[threadbear]

This thread is for people who are depressed and or anxious as a byproduct of living on the planet at this particular time. Problems living on planet earth, can be environmental concern, all the way to difficulties growing up in your particular family. Please feel free to talk about it, share your experiences and help others in doing so. We all gain from shared experience. Everyone's life is interesting, poignant and can offer us insights that help to guide us in our own.

[mcgowanjm]

I've got a nesting pair of bluebirds, Zone Hawks, and
Pileated Woodpeckers.

[SeaGypsy]

Faith or meanness may not be mutually exclusive.
I find I need a deal of each.
The life I choose to live puts me in some very hard situations, but they are harder for others than for me, perhaps that's why I do it. To console myself that my life is not so hard. We each believe the lies we must.
Like a kid with a new go kart at he top of the hill wondering if I will survive the downhill run and emerge victorious or be smashed to pieces on the kerb.
But too old to feel immortal, too wise to think I will get a second chance.
Nearly everyone has the effects of brown acid ripping holes in them.
There is almost no sense of commonality.
Each to his own lifeboat.
An argument with reality.
Truly social values being torn away to make room for a think tank version imposed on an ignorant screaming angry mass of individuals.
Animal farm 1984.
Having to work within the system to escape it.
No hope of defeating the bad guys, merely survival at best.
Always ready with an escape plan.
Attached to non attachment.
Heart bleeding for what is, what isn't, what might have been and never will.
Admiration for the strugglers, contempt for the morally blind.
Whoever said life is fair must have lived in an opaque bubble.
Evil the means to contemptible power.
Ignorance the cornerstone.
Lies the mortar.
Quicksand the foundation.
Human nature crushed and perverted.
All for the benefit of the priveledged few with God given right.
Jesus better be coming back or we are screwed.

[pablonite]

The post sounds like me about 5 years ago, then I decided to do something about it.

Relocating out of the city, getting rid of the TV, mainstream news papers, getting rid of much "stuff" I had collected, eating better, exercising, trying to be outside whenever possible...the list just keeps growing actually.

I feel much better but will admit I am very flexible and don't have a family to support, for many these things may not be a reasonable option but of course that is the trap isn't it?

I watched many nature shows growing up as a kid in the early 70's but didn't realize until later just how staged those programs are, it is after all - entertainment - like everything on the TV.

Nothing compares to being out there, touching things, smelling things, feeling it. I have also developed an interest in gardening lately and want to get into livestock management., pigs, cows, chickens, whatever I can get my hands on.

My biggest fear these days is our food supply. We are powerless when we have no control over our food. I plan on surviving for awhile but their are powerful people in this world who couldn't give a rats ass if you off yourself and in fact I would go so far as to say they are purposely depressing people. This fact alone should wake you up to life no?

[SeaGypsy]

Remembering everything is always in flux is hard to do when you are stuck in an emotion. We humans have a tendancy to try to cling to happiness when it comes, even though this is not possible and results in an unnaturally jammed up way of being. As if happiness could be bought or manifested through accumulation of stuff, we have often learned to forget that true happiness comes from an ability to go with the flow and really feel stuff as it happens. The cost of happiness is sadness. If we can't feel across the spectrum we are not feeling, we are creating our own feeling bubble of self protection.
Having been through the battle with the black dog I carry the scars and I know it's weaknesses.
Burst your own bubble.
Learn to let go and feel as a child again.
Write out your rage, scream it, smash a friggin pillow to smithereens; allow yourself to hate to the point of exhaustion.
Then relax and breath calm.
The paradoxical nature of our being is that whatever we allow ourselves to truly feel we soon experience the opposite. By always desiring happiness, we use up the trickle available to us as it comes. We are too hungry to notice the flowers. We are pleasure seekers with an addictive brain chemistry and highly programmable behaviours.
We may all live in a prison.
Worse by far to accept being caged emotionally, internally.

[Narz]

My woman's a bit nutty & has some health issues that make her tired all the time (not a good combination with emotional instability & raising an energetic child). We don't have much practical or moral support in raising our daughter & Craigslist isn't all that useful in finding it.

Others have it much worse than me though so I try to be stoic.

On the plus side I have a job interview Monday with an non-profit environmental company that lobbies to politicians to pass stricter environmental laws in New Jersey. On the minus side my resume has more holes than swiss cheese so I don't hold my chances high. Nonetheless, I'll try to win them over with charm & wit.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Narz', '
')my resume has more holes than swiss cheese so I don't hold my chances high. Nonetheless, I'll try to win them over with charm & wit.

[Sixstrings]

A lot of what we think of as psychology really has a lot more to do with sociology. I've said before that people are wrapped up in consumerism as part of a never-ending effort to fill some "existential hole." But it's also true that there are sociological forces at work here -- simply put, we buy things so that we can display to others where we stand on the socioeconomic ladder. The myriad choices of clothing and luxury items are really just a way for us to display which social group we identify with.

