tsuki

This is precisely the limitation of the meaning-seeking paradigm that you're missing. There is no life road. People that claim to have a story, have it only in retrospect and even that story misses half of events to make itself coherent. This was one of many realizations that came after writing my experiences. Wrong. Dead wrong. Imagine the most fulfilled, peaceful person to ever exist. That person could sit and do nothing for hours because he would be perfectly happy with whatever happens. Interests, passions and drives are a form of imbalance. Imbalance that comes out of meaning-making that pulls towards goals and pushes away from suffering. The fact that you are disinterested in most things is an expression of your good mental health. What bothers you is the relative lack of greatness because you (mentally) surround yourself with titans of success. These titans of success only got to the top because of their titanic imbalances. People always compare themselves to others. As you are more successful, you compare yourself to more successful people. When you are at the top, you compare yourself to God and curse your mortality. Don't go there. It will destroy you. Learn to suffer peacefully. Then, you will be free to go to the top at your own pace. Your suffering when you're bored is a plea to influence your frame of reference. You can either change your material wealth (achieve success), or change the people you look up to. Admire ordinary life. It has more to offer than you can imagine. I bought into that paradigm of planning and achieving when I was ~20 years old. Now I'm past that. I'd much rather look at what I have right now and combine it somehow to produce unexpected outcomes without pre-planning. Instead of pulling myself towards a goal set in advance, I play with whatever I have right now and propel myself forward. There are various ways to achieve success, despite what mainstream self-help may tell you. I also barely read. I mostly listen to youtube interviews/lectures out of curiosity. Applied philosophy is my passion. Be careful with that. Jung used to say: beware wisdom you haven't earned. I have never tried psychedelics, but from what I've gathered - they are a powerful tool. A dentist doesn't use a jackhammer, so be sure what kind of worker are you.

For me it was more of an automatic, intuitive process. At some points in my life I read things that deconstructed various aspects of reality and by trying to make sense of them, they deconstructed me. Heidegger's Being and Time blew my identity away. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus blew the language away. Self-inquiry into the nature of emotions revealed that what I thought I was, was simply an interplay between thoughts and emotions. In case of Being and Time, the rip of identity was instantaneous and deep. Integration of it took me a few years. Tractatus L-P ripped the language in conjunction with Leo's video about deconstruction after a few years of puzzlement. Observing the interplay of feelings and emotions was a process that took a few years of mindfulness and arrived at meaninglessness. Only then, after facing deep meaninglessness I arrived at the point I am now. Meditation (do-nothing) technique was very helpful after I started to reconnect to the original experience of ego death after a few years of integration. I did not know any of this at the time, I got into spirituality only recently thanks to Leo. It all took place over my last 4-6 years, but the root causes run much deeper into my adolescence. You can read some of my stuff here:

Yep. I wouldn't conflate that with brain, though. The objective-materialist paradigm in which brains exist is one of many aspects of your meaning-matrix. Deconstructing that will show you amazing things. Generally speaking, the more basic a concept is, the more fireworks you experience when you deconstruct it. Fireworks being intelligence swirling meaning all over the place, trying to orient itself. It feels like madness. When it settles though, your intellectual/perceptive capabilities increase. There is nobody to benefit from that, though so you carry on like nothing happened . The internal difference is vast however.

Sorry. I'm an engineer, so it comes naturally to me . Yes. It is not that meaning has limitations per se, but you have limitations when you are preoccupied with seeking meaning. These limitations are related to your identity (identification) and your notion of suffering and desire. Meaningless meaninglessness makes your suffering enjoyable in a sense, but don't take this enjoyment as the same kind of enjoyment when you engage in meaning-seeking. Yes. Meaning-seeking is superimposed with meaningless meaninglessness. Like two simultaneous layers. Deconstructing meaning-map is equal to deconstruction of the self. The point is not to arrive at the empty, deconstructed self, but to observe how one meaning that is being deconstructed is replaced by other without your intervention. This way you become detached from meaning. It becomes something like vision, or hearing. A way to perceive things like colors (vision), or pitch (sound). There is no you in that. Right. If meaning-making is your primary direction in life, then you in fact do need a why to go into that. Most spiritual teachers give you promise of nirvana, but it is nothing like you may imagine from within your current paradigm. When you read descriptions of nirvana, it really is the greatest joke of all time. Joke at our expense. It is true, though!

