[Callan S.]

it's odd.  you traded it, but you shouldn't have.  it was not yours, really, to trade away.

What's interesting is how you think it's yours - until you impune it. Then the truth of the matter is you didn't own it?

Why leave the impression of owning?

It's a bit like giving a present to someone, until they do something with it you don't like, then saying you never gave it to them. Just to the person who would have done with it exactly as you would have done. It's very prima donna-ish - like in table top roleplay where one player tries to tell another player what their PC would do.

[Royce]

Is anyone prepared to wonder if that type of thinking, which is post christianity through and through, isn't functioning as a kind of denial mechanism that tries and FAILS to abate a massive depression and exhaustion with the futility and sad symbolic rules of the game we're all currently playing with each other?

Do you mean members of the Western empire? Or are humans globally fighting to abate depression everywhere?

Just going to throw something out there, and please arrest me in regards of numbers, they might be wrong.

Maybe the futility many people feel, comes from a mass confusion. We can`t just dismiss that for 99% of our existence as homo sapiens, we have been hunter-gatherers. The civilized/modern man is a brand new concept, and we have suddenly removed ourselves completely from hunting and gathering. Instead we buy everything. Maybe this phase of transition is what causes this massive confusion of meaning and lack there of.

We have existed for 250000 years as homo sapiens, and for a couple of hundred years of those, we have been civilized and modern. That is a blink of an eye in regards to how long we have been primitive beings. To me it is not weird that we have trouble coping with how fast we are changing our way of life.

[Callan S.]

Instead we buy everything. Maybe this phase of transition is what causes this massive confusion of meaning and lack there of.

Pure rubbish! Now I'm off to buy a video game where I go into a dungeon, slay beasts and bring back treasure!

[Royce]

Pure rubbish! Now I'm off to buy a video game where I go into a dungeon, slay beasts and bring back treasure!

Lol.

[Royce]

A river comes to the desert and says "Oh my, how am I going to cross that desert?" The sky says, "it is easy. You just wait a while
and bit by bit your molecules drift up to the sky and they become clouds. Then they will travel over the desert and on the other side
they will come down and form another river". The river said, "I do not think I like that. I do not want to stop being a river. How do I
know I will get to be a river again once I get up there and get to be a cloud?" I will be something entirely different and it frightens
me. I do not want to go through that". The desert says, "does not matter whether you like it or not, that is what is going to happen.

[Callan S.]

A man watches a river and a desert talking. He swears off the drugs!

[Royce]

A man watches a river and a desert talking. He swears off the drugs!

Lol, it is a old sufi story, so drugs may be involved yes.

[Wic]

A man watches a river and a desert talking. He swears off the drugs!

Lol, it is a old sufi story, so drugs may be involved yes.

I think that story touches the heart of how I feel about any afterlife sort of explanation, where something of the self survives.  This idea that the self is a singular, indivisible unit and that 'you' might ascend to some other plane looks like fuckin' insanity if you see this image of unity as one of the many illusions the brain foists upon itself.  If you're angry one moment and calm a day later, is one of those selves any more accurate a representation of you than the other?  If the calm you is more accurate, where did that anger go, and why did it seem like 'you' in the moment?  I don't see 'me' as anything other than a composite.

So...which part ascends?  And how is it still 'me', if it sloughs off all those other, observably neurological bits?  Hell, memory seems pretty solidly physical from our explorations, and we all know how the nonmen turn out when they forget...

Even if there's some vaguely-defined electromagnetic field ejected from my meatship upon death and occasionally reinserted in some newborn meatship, that is surely so alien to what I consider my 'self' as to need a new word entirely to describe it.  It's certainly not the me I'm familiar with.

EDIT: also reminds me of the idea that the same man can't wade through the same river twice, as it's a different man and different river.  Is that zen?  Buddhist?  Native american?  Does this darkness come before matter, if truth shines?

[Royce]

Well said Wic

EDIT: also reminds me of the idea that the same man can't wade through the same river twice, as it's a different man and different river.  Is that zen?  Buddhist?  Native american?  Does this darkness come before matter, if truth shines?

It is all of those combined, also known as Wicism?