Philosophy Now Forum

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Hi Luxin

I’m sorry I missed your thread. But better late than never as the woman said when she finally got her period.

You included a lot of meaningful ideas but I’ve found through experience that resolving them requires beginning at the beginning

Being a fan of the highly esteemed Mullah Nasrudin you can’t be all bad. We must accept the foolishness and absurdity of the human condition of which we are a part. Can we verify that we are not one but rather many? We have higher parts with the potential for human consciousness and lower parts which are those of reacting animals. Are you open to this idea as expressed by Ouspensky?

“Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine.
First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.” ― P.D. Ouspensky

Can a machine experience consciousness? Can the human organism become less a machine and more conscious?

Can we really understand the relationship between what we call good and evil without consciously appreciating the relativity of their relationship?

“Besides, all evil is relative. Something that is evil at one level of evolution can be good at an earlier stage because it provides the essential stimulus for development. But you want to judge everything by your own standards. You have reached a comparatively high level and so you see what you fight against as evil. Just think of the others, those who are at an earlier stage of development. Do not bar them from the path toward progress and evolution.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, Talks with a Devil

I agree with you that dead people govern a great deal of our lives. But when we realize it, we become more open the the absurdity we are living with. By awakening we can become more alive. Gurdjieff said:

A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.

Of course Jesus knew this when he said in Matthew 8:

21 Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
22 But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”

Are you open to the idea of our nothingness in comparison to our conscious potential for inner unity? This has nothing to do with conceptions of good or bad but rather just what we are: asleep in Plato’s cave. That for me is the essential foundation to build on the ideas you’ve brought. Of course it is insulting for both blind believers and blind deniers but regardless, to admit the human condition within ourselves and to verify it through efforts necessary to “know thyself” IMO is worth the growls