|
Ped
Interested In Your Brain



Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 5,494
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 7 years, 1 month
|
Ever Feel Like You're on a Treadmill?
#7435425 - 09/21/07 05:43 AM (16 years, 4 months ago) |
|
|
To the extent that we post here (not that I do much of that anymore), and to the extent of the depth of the subject matter we explore, we are interested in developing our intellectual and spiritual potential. Do you ever feel like a mouse on a wheel with this endeavor? For years now I've been probing life's "big questions", but instead of growing happier and more free, it feels like I'm deteriorating, like I'm slowly running out of gas. Anyone..?
--------------------
Dark Triangles - New Psychedelic Techno Single - Listen on Soundcloud Gyroscope full album available SoundCloud or MySpace
|
Middleman

Registered: 07/11/99
Posts: 8,399
|
Re: Ever Feel Like You're on a Treadmill? [Re: Ped]
#7435431 - 09/21/07 05:47 AM (16 years, 4 months ago) |
|
|
To me it feels more like a spiral staircase... Goin' Up?
|
Lion
Decadent Flower Magnate



Registered: 09/20/05
Posts: 8,775
Last seen: 3 days, 19 hours
|
Re: Ever Feel Like You're on a Treadmill? [Re: Middleman]
#7435572 - 09/21/07 07:40 AM (16 years, 4 months ago) |
|
|
I'm fairly new to all this, so I don't know how much my input will be valued.
The path of life for me often feels like a great burden, especially when I am fantasizing about and projecting myelf into the future or tormenting myself about the past. The unconscious moments, the times when I'm acting out of conditioned patterns, are far more numerous than the glimpses of something better, of transcending oneself.
"Overcome and more will always be revealed." I've found this to be true personally on my trip. Just when I think I've backslid beyond hope, and even when I'm walking around half asleep trying to shut reality out, something will happen to spur further growth and understanding. As I become more conscious of this pattern it becomes easier and easier to live with myself when things are not going my way, or when I am caught in negative mental patterns.
So, I don't know. I tend to think of myself as on a journey towards deeper and deeper self-knowledge and peace, though I don't kid myself (well, actually, I do my best to) that here won't be great challenges along the way - that even today, I am very sure things will happen which will reveal an area in which I need to grow, in attentiveness, in self-acceptance, in inner stillness.
Anyway, it's early and I'm a bit hung over, so this isn't particularly coherent. Take it easy.
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
|
Icelander
The Minstrel in the Gallery



Registered: 03/15/05
Posts: 95,368
Loc: underbelly
|
Re: Ever Feel Like You're on a Treadmill? [Re: Ped]
#7435851 - 09/21/07 09:38 AM (16 years, 4 months ago) |
|
|
Quote:
Ped said: To the extent that we post here (not that I do much of that anymore), and to the extent of the depth of the subject matter we explore, we are interested in developing our intellectual and spiritual potential. Do you ever feel like a mouse on a wheel with this endeavor? For years now I've been probing life's "big questions", but instead of growing happier and more free, it feels like I'm deteriorating, like I'm slowly running out of gas. Anyone..?
I'm glad you still check in brother.
If you have noticed much of my posting lately I have addressed this topic for myself by concluding all of our actions in life are a result of a basic death anxiety inherent in the human program. The quality of life depends on the skillful or unskillful methods of dealing with death anxiety. For example violence would be IMO a more unskillful response to death anxiety. Running up in the mountains or painting, taking psychedelics or following Buddhist psychology might be more skillful methods.
But I believe if one looks deeply enough into life then all the props fall away. No God is looking out for you. No assurance of a continuation of the self or importance of the self (personality structure) any more than an ant or dust. Then you are left facing that all your work is only important to you and you are in a sense alone with that. No one is watching and waiting at the end. Like in Shakespeare's Macbeth, you strut your hour on the stage, making your statement full of sound and fury and in the end signifying nothing.
I believe the feeling of being on a treadmill is the result of trying to go against this truth and coming over and over to the same brick wall thinking there must be a way we haven't tried yet or we just aren't good enough yet to get over it. When the truth may be that we just don't want to face the alternative.
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
Edited by Icelander (09/21/07 02:38 PM)
|
Lion
Decadent Flower Magnate



Registered: 09/20/05
Posts: 8,775
Last seen: 3 days, 19 hours
|
Re: Ever Feel Like You're on a Treadmill? [Re: Icelander]
#7436594 - 09/21/07 01:26 PM (16 years, 4 months ago) |
|
|
Quote:
No one is watching and waiting at the end.
That is a good way of putting it in order to shift the way one approaches and perceives this journey that we're all on.
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
|
|