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Nine things I learned in ninety years

edwardpackard.com

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Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#391

Post by silexia »

layer8 wrote: post #343
silexia wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having children is the literal purpose of all life forms. Birth control is the worst thing that humanity has invented.

You are basically saying that the purpose of all life forms is to create further life forms, whose purpose then is again the same. In other words, the purpose is eating its own tail. In my mind, this circularity disqualifies it from being a meaningful purpose.

Read any biology textbook. The purpose of every life form is to reproduce and create more life. This is the purpose of all evolution and all life.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#392

Post by fuzzfactor »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #386
fuzzfactor wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my downvote but I do usually see things going south in a traditional way more as a consequence of tradition itself of some kind, overcoming the better judgement it would have required to avoid such a fate.

but you can apply the same thing to modern way, both are have cons here

Right. Modern ways can easily be worse with effects never before contemplated.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#393

Post by ant6n »

bluecalm wrote: post #318
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what happens if you lose the flip. If it's zero, vs a payout if you win, sure, maximize the number of flips. But take, for example, smoking. You're flipping where the best outcome is zero, and the worst is cancer. Minimize the number of those flips.

There are many positively skewed coin flips as well which we don't take because of various biases, fears, habits or our upbringing. I like a quote from Magnus Carlsen (the chess player): "The correct mindset in chess is somewhere between optimist and delusional". I think it applies to life as well. I am naturally pessimistic I think I lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Thankfully I also get those periods wher…

"The correct mindset in chess is somewhere between optimist and delusional" - until you need to raise money for your delusional project.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#394

Post by malnourish »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #334
malnourish wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm married to my wife. We lived together happily for more than a decade before we married. We are childless atheists in a neighborhood of other childless, atheist, married couples, some of whom have been together almost as long as my wife and I have been alive. By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?

Technically it does make you irrelevant to statistics about child rearing outcomes.

Ha! I can live with that.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#395

Post by NemoNobody »

sambapa wrote: post #348
Dumblydorr wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddha would probably say it’s very easy to “be” a Buddha. To become one, on the other hand, is hard in my opinion, takes thousands of hours of practice. Once you’re there however, it is open effortless awareness and not hard to maintain, so they say! Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in th…

Well, according to the buddhist lore, to become one, you need not thousands but eons of practice.

All living people today have eons of practice of suffering under our belts right now - since the very moment we were born our cells provide a link from the newest baby to the very beginning of life here on earth. We've been prey animals. We've been predators. We've walked every road of life a human can walk - the good, the bad, the evil and unimaginable, the boring.

We've done everything before and we will do all of it again.

Every man a monster. Every man a Messiah.

Both are true. Exactly as a Good man can in an instant become a Monster - so too is the opposite exactly true.

Every person possess the innate ability, at a Cellular genetic level, to become a Messiah/Buddha and the ability to become that iteration of ourselves in an instant - bc we already are that iteration anyways. It's all about the point of view.

In the beginning there was only mind, no rules defined, no "alive/dead" - just the pitch black dark blank and empty universe - so, unstructured, unfettered, unbound, chaos as Mind.

Nothing has changed except our point of view. Like a basketball court, with a basketball and players but no rules - all that is necessary for a game to be played in exists already, but until the rules are set, people agree to accept them - no games of basketball can be played.

Only after enormous limits and constraints are placed upon players regarding everything else hey can do while playing - ONLY THEN can players "play" - before they were bound by the rules of the games, they had much more freedom and choices to do what and go where they please.

The Lebron James equivalent to life on earth - maybe isn't that big a deal, this could be like pre-school, we have no idea.

All I know for certain is that there are no rules - to limit is to lose. Do as thou will - the worlds wheel will work all our sins and misconceptions out, to do right is to do best by ourselves, in a very selfish sense, which is learned and understand with time.

So, don't let those 10,000 eons stop you, the worse thing would be to have to endure 10,000 eons again...

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#396

Post by NemoNobody »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #333
psychoslave wrote: post #71

>“It’s not so difficult to be a buddha,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “Just keep your awakening alive all day long.” And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall. Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed. Ok, th…

Buddha would probably say it’s very easy to “be” a Buddha. To become one, on the other hand, is hard in my opinion, takes thousands of hours of practice. Once you’re there however, it is open effortless awareness and not hard to maintain, so they say! Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in th…

Instantaneous transcendence is the reason humans are such a desirable birth according to the old school Hindu/Buddhist beliefs.

