Misfortune is when something bad happens to us when we least expected it. Death in itself is not wholly unexpected. All humans are mortal. When when death arrives at a moment when we thought there is the next moment, that is tragic. When death is unexpected and sudden, those who died might have felt it for a moment and it is gone. Their last thoughts may not be death, but something pleasant - like looking forward to a holiday in the tropics or meeting up with loved ones. Or, it could also equally be the thought of trying to cheat death, but scurrying along alleyways ducking bullets and bombs which are being indiscriminately rained on an area which the other side is trying to remove a perceived threat or danger.
But to the loved ones who know of the death, their pain and sorrow will stay with them for the rest of their lives. The living mourns for the dead - never the dead for the living. Suddenly, life is not about the material luxury of life, but life itself - the absence of which deprives the living the company of those who are no more with them in this world. The pains or sorrows of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, wives and husbands, grandmothers and grandfathers - images we now unfortunately have to witness on prime time TV nowadays - is a constant daily assault on our inner peace and quiet, on our perception and understanding of what reality is all about, on our faith in the humanness of human beings, on the need for the good to fight evil, on the vulnerability of the good to turn into evil, on the great risk that we all suffer when we do not watch ourselves lest we unwittingly becomes the very monsters that we would have condemned at leisure.
The reality of the world is that it is both good and evil, it be both light and dark in this world of duality where the two poles can switch from one to the other before our very eyes without us ever knowing it when that switch is taking place. Everybody deludes himself or herself to be good, no matter how evil he or she may have become. Good and evil is a value that arise when we are dealing with fellow human beings or fellow living things. Life goes on by the very force of survival, the constant craving for existence, that the very thought of death is appalling - even when one personally wills death because of the unbearable bodily pain one may unfortunately have to suffer. Death is often a respite to life. Some wise man has said the only way to fight pain and suffering is to deny life raising its head in the first place. To banish the thought of life. To focus on the present. Life until there is no more. But for those who are alive, fight pain and suffering through wisdom, wisdom of the truth of realty, and accept reality for what it is - both the fortunate and unfortunate things.
13 comments:
A: Can we ever cheat death?
B: Of course we can. Ask the jellyfish. As it ages, it reverses its aging by turning itself back into its polyp stage which then grows over time to become its jellyfish form again. A perpetual cycle of aging and rebirth.
A: But if humans have that capacity...?
B: We'll probably grow weary of it soon enough. If you ask why most will not take an elixir of life even if presented with one, your own answer will scour the very depth of timeless humanity.
A: Could the general answer be because of scoping? Each and all lives are limited by the scope of our activities so that soon enough one grows weary of it all?
B: This thing about activities. What motivates us to do them? Mixture of goals and experiences. What shape the goals? Perceptions of needs. What shape the experiences? Imprints of the perceptions in our minds.
A: So it's all about perceptions?
B: Take these two tragic incidents. The first was caused by omission to take fast action due to perception that the plane was non-hostile although it was off-path. No action was taken because an assumption was made.
Next, the tragedy which followed triggered an effect that was building up in the last thirty years of social decline. That effect was fatalism. People became frightened bordering on fatalism so much so they did the bare minimum.
Next, the bare minimum caused the second tragedy. It would have taken just one more molecule of effort to ask the simplest of questions, namely 'why take the risk?'
That question was not asked so that the flight path was retained even when knowing it was over a war zone that had seen other planes being downed before and on the excuse that since others were also doing it, risk was acceptable. It wasn't.
In the present aftermath, we can see the play out of perceptions and assumptions. It was assumed the aviation authorities could give safe clearance. They denied that. It was assumed that the pilots who were flying over that zone would have known there was a war going on. They didn't.
A: We need to do some real soul-searching, don't we?
B: I don't think that will happen. It's not an activity on the plate simply because if it is done, the assumption will be that the populace will rise up on the score of the conclusions from the soul-searching. The retention of political power is the primary goal even if the entire world's perception this round is that the present leadership has floundered and is rudderless.
A: What will happen next?
B: We're just a bunch of sabre-rattling but horseless cossacks so this upcoming parliamentary session will be another cheap playing to the gallery by the usual bunch of buffalo-ish buffoons who are only in that august house because they were earlier rejected from their appropriate cameo role in the latest flick, namely Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Ask yourself, what are they going to do? Censure a security council nation that is supporting Iran that is supporting the sovereignty of the Palestine? How will that jive with the local sentiments on whose votes hinge the next election rout? How will that bring back the dead?
A: But doing so will show our closure towards a unified national voice of conscience against injustice.