@Viking Because your life (as I read from the way you frame your questions) is such that you are convinced that you are actually making choices. That there are reasons for doing things and that you compare them and pick the best ones depending on the predicted outcome. That you have control over your life, even if it is only by making informed choices. From the point of view of meaningless meaninglessness, asking a question: 'why should I pursue it?' is absurd. A 'why ' asks for meaning! Even if I understand where this question comes from, there is no honest answer to it from the place I am at. I can give you a reason to abolish reasoning, but that would be a form of deception. It would be a deception because I cannot correlate the state in which I am with any practice that I did. This state however is the best one I have ever been in. It does not mean that you are a puppet on strings however. This total, complete determinism is parallel (orthogonal) to total, complete freedom. You are both enslaved and free from the perspective of meaningless meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is not about stopping your enjoyment. It only looks that way from the point of view of meaning-seeking. You think that you pursue enjoyment because it is meaningful to you. Abolishing meaning is not a rejection. It is exhaustion of it. It is a place in which a new way of being opens up for exploration in parallel to the meaning-making way. It is an orthogonal way of being. It is not a either meaning or meaninglessness but not both kind of thing, but meaningless meaninglessness. When you get it, you will see it as a completely disjoint thing. You can still have meaning or meaninglessness AND meaningless meaninglessness. Sorry if it is confusing. I'm doing my best to explain it. It's a way to enjoy life unlike any other you know. Your question looks like this: The problem with your question is that we're talking about life (instead of skis) and life is the only thing you know. In this sphere of generality, the only other thing is death. You have experienced death before you were born and the memory of it you have (which is a non-memory) is what you have to do in order to arrive at what we're talking about here. Meaningless meaninglessness does not subtract from life. Death gives you a new life each second if you give it a chance. Seeing the world with the eyes if a newborn is the greatest gift you can give yourself.

@Viking Different stages of development require different stimuli for growth. If mindfulness has no traction for you, then go ahead and find fulfillment in whatever you are doing. At some point you may (or may not) find that it doesn't get you anywhere and decide to try something else. This something else may be mindfulness, or some other spiritual practice you've not yet come across. When it comes to inquiring yourself out of all meaning, it is an exercise that lets you see that you do not actually do things for any reason in particular. The idea that you construct your own meaning is a preliminary bait to get you interested in this phenomenon, but it is not actually true 100%. When you talk about constructing meaning, it implies a purpose of said meaning (such as fulfillment or happiness). This fulfillment is meaningful because of what, exactly? If all meaning is self-constructed, then who constructed your meaning of fulfillment? Chasing meaninglessness is not really about that. It is about arriving at meaningless meaninglessness. Only then you can be free to be enslaved by your desires. Stripping yourself of all meaning is nothing other than arriving at consciousness, as everything is meaning, just like everything is consciousness.

From my perspective, the only meaningful way to talk about consciousness is to say what it is not. There is no way do describe it positively. To say that 'it is a universal substance of reality' is to produce a sound that seems like a sentence but contains no information about it. To cling to a positive description of consciousness is a misunderstanding. To try to understand it via symbolic manipulation of such descriptions is a waste of life.

@pluto Great read. Some interesting insights came as I read it. I have one question, though: Do you differentiate I, THE ONE and ALL THAT IS? The I is what is before discovering THE ONE, or is it synonymous to ALL THAT IS? Or is it that ALL THAT IS identifies with both self and other, as opposed to I that identifies only with the self?

@Zweistein Yep ,

To me, beauty of this journey lies in its completion. It's like a man that wants to learn martial arts to be unbeatable. In the process of learning how to fight, he has to understand the desire to conquer others and in doing so, he conquers himself. The conquering of himself however, makes him understand that fighting is unnecessary. So he carries on with his life peacefully, being a martial artist unbeknownst to anybody. The reason for the journey however cannot be taught by stories, or reasoned into by stating the benefits. The man thirsty for power is not satiating it to gain something, but to prevent his suffering at the hands of fate. As he embarks on the journey he is ignorant of his ultimate peacefulness and this persistence in ignorance is what makes him wise in the end. Others that see the completed, peaceful, master may try to emulate him, but now they are in a double bind. At one hand, they want the master's power, but also need to be peaceful to emulate him. It does not occur to them that the master has exhausted his violence, not rejected it. To be a master yourself you need to exhaust your thirst for power by being powerful and seeing its limitations. To me, this is what makes it beautiful. Its cyclic and paradoxical nature.