Better to be born a Human and live 100 years - it's the best chance at getting out of this trap. Being born a dirty would mean several hundred thousand millennia of divine life - thats going to manifest forgetting, by the end the next rebirth is almost always lower.

Animals have thousands of births per form.

Only a human can be born an ignorant savage animal person and in less than 100 years become a Buddha and transcend existence.

That's a lot of the fish analogies in early Christianity and earlier - we all get out, but it takes forever for some of us, God is always looking for the next one of us that's grown big enough to become "a big fish" - "chosen easily from all the rest"

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#398

Post by kakacik »

hattmall wrote: post #381
kakacik wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are of course absolutely right, but its more complex. When I look around me at my family, people there and already gone, one of the issue is communication and whole mental model of reality. Younger generations live emotionally richer lives. Or maybe thats not the best description, but something along that. I can't talk about deeper emotions even with my parents, the generational gap is absolutely huge. They never…

Interesting perspective but with all of that experience are you not able to communicate with them in their way? This seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees, people are no less thoughtful or complex based on where they've lived or what they've done. The experiences you are learning from came at a cost of the experiences like those of your parents, those experiences shape their communication. There is absolu…

Not all experiences are created equal. They have some type of experience in droves, but mine is much... wider and more varied for the lack of better words. Their days looked one like another, very little variety. Same people, same situations whole lives. It really limits one's experience, and living 5000 years in such environment doesn't add up that much.

One example is that psychology - they are just not wired to look at complexities of other people's emotions, origins, mental issues and so on. People are good or bad, weird is a third state for them and thats it. They are trivial to manipulate via emotions, just like their whole generation is.

I mean I talk to them regularly, but its rather shallow talk. Anytime I go deeper ie about my deeper experiences in some remote place and culture, their face goes blank, they don't have much to add. They look at the photos and love those but that's a very tiny part of whole story. I learned over decades what topics work and which are for other people.

Its all fine, apologies if I sounded worse than things are. Parents are just parents, for adults they are not meant to be the closest people in the world, that's rather an indication of some social failure to find and integrate with peers down the line.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#399

Post by Anamon »

ropable wrote: post #387
larsnystrom wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, many things attributed to chance are actually the aggregate effect of other people's choices. If we make choices based on not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us, we will all suddenly become more "lucky". And vice versa, if we only think about ourselves that luck will diminish.

Couldn't agree more. Many (most?) of our opportunities are afforded by the family, community and society in which we grew up. Of course individual talent and choices make a difference, but it's my feeling that many people wildly underestimate how much their external life circumstances contribute to their success or happiness. In fairness, it goes against our sense of self-efficacy.

Like a lot of things recently, it reminds me again of Timothy Snyder's book On Freedom. I think the world would be on a much better path if more people took its core message to heart: that your "freedom" in how to lead your life is not just an absence of oppression, but something made possible for you by an entire society collaborating on giving others these opportunities, by maintaining infrastructure, education, emergency services, etc. etc.

I like the thought experiment of considering how much of your current life's comforts and liberties you would still have if you lived as a hermit in the woods. Nobody tells you what to do there, but you'd quickly find out how much your luck depended on society.

Being able to buy my food at the supermarket instead of having to go hunt and forage for it every day gives me a lot of additional energy and time to exercise other freedoms.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#400

Post by Anamon »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #273
grugagag wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birth control is not to not have children but to control when you have children.

Sort of... Many people do not want to hear this. Many would point to economic factors as the main problem. But I think that when people are educated about the risks and responsibilities of parenthood and given the choice of doing so (birth control, abortion, etc.) - the simple fact is that they CHOOSE not have enough kids to meet the replacement rate. The reason you can see this is because the lowering birth rates ar…

That's under the assumption of framing it as a problem. Personally, I think naturally declining birth rates are a corrective measure for an already wildly overpopulated planet. And that we can be damn glad that this is the way things seem to be heading, because the alternative would be an ever accelerating freight train heading for one of several much more devastating scenarios of population reduction.

Even with sub-replacement birth rates I don't see humanity at a threat of extinction (from natural population decline!) in the next tens of thousands of years. And even if -- what's the issue? It's only humans who think humanity is this great gift to the universe that needs to be protected and spread.

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