryan, you're talking about the workings of sageness without being a sage. How do you know what you say about it is true?

I warned you once: stop being stupid.

If you don't think that what he's saying is true, try to disprove it. Don't be a jackass. The title of "sage" should have no bearing on the truth of his claims.

(If you are wondering, you did commit a fallacy. It's called ad hominem)

Skipair wrote:

How do you know what you say about it is true?

When you know the truth, but occasionally your behavior contradicts what you know, you suffer for it, that is the law of the universe, no one can escape it, it is determined by causality itself, and the suffering that you feel is an indication that the truth you know is definitely correct.

For instance: boredom may cause an imperfect sage to pursue something that only results in more negative emotion. His wisest course of action would have been to take no action at all, but the negative emotional state affected his judgment, and his action was not wise as a result. However, for weeks prior to that emotional hiccup, he could have been living perfectly aligned with reality with very little delusions operating in his mind.

So an enlightened man can experience very deep subjective tranquility for a period of time, but also periodically, he can regress emotionally, and make small dumb choices based on being controlled by subtle feminine impulses and delusions.