31–40 of 173 posts
I often yearn for the "unearthly quiet" and structure of a monastic life. I am not religious but I just feel as if I don't belong in society: I don't care about work, jobs, careers, riches, fame. I would like a life of study, contemplation and silence.
Before the "woke" people come out of their holes and try to bash this: The concept IS NOT to exclude women, the idea was to move to the most distant place possible, and to live a life far away from society, love, sex, etc. - something everybody should respect. These people living there dont want to harm anybody, and there's no reason to "go there an visit them" or to do any "feminist" stunts. Intention matters.
I often yearn for the "unearthly quiet" and structure of a monastic life. I am not religious but I just feel as if I don't belong in society: I don't care about work, jobs, careers, riches, fame. I would like a life of study, contemplation and silence.
I think a lot about the right to be a monk. It solves a lot of other human rights issues along the way. Monks create their own food, have a place to live and work, and don't cost a lot of money. Let people monk.
Before the "woke" people come out of their holes and try to bash this: The concept IS NOT to exclude women, the idea was to move to the most distant place possible, and to live a life far away from society, love, sex, etc. - something everybody should respect. These people living there dont want to harm anybody, and there's no reason to "go there an visit them" or to do any "feminist" stunts. Intention matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The constant "time zone" changes might throw a wrench into calculating the offsets. How far in advance can we calculate sunrise/sunset times?
Depends on what you mean by sunrise/sunset. “The relative position of the sun’s edge drops below/rises above the tangent of the average surface at sea level” is pretty easy to calculate many years out; the complications are deviations in Earth’s orbit. “I can/can’t see the sun anymore” depends on local weather, good luck.
For anyone wanting to know a bit more about why this is, here's some additional details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sj868IzNrk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_refraction
Technically, one might also argue something weird like, "If I can see sunlight, it's still daytime" in which case a different phenomina would come into play:
https://www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/zod1.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light
What this all comes down to is, roughly speaking, even after the sun has technically set, there's still a bit of leeway before we no longer see the sun/sunlight due additional factors.
I often yearn for the "unearthly quiet" and structure of a monastic life. I am not religious but I just feel as if I don't belong in society: I don't care about work, jobs, careers, riches, fame. I would like a life of study, contemplation and silence.
As far as I know monastic life is not really work-free or worry-free. It's still a society with a lot of baggage. You are even expected to work for free and don't question the authority of the "upper-class". The only chance to be "free" would be to live in a very remote area, alone. That's a tough life but at least you don't have any answer to anyone.
I would imagine part of enjoyment of Monastic life is surrendering to those in charge of the Monastery.
Good point about monastic life, it is always idealized but as with most things in the cosmos reality deviates.
I often yearn for the "unearthly quiet" and structure of a monastic life. I am not religious but I just feel as if I don't belong in society: I don't care about work, jobs, careers, riches, fame. I would like a life of study, contemplation and silence.
In the book "Wanting", the author has a bit explaining silent retreats, which are basically vacations where no one is allowed to talk and everyone reads. I thought they were an interesting idea to kind of test out monkhood. Similarly, I have always wanted to try John Carmack's idea of taking a computer away to a hotel for a week and working on a project and ordering room service
The time zone issues sound fun: > A visit to Mount Athos also involves literal time travel. The monasteries there still go by Byzantine time, in which the day begins at sunset, not midnight, so the time zone changes literally every day. Visitors may have to set their watches back by as much as seven hours as they cross the border. And don't forget to change the date as well. Mount Athos never adopted the new-fangled…
It sounds irrelevant instead, and whoever wrote the article, is obviously being a bit too playful with words. Of course it's not "two weeks ago there", it's just that the date is different: it's as if you tried to use a different calendar system altogether — it's fine, you just need to convert back and forth. FWIW, a bunch of churches (Russian, Serbian, Romanian Orthodox churches) still respect the Julian calendar to…