B: Closure? Unified? National? Conscience? Injustice? Exactly what glue have you been sniffing these days?
A: Ok. I C four times your point. Amongst others. But are you hinting that the Ukraine shouldn't secede?
B: See, we have progressed from jellyfish to geopolitics. Whatever weed you've been imbibing, pass some over.
A: Errr...but..
B: My answer to your question is no. When life is already so fragile, transient, superficial and cheap (but not good), the voice of the majority must take precedence...
A: Ahah! So that means...
B: Not so fast. I haven't finished my sentence. The voice of the majority must take precedence subject to certain ineluctable principles.
If memory serves, one of them is don't do onto others what you won't want no mf to do onto you.
A: Hmm...you're making some point there...
B: You mean if i don't wanna take no holy book or cd of yours, you should return the compliment by not taking any of mine. Did i say that? i thought we were talking about Ukraine and Hard Rock Cafe Jalan Sultan Ismail.
A: Whatever weed you've been downing...oh never mind..
B: Gudang Garam, my friend. Just cloved-tembakau.
A: Let's get back to serious matters. Is there life after death?
B: How would i know? I haven't died yet. Will you take a rain-check for my answer?
A: I espy a glint in your eyes. Come, say it out. What have you discovered lately?
B: Simple. The infamous law of the conservation of matter was violated three times in two different places.
A: Please explain.
B: What is there to explain. Things apppeared twice out of thin air and one thing, alive, disappeared once instantly.
A: How you know?
B: I was there and had instantaneous perceptions.
A: Could it be assumptions?
B: Nah. Real distortion of reality of this world by another world.
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Walla,
Humans measure their lifetime based on their time which is a millionth of a second of geological time. Your lifetime is faster than a blink of an eye based on geological or Universe Light Years. Humans invented their own time frame by frame to be able to percieve that they live longer. In geological/universe time you are dead even before you start to live.
Based on Quantum Physics..Everything is emptiness..Form is a form of emptiness. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form so don't mourn when you die for you enter into emptiness whilst being empty anyway. Ask Buddha for he has seen the existence of billions of stars hundreds of years before the invention of the hubble telescope. He talks of what Quantum physics excudes hundreds of years before Einstein and proponents of quantum Physics and Dark Matter. So fear not death for you really do not die for life is only a perception. Joe Black is not here for your soul for there is no soul nor body just emptiness.
Joe Black,
Interesting angle. Actually, based on quantum physics, everything is less than emptiness.
Everything is just a probabilistic wave function pivoted by a mathematical constant of a specific value. Life and matter are therefore chancy whose index depends on one's frame of reference.
Man is young compared to his earth but his earth is young compared to another planet beyond our minutiae solar system.
Man is young compared to his earth but his lifespan is old compared to that of the mayfly which lives but for one day only.
The question then is what do we do with our lives in the time given to us.
Do we do good per se or do we do good based on certain axiomatic precepts?
Is the Unseen One perfect from the beginning or is He also in some evolutionary development reflecting the quantum evolution that is central to your angle?
Suffice to say, in the time we have, we get clues along the way that things are not what they seem based on our notional perceptions which are nonetheless wrought by daily exigencies.
All that is needed is for us to take a step back in our own personal capacities, untether ourselves from our transient attachments, and stay alert to receive the signals as they may appear.
But to receive those signals, one must be in the right frame of mind. To get into that right frame of mind calls for effort and faith to the extent one should exercise faith IN faith.
Because once that first step is taken, namely to have faith in faith - which is not necessarily any specific religion but to try to receive and understand insights - then something may happen to cast deeper light of a beyond which is not necessarily a place or thing.
Considering how bland is life and the universe, that something is something we only call miraculous for lack of a frame of reference or tools to read it clearly and deeply.
Suffice to say, along the way we get interesting seashells bedecking the shore that presage greater truths await us in the oceans beyond.
One such local seashell is our oil palm tree. Its trunk has a spiral pattern. From each spiral outgrows fronds or branches.
The numbers of fronds of specific spirals denote a fibonacci series.
Yes, everything is emptiness but there are patterns inside the emptiness which denote something beyond the void. Even for the plain elaeis guineensis.
What more humans. Just the other day i passed by a chinese shop selling joss-wares. The chinese customer, an old man, was inside the shop, asking what he should buy. A young Malay girl was attending to him, and advising with great aplomb that he should get this and that for the occasion.
Imagine what cretinous fulmination will spew forth if such an event takes place in the sanctum of certain species.
