When the people of the Earth all know beauty as beauty

[DiscoStu]

When the people of the Earth all know beauty as beauty,
There arises (the recognition of) ugliness.
When the people of the Earth all know the good as good,
There arises (the recognition of) evil.

[-RC-]

道

[☽Ţ ҉ĥϋηϠ₡яღ☯ॐ€ðяئॐ♡Pϟiℓℴϟℴ]

they lived + mgtow = a large proportion of this beauty/ wretched ugliness unveiled and assist toward the goal.

 

*echoes of horace the pacifist walsh on k-jah radio back in gta3 days on the ps2 ranting on about how "knowledge is king"* when I read things like the OP .. like the messages were all there in some of the strangest of places.

[DiscoStu]

On 16/11/2017 at 0:12 PM, ☽Ţ ҉ĥϋηϠ₡яღ☯ॐ€ðяئॐ♡Pϟiℓℴϟℴ said:

they lived + mgtow = a large proportion of this beauty/ wretched ugliness unveiled and assist toward the goal.

 

*.

So i dont think you need to focus on the idea of beauty in this verse . It points to the idea of duality in that to hold a concept of one thing (beauty in this case) we must hold a corresponding opposite concept (uglyness). I.e. no thing can be beautiful without knowing what non-beauty is to compare it to. Interestingly zennists would point out the emptiness of both beauty and non beauty if they rely on their oppposites to exists and say that ultimately neither really exists. So if neither beauty and non beauty exist then ultimately what is there?

[DiscoStu]

So if we apply this concept of "from this arises that" to our own selves what are we left with. Not talking labels or identities here but the core understanding of a sense of being which we all have. If one thing needs its opposite to exist for it to exist itself then we need an understanding of non-being in order for us to understand being. But how can we understand non-being? Its not a tangible object which we can grasp and describe. So we're left with emptiness which we can only imagine from an idea of form. Is this what they meant from the heart sutra when they wrote "form is emptiness emptyness is form"?

[Anodyne]

I reckon you need to be careful when getting in to this whole duality concept, and especially to applying it broadly to a range of different ideas. It sets up opposition (literally, of one thing being opposite to another) where this may not always be a helpful way to think about those things - it equates things which may not be equivalent on all levels, and can also support antagonist, us-against-them kinds of ideas. That is more of a conceptual criticism of duality. Maybe a more practical one is simply: not everything has an opposite. Many of the concepts that people present as being dualistic are not a thing and its opposite, but rather a thing and its absence. Which is a more interesting idea in my book. All the labels are arbitrary stuff that we've assigned, all their "opposites" are equally arbitrary, our entire existence is subjective. There might be stuff that exists outside of our own heads, but since we are beings of matter, who have forms & consciousness, that is the way we interact with that stuff. So I dunno if it's even possible to understand nothingness. I think this is another one of these dualisms that ignores the third option. We think in terms of "being" & "non-being" because our being is our lens through which we perceive everything. It is so central to how we think about things that our whole idea of "nothingness" basically just becomes an existence without us in it!

 

I find it really interesting how most religions have a creation myth that begins from nothingness, with realms & beings coalescing or being formed/summoned from this. It seems an idea that we find very comforting - that some kind of god-creator-being banished that nasty Void that was giving us nightmares. Because so few of them have us returning to that void when we die, and becoming nothing again. We are so attached to being that we don't want to give it up, even in death.

 

But how else to think about nothingness? The buddhist idea of non-attachment is one way to approach it, but in practice this seems to often get mixed in with some unhealthy self-denial. And while it still represents that dualistic problem I was talking about earlier (that non-attachment-to-being & attachment-to-being are two sides of a coin, and not the same as non-being), it does attempt a worldview where our own being is not central, which is at least a step on the path to accepting the idea of it not existing at all.

 

DiscoStu, I figure you're already on top of all this, I'm just riffin. If you're listening to special plans for this world then you already know that most don't go far enough, and that you must go beyond tongue and teeth, and hunger and flesh, beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away.  That poem has some of the best descriptions of nihilism. Here is another one you might like.

 

Happily, I don't believe that you need to understand nothingness to accept it.

[DiscoStu]

lets's look at the next stanza:

 

Therefore:

Being and non-being interdepend in growth

Difficult and easy interdepend in completion

Long and short interdepend in contrast

High and low interdepend in harmony

Front and behind interdepend in company

[☽Ţ ҉ĥϋηϠ₡яღ☯ॐ€ðяئॐ♡Pϟiℓℴϟℴ]

22 hours ago, Anodyne said:

 I'm just riffin. If you're listening to special plans for this world then you already know that most don't go far enough, and that you must go beyond tongue and teeth, and hunger and flesh, beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away.  That poem has some of the best descriptions of nihilism. Here is another one you might like.

 

Happily, I don't believe that you need to understand nothingness to accept it.

thanks for taking the time to riff that was great too, maybe even a machinehead riff equivalent in metal

Edited November 19, 2017 by ☽Ţ ҉ĥϋηϠ₡яღ☯ॐ€ðяئॐ♡Pϟiℓℴϟℴ
shorten the edit to minimize thread takeup