Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!
|
 medsn
Natural Born Farmer
Registered: 06/11/09
Posts: 279
Loc: Club Tropicana, UK 
Last seen: 3 months, 7 days
|
 The Meaning Of Life (A MUST Read)
#13153957 - 09/06/10 04:43 AM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
THE MEANING OF LIFE - By Trevor Lock
Life, like women, cannot be understood. Theories, maps and feelings are to be understood but not life. No, nor women neither. People sometimes ask me, because they have heard I read philosophy at university, what the meaning of life is. And the short answer is none. Life is meaningless, I say. Which is a shame because it takes up quite a lot of time, all that effort and then you die, I add to try to make them smile/like me. Although I try to be funny about it, it is true. Life has no meaning. But this is not some nihilistic or despairing point of view as some people think it is. In fact, if anything, it's good news. Life has no meaning because it needs no meaning. There are countless things in life that do have meaning; glances across a crowded room have meaning, don’t they? The theory of evolution means a hell of a lot to some people. E=MC2, The Parable of The Sower, The Green Party Manifesto. But the thing about meaning is it occurs within a context, such as words within a language, or arguments in a relationship. Language, music, stories, books, poems, scientific theories, political ideologies, spiritual teachings have meaning, and are meant to be understood. But all these things are contained within life. And life itself simply is; nothing contains it. If you could imagine something to contain life then that would be just more life, like if an area of space was found to be containing another bit of space, that would simply be just more space. Life does not happen within a context life IS the context for everything. There is nothing outside of life in the sense of existence. Even death happens within the context of life. Even if one imagines life after death, that would simply be more life. You can conceptualize meaning as something that is laid over the top of life, like a map could be imagined as spread over the top of the world. The meaning of a line on the map may be a river, but the actual river itself would have no meaning. Likewise Christianity, Science, Capitalism and Britpop all have their meanings but that which these terms refer to in life is beyond meaning. So why do we search for meaning in our lives? We've simply been taught from an early age, for generations, to look for it, that’s all. Looking for meaning in life is simply a habit. And of course much of what happens in life does have meaning, in fact meaning is potentially unlimited – there seems to be nothing that cannot be given meaning within a certain context. But life is bigger than that, without context, it is the context. Life just is and it is all there is. Women, however... their meaning is infinite.
TFL
As a child of the 80's alive in the 21st century I can't be alone in occasionally experiencing what I like to call 'Proustian-retro-future-nostalgie' when confronted with the phrase two thousand and ... Hearing 2009 and 2012 all the time still makes me think that I'm living in the future. Recently it's been getting worse and I've been having the feeling not only that I'm living in the future but more specifically that I'm living in a perfectly designed dystopian nightmare vision of the future. The tube station nearest my house is often the departure point for these realisations. It has been in an indeterminate state of repair/collapse for several years now which has had the effect of making one no longer sure if they're just about to put on the finishing touches or have just started to rip it all out again. Over time this warps your perception of what a tube station is supposed to look like. Improvement comes to mean 'to make worse', demolition is renovation. Perhaps you're supposed to be able to see the tangled intestines of metal and wire cabling that run through where a ceiling might have been? At the time of writing the walls of Brixton station are a Mad Max mix of bare cement, state of the art lighting panels and chicken wire. In some places the cement has been a carved with a wavy line pattern that I think I've seen before on Pre-Colombian earthenware. A couple of weeks ago there were police with portable airport style security scanners in operation. Add to this the strains of Beethoven buzzing over the tinny speakers under the propaganda announcements about the quality of the services on the underground this morning and you really do have something so evocative of Terry Gilliam's Brazil that it's hard not to think that it isn't all deliberate.
My paranoia only increases when I get on the train. Watching passengers reading The Da Vinci Code makes me think of an Orwellian Ministry of Literature where books are manufactured for the same purpose that another government department might be flooding the culture with pornography in order to keep the population distracted and docile. Think what might be possible if populations used the internet for the free exchange of information instead of for pornography, facebook and youtube? Then I think about the sudden ubiquity of the myriad coffee chains. What purpose do they serve? There are hundreds perhaps thousands of these outlets now where 10 years ago there were almost none, so there must be thousands, maybe millions of people now addicted to coffee who were not before. And what do you do in the coffee shops? Log on and check your facebook and surf youtube....