To them, one can say lighten up, loosen up, champion rationality above all and remember compassion is the basic key to all religions.
WTF else have we got left?
Yes?
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Walla,
Woe betide the human condition the moment they invented religion.
The 21st Century Scientist Richard Dawkins fervently strived hard to expose this human condition amidst the current massacres under the name of religion. Truly the man on the street is left far behind by the progress of science.
The myth of Newtonian/Cartesian scentific view of the world disintegrated under the impact of the experimental and theoretical evidence produced by quantum physics showing that the atoms presumed fundamental building blocks of the universe, were at their core essentially empty. In experiments, subatomic particles showed the same paradoxical nature as light, manifesting either as particles or waves. Mass is no longer seen as a material substance but is recognized as a form of energy. Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness of rythm. The typical cell lives for 110 days, then become tired and decrepit. There is no lingering deaths, for when a cell loses its force it attracts the attention of macrophage.
At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity, just the dance.
Are the weakened life forces in various parts of the world being ravaged by religious and racial macrophages?
How do we escape the ravages of these microphages without destroying ourselves in the process?
The notion of emptiness is not without utility.
Imagine the blogger. He is reading in. Pickled in thought and probably ruing the day he started this blog, he reaches for his tumbler of tonic. By the concept of emptiness, it actually isn't. But that's alright. He isn't as well. And since i am viewing both, i ain't either.
If everything is just an incurvating dance of energy leading to nothing, how then should we live out our lives?
There is a fork at the end of that question. Right, we inure ourselves completely because we reason everything is empty in essence so why lose sleep over nothing? Left, it is because we know everything is emptiness that we find it within us to try and make something out of the nothing that we ultimately are.
Somehow left sounds more inviting. The question is why. And the answer is because waves of our humanity over the eons have built us up to have feelings about our human condition even if we sense that one day we will conclude it is all just a sham.
The mayfly overhearing this dialog will be puzzled why we are not celebrating the capacities of life given us when it knows its own are limited by fiat.
And that is why we should. Because other living things, including the phages, can't.
Having said that, we should be also mindful about the need for humility. The same phage or virus which can't can snuff us out by just disrupting the energy field of our chemicals-engorged immune system.
The left road leads to noble thoughts. But there is a quantum tunnel for all paths to jump to the right road of emptiness from which we came in the first place. A wry joke about leveling effects in the script written out on the drama called life.
One can turn what is bad to be what is good. For example, vaccination weaponizes a toned-down version of something bad to fight the natural version of the same bad thing.
So too with things like race and religion. What is race if not diversity of human life? What is religion if not diversity of the same Unseen One?
It is because people of limited critical thinking read too much into the literal handed-down versions of their holy scripts that they shunt from their hearts and minds the essence of each religion which finds common ground across all sets of beliefs, thereby dividing what in essence unifies all of humanity.
Even if they can argue their ground, they should ask themselves what will happen next if what they demand for themselves exclusively is given to them. Exclusivity of universality? That's just a hand grenade with a zero-second fuse.
We can see that happening. Someone goes on road-rage and affronts another person's property. Why mount a defense of the perp on the basis of race for that matter religion? After all, a civil complaint about the decibel level of the azan is not tantamount for purpose of equivalent punishment to a uncivil act of destruction of property simply because punishment of the latter is founded on the social contract of civil law whilst the former is deemed a man-made administrative decision without contractual foundation. There is nothing in the constitution that says the official religion must be practiced at such a decibel level as to inconvenient others even if it is deemed by some to have some role in reminding everyone about something.
By the same argument, if others decide their non-official religions require them to make an inadvisable din at odd hours, on what basis can their practices be deemed criminal when the same constitution that speaks of official religion also speaks of the right of others to practice their non-official religions?
The real issue here has nothing to do with race and religion. It has everything to do with distorting the use of the word 'official' for the political objective of federated power over the economic implication of jus soli.
That's why those who are trying to maintain their personal powers are saying the race and the religion are being threatened.
But that's disquieting. How can a race be threatened unless it be a community of just robotic minds whose circuits are required to respond in specific ways all the time but in a world that changes every second?
Similarly, how can a religion be threatened when the last one checked, a religion is practice of a faith by individuals in possession of their own minds unless the definition of religion excludes having one's own mind?
If one doesn't have one's own mind, one can't do anything let alone practice something of the higher order.
No?
The biggest act of insanity today is diverting the weakest from learning how to use their common sense.
Today we see how uncommon is that sense. As with other hot spots around the world, this nation has been hijacked. There will be no happy ending for all.
