by Angry_Chimp » Tue 29 Apr 2008, 07:16:56
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')and why you didn't reply to this:
so are you comparing drug-induced trips to meditation + ethics + wisdom (noble path)? That's a weak "argument" against spirituality in general. What made you so bitter and frustrated?
"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."
~Huxley
No problem. I AM comparing self induced illusions of grandeur [nirvana] to drug-induced trips. Aldous Huxley wrote "The Doors of Perception” after taking mescaline. He too was looking for enlightenment. Now I am not saying someone sitting on his couch drugging himself into oblivion is acquiring wisdom; that is a different journey.
Your stance that those that are not on your current self induced “trip” just don’t understand the argument seems extremely narcissistic to me. You are at the center of your own world view and people need to come around to see things as you see them just to even to begin to “understand”. Since you have told me quite a few times the type of personal trip you are on it seems you would like to win some “converts”. I mean who wouldn’t? Did you ever wonder why you tell people in life or in this forum something so private and personal? If you were to have your peak experiences and not tell anybody at all about it would it have any “meaning”?
In the end aren’t we mostly here with others like ourselves screaming about the fall of civilization, something that seems so unreal, to reaffirm belief in ourselves? Isn’t that why we will talk to perfect strangers and attempt to take their blissful ignorance away?
If you don’t mind me asking what led you to begin the journey you are now on?
“Neurosis is the contriving of private obsessional ritual to replace the socially-agreed one now lost by the demise of traditional society. The customs and myths of traditional society provided a whole interpretation of the meaning of life, ready-made for the individual; all he had to do was to accept living it as true. The modern neurotic must do just this if he is to be "cured": he must welcome a living illusion.
“It is one thing to imagine this "cure," but it is quite another thing to "prescribe" it to modern man. How hollow it must ring in his ears. For one thing, he can't get living myth-ritual complexes, the deep-going inherited social traditions that have so far sustained men, on a prescription form from the corner pharmacy. He can't even get them in mental hospitals or therapeutic communities. The modern neurotic cannot magically find the kind of world he needs, which is one reason he tries to create his own.
I think this helps explain the intensive evangelism of so many converts. Offhand we may wonder why they must continually buttonhole us in the street to tell us how to be as happy as they. If they are so happy, we muse, why are they bugging us? The reason, according to what we have said, must be that they need the conviction of numbers in order to strengthen and externalize something that otherwise remains very private and personal—and so risks seeming fantastic and unreal. To see others like oneself is to believe in oneself.”
~Becker
==AC