Posted by SLS on July 8, 2009, at 14:19:08
In reply to Re: would I do it when I'm happy? ***triggers***, posted by Timne on July 8, 2009, at 10:25:06
> > I guess everyone finds his own path to spiritual fulfillment. I just happen to find existence to be the source of my spirituality. I find spirituality in logic. I also find it in intuition. The spirituality that I have found for myself helps me to integrate both of these into a the Gestault. I see introspection as a vehicle for me to better understand myself and the world that I sense around me. I am spiritually fulfilled despite the lack of certitude.
> >
> > It works for me.
> >
> > I wouldn't know what to suggest to someone who is spiritually empty. It took a very long time, and an extremely tumultuous road travelled for my seeking nature to find spiritual resolution.
> >
> > Every now and then, as happens to most everyone, I have been asked, "What is the meaning of life?" I usually respond quite simply that life is its own meaning.
> >
> > The beauty I see in the order of the Universe, despite entropy, helps to reinforce my spiritual being, and encourages me to nurture it so that it may grow. At the moment, I feel that I have a firm root system upon which to do so.
> >
> > It works for me.
> >
> >
> > - Scott
> >
>
> Scott,
>
> Your approach to spirituality seems very similar to mine. I have to support your claim that it works for you, only if out of Senatorial Protocol, but, well, you are here and you're on record here discussing your experience with the same sort of dilemma, if not the same dilemma, as do I.
>
> I'm not convinced my spirituality nor my emptiness is the problem. My problem might be more related to reactions to my emptiness. My problems (like those of my at-risk friend, and the character in a book I'm researching [in the event I need to sue a P-doc, a ISP and a local police department for sending armed, politically motivated psychological police to my door instead of to my friend's door]) are primarily social, economic and cultural, not psychological or spiritual. The use of psychiatric medicine or psychological claims to neutralize political, cultural and social dissidents is widely recognized by such advocates as Amnesty International and the like. It just doesn't happen in the land of the free. Wherever that is.
>
> The dilemma for people such as myself, my friend and characters I might create for the sake of discussion, is that the primary response in Western communities is to treat these dilemmas as spiritual and psychological rather than as practical, economic and social.
>
> Imagine sitting, empty of desire, in a room full of millionaires who just returned from their eight-day retreat, all boasting about the profound emptiness they achieved and how their newly recharged "emptiness" will pay off in financial terms as they return to their busy lives. They've emptied their minds of all the conflict between what they say they are and what they are. I ask "Can I just sit, today. I need to work on something personal." "No, we have work to do, and by the way, I'm raising your rent, because I need to pay for my trip to Nepal on a 747."
>
> Logic, intuition, mere existence -- these all nurture me, but they are too much or too little for the "enlightened" I've kept company with lately.
>
> Mere existence -- that's narcicistic self-satisfaction (at least according to plentyoffish's algorythm, which draws on major psychological theories of our time). People satisfied with a lowly economic status are not to be trusted by standards I've encountered in the workplace. They lack ambition, and no matter the value of the logic or intuition they offer, if they don't want to use it to advance their financial position, it's probably an artifact of pathology, at least according to popular capitalist culture.
>
> Logic -- "you need to be more sensitive to people. Bring them along -- you don't have to confront them with facts (in the workplace where the facts are the substance of our business)" Intuition -- "well we all have intuition. The problem is your intuition says something different than mine. Don't bring your personal preferences to work, please. And by the way, what's your sign. I want to read your chart to see why you claim to have intuition at all."
>
> Logic and intuition reveal to me the authoritarian basis for these behaviors. So I pursued work where logic and truth were supposedly the foundation. What I found was explicit lies perpetrated by the very institutions we rely on to keep our collective narrative on a logical path.
>
> Sophie Scholl didn't die because she had a spiritual problem, or because she was "empty." She died because she dared confront a problem 99.99% of us will agree was a problem worth confronting with all of our nation's resources, and with the lives of some of our best and brightest.
>
> Frankly, I'm fed up. I'm fed up that, 8 years after the attacks, the vast majority of Westerners can't articulate the fundamental difference in approaches to finance between the culture from which the attackers were recruited and that championed at the specific location and by the very businesses that were attacked. Those aren't spiritual or psychological dilemmas for me, except that I need the psychological strength to live in a confused, illogical, misdirected and self-serving social milieu.
I think my way is simpler. I really am a very simple man. For me, I find that there is enough complexity in life not to complicate it further by devoting my intellectual energies into designing a universe composed of Ptolemeic epicycles.I found that when I operate with too many intellectual filters, not enough light comes through.
I don't know if any of this makes me a narcissist, but if it does, it seems that I have found a way (acceptance) to be happy and economically challenged at the same time.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:905409
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20090624/msgs/905617.html