Not that it is much of a concern anymore. After all, reality is just nothing and emptiness in the end.
Walla,
Your Lamentation on Officialdom and State control of religion and Race is nothing compared to the Wholesale Institutionalisation and Scripturalization of Religion.
By successfully Instituted Religion and Race in the Constitution there is nothing else left for one to investigate one's own experience with complete honesty. There is no seeking for answers to dimminish suffering for the state have all the answers. Coming from the Ulamas and Paderis whose only right to being the soothsayers is that they were born into the Instituionalised and Scripturalised Establishment.
The original verbal messages passed on to the children of Abraham and of Buddha's teachings were Simple without the distorted perception of self and the world as manifested in written words.
What of the the two tragic incidents? "Reality" is not substance but a network of causal happenings that create different manifestation in each moment. Searching for the cause and placing blame is part of the cycle of cause and effect which came about through the cause and effect of the tragedy itself.
Yet the scripts from the holy books are considered arcane today.
How many people can read and digest them these twittering days where the attention span and the patience to plough ponderous texts are limited?
Thus the role of religious interlocutors.
The social problem arises when these religious representatives take it upon themselves to impose man-made rules as proxy for their interpretations of those scripts without the wherewithal of critical reasoning, common sense and any appreciation of human pathos outside the framework in which they deem themselves to operate.
Once they do that, they lock themselves in to continue doing it for fear of losing their arrogated authority.
It then becomes a power struggle which lends itself fertile bed for politicization of religion without the very foundation of critical thinking that is central to the conduct of all human activities whether secular or theocratic.
Carried to the limits, dictatorship will rear its head and propagate an unthinking society constantly shadowed by fear not founded upon any understanding and appreciation of the human condition under which they operate.
Society then grooms one generation to the next as just empty-headed citizens who when caught out will only offer weak apologies if contrite or try to divert attention by a display of unmitigated arrogance and chutzpah if unrepentant.
Such as we have seen these past years.
It goes to show people tempted by power tend to open their mouths without engaging their brains. Their knees jerk where their minds should engage. They speak only what sounds nice to themselves for the moment. Their agenda is thus their own fashionable comfort zone of the week.
Instead of peace and creation upon which sustainable progress can be made, you get instant mayhem and destruction by which regression is triggered, propagated, entrenched and then institutionalized.
And it is all because people forget the end objective of faith is the nobilisation of man. As an individual. For how does one nobilize a whole community unless it means the community is to be standardized? Who gives anyone the right to do so? Who decides the protocols, rules and limits by which that can be achieved?
Even as we have already long concluded that what man touches soon turn to dust.
No?
So i have reached the end here. Thus to take a step back.
This thing about cause and effect. If we argue things deeper, we will say cause and effect are not necessarily entwined.
My hand exerts a directional force on a ball resting on a table. Less surface friction, it moves away. Every time i do that, it reacts the same way. I conclude the muscle force transmits kinetic energy that moves the ball. The force is the cause, the motion is the effect. A Hume will say not necessarily so. It just happens that one event, namely the exertion, has so far been followed by another event, the motion. One day it may not.
So i apply the force at an angle without touching the ball. It doesn't move.
One suspects the reply may be 'but one day it may move'.
Therefore there is a time-constrained limit to human knowledge. Given so, it is therefore understandable if most will just accept common knowledge and beliefs to fill their limited lifespan and move on.
Occasionally one gets a break. How do you explain a face appearing on a plain wooden plank in the middle of a jungle?
Lastly, people should be free to believe whatever they want to believe and practice whichever they are comfortable in so long as it doesn't affect them and others negatively.
There should be no imposition or coercion.
When young, their parents should teach them commonly recognized good values. If the parents can't, then the education system should.
Later as they mature, they will be more inquisitive about life. It is their life so it should be their own path to determine.
What is important is to have enough critical thinking skills out of a good education system that will bolster their confidence to make their own decision and live by it.
If one option doesn't work for them, they should not be penalized to try another.
Then they will add to their store of wisdom later in life than be limited to only one manner of describing what is essentially a compact of moral exponents out of a single unified differential equation.
Which therefore, if it comes to it, makes for stronger and more progressive institutions founded on the gold standard of reasonableness, not the self-destructive standard of herd mob riotousness.
Furthermore, how long is a life that one can be assured of only one way?
Notice when one practices the essence of a faith, it is to do onto others no different one from the other, including how an ethical non-believer may be expected to conduct himself.
Suffice to say, the end-game of life is to converge physical, moral, social and other yet to be discovered laws into one integrated stream of realization.
Yes?
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