Society in which you step over homeless folks on your way to pointlessly click and type on the computer all day, is deeply fucked up. And you have to be veeery brainwashed to not realize that.
Society where everyone’s main activity is to do a “job” that serves no purpose but to make some people richer.
Where we commute to that “job” by cars while the planet is dying.
Where we are only allowed to do this “job” in an “office”, although it was clearly proven that they are just as capable of doing it at home.
Where there are still people are sleeping on the streets, people who can be sheltered in the “offices”, but instead we are supposed to just run over those people our way to work and not care.
And we are supposed to pretend all of this is OK, lest we are fired from this system and have to lie down next to those people.
Well, it’s not worth it.
There is an ability I call unity of thought, for a lack of a better word, which is essential for acquiring intelligence/wisdom. It is the ability to connect each new idea/view that you have, with all the other ideas/views in your mind, to make it compatible with those. And to drop the ideas and views that aren’t compatible.
(it is called holding a view for a reason — it takes effort and you cannot do it with too many of those.)
Unifying your thoughts sets your mind free, but it requires commitment.
It requires that you remain consistent in your thoughts and view, even in contexts where this is not beneficial to you.
It requires you to reject the ideas that your brain wants you to reject.
No compromise.
Trying to balance a different set of views and ideas, depending on the situation, will make you dumb and will mess up your mental health…
The things you fear will happen are already happening (else there would be no way to fear them). The only way to stop them from happening is to stop fearing them
One of the things I wrestle with in my spiritual practice is the idea that you will never be able to truly win and truly fail — all mistakes, weaknesses and missed opportunities do not matter, unless you want them to matter (no point in doing so). More importantly, the positive things you do don’t matter as well. Leaning on them is sends you back to square one.
There is something spiritual about this principle itself, it somehow defines spirituality.
“I have everything but I am still not happy.”
Well, that’s because you don’t have everything, you have just money (and things that you can buy with it)
You don’t have a job that satisfies you while letting you retain your piece of mind.
You don’t have quality relationships with people who will be there for you, even if you are broke.
You don’t have material objects that fulfill your needs without having maintenance costs that make you dependent on corporations that you don’t want to depend on.
Or maybe you understand that you need all these things, but you are thought that you need them in addition to being rich.
Or that you want to make money first and then concentrate on everything else.
Both of these are dead ends. Act now to attain what you want. Directly.
Why, cause “character is faith,” as Heraclitus says. The saying is more literal than it seems:
Pursuing your goals is not merely a prerequisite to getting the results you want. If you look at it from the grand scale, goals are themselves results - pursuing the goal to be good (“good” both as a person or good at some specific skill) is the same thing as being good.
By the same token, pursuing a goal as obtuse and meaningless as money makes you an obtuse and meaningless person.
e.g. a person who is sorry for whatever bad thing they have done and wants to be a good person already is a good person, better than a billionaire who donates 10% of this fortune to charity.
10-year-old-kid who has set their mind to become a great pianist is a great pianist, better than anyone who merely plays just for the money.
My focus for the next year or so is to stop being so self-critical. No reason whatsoever to beat yourself for stupid shit, and it destroys your self-esteem, allowing you to be exploited by people who don’t even know what self-criticism means.
Seeking instant gratification is not “living for the moment”, it’s a manifestation of our your fear of death (so kinda the opposite thing)
Positive nihilism:
Nothing that you say or do matters in the grand scheme of things, and this is pathetic, but more pathetic is the refusal to accept that fact, instead of conforming to it and thus making it the only thing you conform to:
Your achievements don’t matter, so no point in being dishonest.
You failures don’t matter, so no point in giving up.
Your strive to perfection is vain, so no point in pressuring yourself.
Dogen’s concept of a “myriad of things” (or “the thousand things” as it is sometimes translated) is very similar to Kant’s concept of the “manifold of sensibility”, essentially both are trying to highlight the novel, flux-like aspect of reality, the fact that the concept of objects are subjective (no pun intended). It would be a really cool plot twist if it turned out that Kant had read Dogen (very highly unlikely in real life).
Seems that all this obsession with productivity that we have is due to the fact that we don’t believe in the things we do and so we want to at least do more of them.
