Interesting, Lauren. Sounds like you are (as am I) a fellow charter member of the Arthur Schopenhauer League of Willful Pessimists. Schopenhauer accurately describes the subjective experience of restlessness, desire, suffering, and the brief suspension of self in beauty or compassion, that we may avail as a work-through approach to these unavoidable dilemmas. His pessimism articulated the existential cost of being a conscious, desiring organism in a world without final purpose, therein exonerating whatever regard for both pleasure and pain (e.g. "suffering") we imperfect creatures may have as intrinsically meaningless in our greater overall perception of life.
I've always maintained that short of actual death, a prefrontal lobotomy is perhaps the next best and most desirable resolution to seek when confronted by "The Unanswered Question." However, PFLs are currently out-of-fashion these days and 'selbstmord' is usually not wholly satisfactory either, since there's usually always a breath of fresh breeze lurking just around the next corner!
All we have to do is stick our nose around that corner and take a deep breath! Who nose (sic) what one may find...!
Besides, pleasure and pain are inextricably bound together as tightly as the Tao itself. That remains one of the great paradoxes of what we call (in our sensory ignorance) 'the human life experience.'
Finally, as Justin-Scott notes (and the great sages of ancient Far Eastern philosophy have striven to remind us), 'nothingness' may be a third alternative to pursue, but it remains one of the most difficult states of being in our world of sensate (erstwhile) realities to attain.
Share a bit more of yourself (your prose & poetry) with us, Lauren, eh?
When everything is doomed, we will rise from the ashes!
When you are nothing. Nothing can manipulate you, yet as nothing knowing nothing you can touch without attachment. You feel?
Let the energy flow through you.
Our life force needs a chance to catch up. Silence your mind. Open your channel. Then sit.
The market rewards output, not intention.
Interesting, Lauren. Sounds like you are (as am I) a fellow charter member of the Arthur Schopenhauer League of Willful Pessimists. Schopenhauer accurately describes the subjective experience of restlessness, desire, suffering, and the brief suspension of self in beauty or compassion, that we may avail as a work-through approach to these unavoidable dilemmas. His pessimism articulated the existential cost of being a conscious, desiring organism in a world without final purpose, therein exonerating whatever regard for both pleasure and pain (e.g. "suffering") we imperfect creatures may have as intrinsically meaningless in our greater overall perception of life.
I've always maintained that short of actual death, a prefrontal lobotomy is perhaps the next best and most desirable resolution to seek when confronted by "The Unanswered Question." However, PFLs are currently out-of-fashion these days and 'selbstmord' is usually not wholly satisfactory either, since there's usually always a breath of fresh breeze lurking just around the next corner!
All we have to do is stick our nose around that corner and take a deep breath! Who nose (sic) what one may find...!
Besides, pleasure and pain are inextricably bound together as tightly as the Tao itself. That remains one of the great paradoxes of what we call (in our sensory ignorance) 'the human life experience.'
Finally, as Justin-Scott notes (and the great sages of ancient Far Eastern philosophy have striven to remind us), 'nothingness' may be a third alternative to pursue, but it remains one of the most difficult states of being in our world of sensate (erstwhile) realities to attain.
Share a bit more of yourself (your prose & poetry) with us, Lauren, eh?