I think that you shouldn't concern yourself too much with judgments. All statements are judgments. By saying anything you judge reality to be such and such. This is why I prefer to answer questions by asking more questions. I think that questions are much more honest to what we experience.

@123456789 Also: if you're interested in existential philosophy, you can check out Eric Dodson's channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr8ziBzqZlGAvv4krfAAORQ

@Skanzi Hey, I just wanted to know that I read this and that I relate very much to what you are saying. Unfortunately, the determination required to go this deep cannot be conveyed through words. It has to spontaneously come from within, which of course is the expression of being-intuition that is not yet recognized. Using thoughts and feelings as the guiding system is a preliminary step to the synergy. But why does it occur? No idea. I do not know why people like us go into such extreme lengths in questioning the self, but it really brings something wonderful. Even if it is simply the feeling of relief when you stop banging your head against the wall .

Everybody suffered only their own traumatic childhood, so comparing yourself to others is absurd in this respect. I think that we all are drawn to self-improvement, but the means of the improvement are different. 'Normal' people try to change the world to be more hospitable, but 'we' change ourselves to need less. There is not much difference, really. Not unless you can't see that there is no you that improves anything. That change however is not visible externally, so after all - reality has its final laugh at us.

@EddyC There is no creativity unless you express it. There are lessons to be learned from the still mind, but the still mind is not the end of the journey. The mere fact that you can learn without thoughts is a very profound lesson. Once you understand that, there is no point in stilling the mind any further.

@fluidmonolith Great post. You should have put it in a separate thread. You would get more traction with it that way.My response will be short, mostly because your points are valid. There seems to be one thing you are missing, which cause your puzzlement, however. Belief is not a thought stored on a readily-available thought-pile. There is no access to such a pile, other than by experiencing the thought as you think it. There is a passing sensation of speech that goes through your head as you think a thought. Beliefs are mute and invisible. Beliefs predicate what thoughts you can think, and you can arrive at beliefs by interpreting your thoughts over a long period of time. That arrival at a belief by interpretation is still only a thought. All thoughts are here and now, and beliefs are nowhere to be found. You cannot experience the safety of a bridge, other than listening to your thoughts and feelings as you cross it. This experience however is not something that can be extrapolated onto future events that can occur on the said bridge. That is because the safety of a bridge is a property of you as much as it is a property of a bridge. Safety is the boundary at which you and a bridge meet (touch), without intersecting. There is no external, objective, perspective about a safety of a bridge. Like you said - no amount of experiments can determine whether the bridge is safe, but do you understand why? Safety of a bridge is not found within an objective structure of a bridge. To a bridge, its safety is irrelevant. To you, it is irrelevant what is a structure of a bridge as long as it is safe. To a squirrel, there is no such thing as a bridge. Not because it is too stupid to notice it, but because it has no beliefs about it. Beliefs are what lets you experience the world in a tangible way. They are not your enemy, but in order to understand what they are - you need to first become enlightened. Enlightenment is not knowledge that you put on your thought-pile to change what you can notice. Enlightenment is a rupture (obliteration) in the web of your beliefs which you experience personally. The extent to which you experience it personally determines the degree of your awakening. There are degrees that feel like death and this is why we call it as such. It is not because we have experienced physical death, but because there are no words that can possibly describe it. It is because we destroy our beliefs that are the root of tangibility of the world. This is why talking about enlightenment is so difficult.

I noticed that too. When you just drop truth at people, they respond as if a baboon threw shit at them. When the difference of consciousness is too great, it gets tricky to tell wisdom from trolling.

Start with YouTube. There are tons of free lectures available. You can also start with Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy.