Totalitarian states keep their populations ignorant by giving them the illusion of freedom and occupying their minds with trivialities and diversions so that they have no inclination or capacity to seek out or even recognise truth or beauty.
So Bach becomes something you associate with delays on the northern line, literature becomes the relentless cheap thrills of Dan Brown, chicken wire something you hope you can afford to line your stair well with and 'Big Brother' is just something you watch so that Big Brother doesn't actually need to watch you anymore. Who's behind it all? And what are they trying to distract us from? I suppose the most terrifying truth is that no one is behind it. It's all just happening. Or from another point of view - we are all behind it. We're all responsible our own collective subjugation.
What then are we trying to distract ourselves from? The end of our civilisation I suppose. From the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, the population of the world exploding just at the point the resources have started to run out.
--------------------
My job makes me unhappy but that's alright because
when I get home I get in my spaceship and she
tells me everything is going to be OK.
|
 OrgoneConclusion
Pharoah & Balanced
Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 29,384
Loc: Luxor
|
Re: The Meaning Of Life (A MUST Read) [Re: medsn]
#13153991 - 09/06/10 05:11 AM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
Quote:
Life, like women, cannot be understood.
At least it starts off retarded. If one cannot comprehend a portion of life then one certainly cannot comprehend the totality of life.
--------------------
This is your drain on brugs.
|
Diploid
Cuban
Registered: 01/09/03
Posts: 14,222
Loc: Rabbit Hole
|
|
Everyone knows the answer to women, like life, is 42. 
--------------------
Wanna hear something depressing? One out of four Shroomerites wants to lock me in a government cage for using a substance they don't like.
Hard to believe, right? Read it for yourself:
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/7874721#Post7874721
|
Brainstem
_@_y
Registered: 07/31/10
Posts: 1,969
Loc: In my shell
|
Re: The Meaning Of Life (A MUST Read) [Re: medsn]
#13155599 - 09/06/10 02:15 PM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
Reminds me of the ad breaks in the Robocop films. 
--------------------
The arrogant cat stalks the humble mouse, the self important dog chases away the cat and is in turn unable to stand it's ground against the Proud lion. Then the lion is almost trampled underfoot of the enlightened elephant, who surprisingly and paradoxically yields to the humble mouse.
|
OrgoneConclusion
Pharoah & Balanced
Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 29,384
Loc: Luxor
|
Re: The Meaning Of Life (A MUST Read) [Re: Diploid]
#13155616 - 09/06/10 02:20 PM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
Quote:
Diploid said:
Everyone knows the answer to women, like life, is 42DD.
--------------------
This is your drain on brugs.
|
Brainstem
_@_y
Registered: 07/31/10
Posts: 1,969
Loc: In my shell
|
|
Women can be understood, but usually with the aid of hindsight. 
|
OrgoneConclusion
Pharoah & Balanced
Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 29,384
Loc: Luxor
|
Re: The Meaning Of Life (A MUST Read) [Re: Brainstem]
#13155724 - 09/06/10 02:41 PM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
|
|
--------------------
This is your drain on brugs.
|
AlphaFalfa
imagine
Registered: 06/16/08
Posts: 3,569
Loc: 3 Seconds Ago. 
Last seen: 21 hours, 36 minutes
|
|
Women can't all be understood because they DO NOT all FALL squarely in the definition he bases his attempt to understand them from, ON.
--------------------
if you ever feel lost, just remember, life is not a journey, it is entertainment, all 4 fun...
| |
|
|
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Mr. Middle, Diploid
293 topic views. 8 members, 14 guests and 2 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Toggle Favorite | Print Topic ]
| | |
|
|
|
Previous
Index
Next
Threaded
Edit 
Reply 