This is why relative poverty matters. A poor person in America can be rich compared to a middle class third worlder, but that doesn't much matter because the misery of being poor is all about being at the bottom of society's class structure.

The system is designed so that you won't be satisfied with simple living. Advertising is literally everywhere, this site included, and the message is always the same: buy this thing so you can feel better.

[Kristen]

I just have the usual unanswerable question us beings with intelligence posses. What happens after I die? Is this my one bang at existence? Surely there must be more to life then endless tv shows, new products, mowing the grass, etc. etc. God/Enki/Zeus help us all.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kristen', 'I') just have the usual unanswerable question us beings with intelligence posses. What happens after I die? Is this my one bang at existence? Surely there must be more to life then endless tv shows, new products, mowing the grass, etc. etc. God/Enki/Zeus help us all.

[SeaGypsy]

I think thinking has nothing to do with what happens after we die, except for the thoughts we might have right at the moment of death.
The Buddha didn't just say the self is illusory, but every single thought, including this one. In classical Hindu understanding Buuddha had a very specific role and was superceeded by other spiritual masters once he had achieved his philosophical goal; much as we will be.
Time is non linear and cannot be presumed to continue according to the individual percieving it after death has occured.
What is timelessness?
Is it the same as nothingness?
Does anyone know?
Is there any reason to believe that anyone knows?
What is timelessness like?
We all find out for sure at the end of our time.

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kristen', 'I') just have the usual unanswerable question us beings with intelligence posses. What happens after I die? Is this my one bang at existence? Surely there must be more to life then endless tv shows, new products, mowing the grass, etc. etc. God/Enki/Zeus help us all.

[threadbear]

"The earlier concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic. . . This is good news, for it is no longer appropriate to think of the universe as a gradually subsiding agitation of billiard balls. The universe, far from being a desert of inert particles, is a theatre of increasingly complex organization, a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution."
--Arthur M. Young
The Reflexive Universe

http://www.arthuryoung.com/

Young's bio: BTW, Young is credited with developing the first viable helicopter. He wasn't a nitwit, nor was he an overly fuzzy thinker.



While at Princeton in 1921, Young quickly transferred his major from astronomy to mathematics, studying under Oswald Veblen (nephew of Thorstein, and one of the outstanding mathematicians of the day). Young contrived to exhaust all the available math courses in his Junior year. At his request, a special course in relativity was created and taught by Veblen. Young was the only student. He felt unsure as to what he wanted to do and even thought of dropping out to become a painter. Veblen persuaded him to continue and Young graduated from Princeton in 1927, the year Lindberg flew the Atlantic.

In his final year at Princeton, Young decided to devote himself to philosophy and devise a comprehensive theory of the universe. His first attempt, like relativity, sought to capture reality in a formal system. But the enigma of time, especially as exemplified in logical paradoxes, induced him to change the theory from one of structure to process, which would give special treatment to time. Unable to elaborate on what constituted "process" in his theory, he decided to pursue a more tangible goal in which the answers could be tested.

Late in 1928 he travelled to Washington to investigate the files of the Patent Office to see what progress had been made with the various possibilities he had in mind -- sound on wire, TV, color and 3-D film were some of them. He finally decided to work on the problem of the helicopter, which at that time had a long history of failure and clearly needed a solution. Helped by his boyhood experience of making model sailboats, he began his work by making model helicopters. This self-imposed task would absorb him for almost nineteen years, twelve of them on his own and thc last seven with Bell Aircraft Corporation.

By 1940 Young had, using models, discovered how to provide stability, through the use of a stabilizing bar. He then set about showing his machine to potential backers. On November 2, 1941 he assigned his patents to Bell Aircraft with an agreement to work with the company until the prototype was complete. Five years later, on March 8, 1946, Young's helicopter, the Bell Model 47, was awarded the world's first commercial helicopter license. The machine incorporated many essential Young patents: among them the stabilizer bar, skids and familiar bubble. In 1984, Young's helicopter, the Bell-47, "an object whose delicate beauty is inseparable from its efficiency," was placed on exhibit as part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

http://www.arthuryoung.com/about.html

[SeaGypsy]

I find it kind of funny, kind of sad that people think so 3 dimensionally.
There are obvious dimensions beyond the basic 3 such as perception and the senses. Quantum physics keeps adding more dimensions. Yet people still insist when the body dies we die, because we are 3 dimensional beings, regardless of the fact that nothing is 3 dimensional or the other facts which science proves exist but we know almost nothing about.
Another bizarrelink is how this naive materialism translates into wishing for de-facto immortality via the stars, despite the thousands of generations of humans which would have to endure space travel for millions of years, only to get where the ancestors sent them having devolved legs. Little stumps where the legs used to be; along with a deadly propensity under gravity.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', ' ')Yet people still insist when the body dies we die

[SeaGypsy]

IMHO your HO is correct, dear Ludi. We don't know.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'I')MHO your HO is correct, dear Ludi. We don't know.