@SBB4746 Leo seems to disregard Peterson for some reason (and even go as far as judging him to be Blue), but I'm more cautious than that. What I always find interesting about him is his persistence on treating good and evil as primary ways to orient oneself in the world. His measure of the two seems to be utility, but I'm yet to see a video in which he goes in depth about what is the goal is he trying to optimize. Well-being he often speaks about is such a broad term for me that it incorporates both pleasure and suffering, so it really is not a great way to give direction to life. Growth, for example is a dimension of well-being that is directed by suffering, so we cannot simply orient ourselves towards maximum comfort. Meaning, on the other hand is self-constructed and requires a discriminator on its own so that it can be used in the framework of utilitarianism. Given his outrage with postmodernists, he seems to be aware of that, but I haven't seen any videos with an explanation. Peterson is a strange figure to me, but I respect the knowledge about Jung he spreads. A popular conservative is a rare sight these days.

It is not that you do not care about your job. From what you've described it seems like you care too much. As disturbing as it may sound: it is really easy to confuse the two in the midst of things. The institution you're working in is not going to get any better any time soon, but it definitely is: the best thing that we have right now better off with workers that actually understand the problems it is facing. However, the point of view of the institution is only half of the problem. The other half is your suffering related to your inability help people to the extent you want. Again: as disturbing as it may sound - the solution to your problem may lay in your attitude towards your work. You cannot help more than you can. Unless, of course, there is more you can do, but for some reason you don't do. Do not blame yourself for the extent of your influence, because you are working with finite resources. If your suffering is related to the observation of how much money is 'wasted' on middle-man people like yourself, then stop blaming yourself for trying to live a decent life. Everybody working in welfare deserve to live a reasonably comfort life. Even more than people from other fields. Caring too much can prompt you to do all kinds of things. Don't be too harsh on yourself.

I really resonate the definition by @Etagnwo, but disagree with his reasoning towards the end. For me, there is a very important aspect of maturity: without the part about the conscious usage of the mechanisms of the psyche. The point I am at clearly suggests that whatever may I discover within myself, another unconscious part pops up to steer me. The discovery of mechanisms is simply a re-formulation of whatever is already present. Re-formulation that hides half of existence from my conscious attention. So, maturity to me is the acceptance of the equivalence between using and being used. It is the acceptance of ever-present duality in which parts imply each other, forming the inexpressible singularity of existence.

@Hotaka Be careful with your exploration, friend. Going too far off to the Unknown will yield experiences untranslatable to us, mere mortals. Without grabbing the essence of what you're experiencing, you will drift away, losing touch with others. At this point, others may not interest you, but you will interest them. Inability to express your experience will take you to some unpleasant places. Your wisdom will be barren unless you plant it.

This interpretation smells of solipsism. Think of yourself as a neuron within the infinite mind. It is like saying that this neuron will be able to become the whole mind. All a neuron can do is to dissolve its own identity and become united through its indistinguishability. The mere act of dissolving identity makes the neuron become a superconductor. It feels like a superpower, but is totally mundane.

@lmfao Parenting is tough. Not simply because of the need to support yourself and your child. It is, because the parent's personal worldview is being treated by the child as absolute truth simply because there is no other point of reference. As you grow up, you learn various other perspectives about things that happen, and it may seem like your parent is being stuck. Your mother probably went through the same thing as she grew up and now, having lived all these years and transcending all of these worldviews, she is probably convinced that she is a reasonable human being. It is not your, nor anybody else's fault, that you mistook her worldview as the world when you were a child. This is simply you growing up. I'm not saying this to somehow deny your pain which you went through, but to point you to the fact that what you see now is still, a relative worldview. The story about your mother and about you is not just a story, but it is something that lets you cope with your suffering. It lets you see your suffering as something meaningful, which is a valid approach. The frame of reference you've chosen however, is not constructed to explain human interactions. Science will diagnose your mother's autism, but will not let you relate to her. Relating to other people is not done solely through but via mental capability to produce stories that do not place burden of responsibility on anybody. This mode of being in which there are aggressors and victims is a rationalist's way to enforce causality in human interactions so that laws of science apply to other domains. Human interactions are non-causal. The way in which you perceive your mother determines the way in which you treat her. The way in which your mother treats you determines the way in which you perceive her. This is why compassion is important in these relationships. Compassion is a mode of being in which you endure perceived mistreatment to protect your perceptions of others. Because you never know whether you are being reasonable or not by being hurt. After all, all perspectives are relative. It is a mistake however to ignore your own suffering in order to protect others. Everybody is equal, including you. Your suffering is not less important than other people's suffering. Listen to it, but be compassionate. Towards everybody.

@Freakrik A pointer to construct your own green PUA: