Author Topic: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)  (Read 4251383 times)

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Holden

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La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Silenus

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Re: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #16 on: July 19, 2019, 07:49:45 pm »
Reading about the diet and water reduction is interesting. So is the fact that these asectics are praised for doing so. Could you imagine the horror on an unassuming Westerner's face if you showed them that photo?  :P

I do have to wonder if this is the least painful way to check out. It would be reassuring if it is so. And it makes sense if it is fairly pain-free. Our bodies probably evolved to "shut down" in the event of a lack of resources, given that our scavenger/hunter state precluded agriculture. Don't you ever wish that we never "got fat" off of planting and harvesting, Holden? It would have saved generations of large populations from misery.

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Holden

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Re: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #17 on: July 19, 2019, 09:01:58 pm »
I have been studying this subject for a few years now Mr. Silenus.I posted an article here somewhere about 4 years back which says that most animals die this way.

VSED(Vee-SED) is as close to a natural death as one is going to get.
I have been having a series of nightmares due to bad office environment.Just woke up and saw your message-thanks.

I was watching this movie -Into the Wild



and it sort of reminded me of you.

As to its being a  painful method,well,I went for 3 days without food and water last year around this time and it's not painful really.

I was so tired that I felt like sleeping ,keeping the eyes closed all the time.I felt like throwing up from time to time but that was it.

I remember walking the streets of the city about 15 years back looking for some kind of sleeping pills because my existence was so miserable even back then.

Nothing has changed.Nothing can change.Misery is my companion.

Also I do not like violent methods becaus it's again Will asserting itself.

I am a really miserable guy, Mr. Silenus.I have glimpsed the Truth and it is Terrible.
The meaning of life is in rejecting it.
This appears to me as the least bad way of leaving this hell.

In Hinduism,Jainism and Buddhism ,there have been many,many saints who went out this way.

This is about the only hopeful thing left for me. The crime of having been born is the worst crime.
I am not the kind who can pull the trigger.
Most animals in the state of nature just stop eating and drinking.I am one of the animals.





La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Silenus

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Re: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #18 on: July 20, 2019, 06:28:19 am »
I would never profess to being like Chris McCandless except in temperament, in that I too am disillusioned by my surroundings. So while I do feel the need to let a little chaos in my life and "take off" as I have in the past, I come running back home like a coward. The world is unforgiving both in comfort and in insecurity alike, so it ends up feeling like a trap either way. I enjoy being with you all on the forum because each of you recognize this fact.

I am my most content when I am unemployed. And there is rarely a day that goes by when I wonder why I am doing so. What am I working for? I don't spend any money except for helping with the family grocery bill, and on cigarettes and bus fare. I am interested in what I'm learning at the job, but really what's it all for? And then on the opposite end, what terrible events could arise if I were to forego the job yet again? It's a big trap that a few lucky men and women can make it out of, such as Hentrich. Even though he had to go through hell just to get there.

Even still, if one can make it out of employment, we will never escape the prison of consciousness and the inherent dissatisfaction of the body.

I am sorry that you have to deal with the office politics. I imagine that you've done your best to distance yourself from it. I can only say that one must draw the line in the sand early on. I am surprised that I was even hired at this hotel, when I told my now-former boss that I cared more about myself than the "company reputation." From then on I've had enough small conflicts with others and shyed away from the "work family" bullsShit to the point where no one bothers me with it. I will not tolerate anything beyond a means to any end except my own "well being," which is simply LEAVE ME ALONE. :)

I sympathize with you Holden. I have found out more about myself, my emotional and mental tolerance, and discovered my disgust for life in all I have rejected, rather than affirmed. Rejection has been my path all along, and philosophically speaking it began with discovering Thoreau and Emerson about 6 or 7 years ago. That was the tipping point for me, to find thinkers who shaped their lives largely by negation and a skeptical eye. The peices fell into place from there.

If one day you choose to live out your path of rejection and refusal in the form of refusing nourishment and hydration, well then maybe you will have reached your own personal conclusion to life. I think it's honorable and respectful to oneself to choose how to check out of this game that was never worth playing.


"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

raul

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Re: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #19 on: July 20, 2019, 11:29:48 am »
Holden,

Thank you for sharing this sad, extremely sad story. What more can I say? Life is a nightmare. Life is disgusting. But only a few can realize that. As Silenus says life is a game never worth playing. As they say in American English this world is a big hoax. This world made for exploitation and suffering.

Sometimes I would like to live in most people´s bubbles but that is not possible. My bubble burst out and there is no
going back. I try to repress my thoughts in front of people when I hear them. It is bitter to do that. As you say misery is our companion and nothing can change and above all nothing will change. 

Most think of money and so do I, yes, money, the operating system of this insane world. But I think one of these days this operating system will be shut down.

A week ago I talked to a computer technician (51) and he told me his father passed away in August last year. His old man suffered from Alzheimer. He has an 8 year-old daughter.  I wonder if he ever thinks that his child may in the future suffer this terrible sickness.   

Thank you also for the Wikipedia link about the Buddhist mummy and asceticism to the point of death. Most interesting. If I show the picture of this Buddhist monk, Luang Pho Daeng to anyone,well, some may think that I need to go to a psychiatrist. 

Stay well.

Holden

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Re: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #20 on: July 21, 2019, 06:48:45 am »
Mr.Silenus,

Most of the time I am just feeling dreadful.Life is a dangerous game and has been thrust upon me. Religion ,I mean the ones followed by the masses, is nonsense. Clearly, most people do not have the intelligence and honesty to see what life really is. It is so ugly that even the greatest of minds cannot bear to look at it constantly.

Most of the time I am in a very dark place and the thought of VSED brings me some relief. I am thinking of the street children in the city over here. The parents breeds and leave the kids on the road to fend for themselves. They beg, sell balloons. The girls ,when they grow up, choose prostitution as a professions and the boys end up becoming labourers and criminals.

I often see a couple of tramps ,with a shaggy beard and dirty clothes. They are almost always quiet. Their eyes look vacant.



La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Diary Excerpts (Senor Raul,Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #21 on: October 17, 2019, 09:34:22 pm »
Quote from: Holden
I have been thinking about Continental philosophy.It is certainly closer to how my life really is like.It is like a big wave in the ocean which submerges everything in its path.
Analytic philosophy is like playing with small pebbles.It maybe amusing but when the wave arrives (of fear and loathing and dread) it washes away everything-the pebbles and the players.

I was trying to post a link to a paper from Academia, The Elemental Past (2014) by Ted Toadvine, but it only took you to the sign-in page where you have to login.

Reading just the first several pages of this paper made me think of Holden's thoughts on the analytic-continental divide.  I will attempt to summarize it in case the link doesn't work.  Or, better still, some direct excerpt to get a feel for the kind of reading it is.   One must be patient when reading those working in ivory towers on their theses and such things.

I suppose we are to believe there are "insider" and "outsider" groups when it comes to the value of our opinion on this matter, but I still can't help but wonder what it can even mean to say that the sun did not exist before the world in our heads.    Take it for what it's worth and don't feel pressured to make up your minds once and for all.

_____________________________________________________________________________

 In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s  Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.”

I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived.  A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity.

 Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past.

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future.

In a lecture to the Collège philosophique on 12 January 1951, Georges Bataille recounts a barroom debate held the night before with British philosopher  A. J. Ayer, who was at that time stationed at the British Embassy in Paris and had presented a lecture to the group that previous day. The topic of the debate,  in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty and atomic physicist Georges Ambrosino also participated, is described by Bataille in the following terms:

We finally fell to discussing the following very strange question. Ayer had uttered the very simple proposition: There was a sun before men existed.  And he saw no reason to doubt it. Merleau-Ponty, Ambrosino, and I disagreed with this proposition, and Ambrosino said that the sun had certainly not existed before the world.

I, for my part, do not see how one can say so.

Although Bataille suggests that a compromise was finally reached at around three in the morning, he says nothing about its terms. Instead, his lecture takes up Ayer’s proposition as an example of “nonknowledge,” non-savoir, since, even though it is “logically unassailable,” it is nevertheless “mentally disturbing, unbalancing.” This disturbing character is a consequence of the proposition’s violation of the requirement for both a subject and an object, since what  we find in this case is “an object independent of any subject”—and, consequently, “perfect non-sense.”

This may seem little more than an interesting anecdote, but Bataille’s account of his debate with Ayer has been identified by Andreas Vrahimis as “the first explicit announcement, in the twentieth century, of the division between Anglophone and Continental philosophy.” 

(footnote 3: Andreas Vrahimis, “Was There a Sun Before Men Existed? A.J. Ayer and French Philosophy in the Fifties,”  Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1, no. 9 (2012), 11. See also Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36)

 As Bataille puts it, the conversation with Ayer “produced an effect of shock. There exists between French and English philosophers a sort of abyss which we do not find between French and German philosophers.”

 I suggest that this remark concerning the parting of ways of philosophical traditions is of more than merely historical interest. The debate over the sun’s existence prior to human beings anticipates and even enacts the split between analytic and continental philosophy because it already sketches out what is at stake philosophically in this split, namely, the fate of naturalism. To any naturalist, and especially to the inner naturalist of common sense, the position taken by the “continental” thinkers in this debate is so absurd as to function as a reductio of their position. Even for those  whose sensibilities align with the “continental” side of this debate, or at least for many of them, it will be Bataille’s position that seems shocking rather than  Ayer’s.

 How, today, could anyone—continental thinkers included—deny the anteriority of the sun to human existence? Indeed, it is precisely by criticizing such absurdities that Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism has attracted attention.   Nevertheless, it is my intention here to reanimate this old debate and to argue on behalf of the “continental” position: the sun exists only within a world, and a world emerges only at the confluence of a perceiver and the perceived. But this does not deny the insistence of a time before the world, a primordial prehistory that haunts the world from within, which is the truth of the naturalist’s conviction about a time prior to humanity. Yet only the resources of phenomenology can clarify this encounter with an elemental past that has never been for anyone a present.

Close readers of Merleau-Ponty will immediately recognize that the debate over the sun’s existence echoes an infamous passage at the end of the “Temporality” chapter of  Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty considers the objection that the world existed “prior to man.”

 In response to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure,” his imagined critic counters that “the world preceded man,” since “the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together.” Merleau-Ponty nevertheless insists that “[n]othing  will ever lead me to understand what a nebula that could not be seen by any-one might be. Leplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world” (494/456).

____________________________________________________________________
I have not finished reading the entire paper, but I thought this might spark some reflections for Holden during his commutes.   

My take on this is that, since the sun is involved in defining the passage of time, the sun is outside of time and does not exist "in a world" as such, a Lebenswelt, until there is a perceiver and a perceived.  I think it is liberating, psychologically at least, to consider the mysterious nature of our consciousness and the role it plays in presenting the "world as representation."

That is, even the so-called powerful are subjected to the same "inherent nature of our world."

Even the preacher man, as he confidently gives his congregation advice on how to get through this life is subjected to the mystery of consciousness and the formation of his own Life_World. 

In other words, you don't have to know the truth in order to be standing in it.   People can think and say whatever they wish about what they suppose the nature of our existence or "world" is. 

It defies common sense to suggest that the sun had certainly not existed before the world.  The problems we have imagining this scenario are at the heart of the divide between Analytic and Continental Philosophy.

How different this subject matter is from computer programming topics!   

To just sit and ponder such things ... things that presidential clowns, businessmen, and war thugs rarely consider.  They are too obsessed with power and their delusions of "control," when, the truth is that each little emperor and gang boss are just as "thrown into this" as anyone else.

May we find some comfort in the knowledge that we are not alone in this great riddle, and that no social hierarchy can dictate the quality of one's inner life.   

There are so many grand delusions shared on a mass scale, so much so that we can refer to "common sense reality" as a mass hallucination.   

It might turn out to be something very pleasing to consider, that we may be stuck in mass cultural hallucinations, going around in circles chasing our tails with circularly defined words.

I'm going back to writing a little code as I appreciate the simple and elegant logic necessary for computing, but I have a feeling I will be revisiting more "philosophical" ideas before I lose consciousness and the morning returns. 

The world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived.
« Last Edit: October 18, 2019, 11:59:00 am by Haywire Baboonery »
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