Obsession as Usual

I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I'm fuckin obsessed with Blade Runner. It's been non-stop for a few days between repeating the soundtrack and the film itself. I'm actually watching it at work :O

Something about a dystopian hopeless future, a deadbeat cop, societal persecution, and contemplation on the meaning of existence, totally appeals to me. The fact that there are no heroes, and no villains in this movie I find interesting. It's just a bunch of people who are all set against each other due to circumstances well beyond their control. It's got a very real feeling about it because of this. It's not your typical hero defeats bad guys and gets the girl movie. Not at all. Even the end of the movie is nothing like your typical ending. Lots of things are uncertain and there is nothing resolved, if anything there are just more questions.

When I was finishing and for the year or two after I just got out of high school, I was completely obsessed with Fight Club. I related to the main character a lot. Now it seems my new obsession is Blade Runner, where I also relate to the main character somehow.

Alternate Viewpoint

On 2nd thought, half the time I don't even know what the fuck I think.

The previous post sounds like another cop out. I can't make changes because I believe in death and Buddhism said if I believe in death I am doomed to a life of sense seeking. Fuck that. There's no reason not to make changes now that will benefit me for the rest of my ~40 years of life. Just because death is the end doesn't mean I have to be a slave to addiction.

You know, addiction isn't even my only problem. It's a close tie with being extremely lazy. So lazy I can barely keep up with day to day tasks like paying the bills and taking care of my cat.

Sometimes I think these traits are problems which cause me distress. However... I'm not so sure today. Can't I drink a cup of coffee full well acknowledging that it is unhealthy for me yet enjoy it anyway? Does this force me to be incongruent with my ideal self?

Maybe it's time to adjust the ideal self instead of trying to adjust self to match the ideal. But then.... isn't that just another cop out? Just another easy way out of not having to change or improve.

I have no facking idea.

/me hands himself a mirror

I'm starting to get a little pissed off at myself. I've spent the last day or so psycho-analyzing those around me. I like to tell myself I'm trying to help, but I'm not sure I really am. Sometimes shoving truth (or maybe only what I perceive as truth) down people's throats isn't the best way to help them.

I think I need a strong dose of truth shoved down my throat though. Likely I'm just analyzing people around me because it's so much easier and impersonal then examining myself. If I examine myself, there are implications, I have to make changes. If you don't examine yourself, if you keep your eyes blurred a little bit, that idealized version of self you hold in your mind looks just like the real you! However if you look closer, maybe focus your eyes a bit, they sure don't fucking match up. You can either adjust yourself to match your idealized self, you can adjust your idealized self to match your real self, or you can just live with the discrepancy.

Living with the discrepancy results in all kinds of poor decision making. It is the least favorable result if you ask me, and humorously, is also the result you get if you don't do any self-analysis at all. Which is what I've been doing. Seriously, who am I to be giving advice or cautioning anyone about anything when I can't even straighten myself out? It's time for that pointing finger of mine to do a 180.

I would say the majority of the self-incongruence begins with addiction, or more specifically a lack of discipline. I have a distinct lack of discipline. I'm not sure how or when this started, but I can actually acknowledge that something is harmful to myself, and do it anyway. Well now that I put it like that, it sounds like a lack of self-respect. Which is the exact opposite of what I was just harping on about on someone else's blog.

I felt they were grasping/craving (any research into Buddhism will explain these concepts) existence. Who knows if I was right or wrong, in the end it doesn't matter. When I look at myself I see the opposite. Grasping for non-existence. Buddhism is the middle path between what is defined as eternalism and annihilationism or nihilism.

1. self-doctrine clinging: first, one assumes that one has a permanent "self."

2. wrong-view clinging: then, one assumes that one is either somehow eternal or to be annihilated after this life.

3. resultant behavioral manifestations:

(a) rites-and-rituals clinging: if one assumes that one is eternal, then one clings to rituals to achieve self-purification.

(b) sense-pleasure clinging: if one assumes that one will completely disappear after this life, then one disregards the next world and clings to sense desires.

So (a) would be eternalism. I'd like to expand this idea and suggest that reproduction is a form of eternalism, lasting fame is also a form of eternalism. The false belief that one, or ones ideas, or ones seed, can survive forever.

(b) would be annihilationism or nihilism which is probably the side of the fence I'm leaning on. It would certainly explain my many self-destructive tendencies.

The question is, what the fux do I do about it? According to Buddhism this is rooted in the idea that I will die and be dead when I die and thats the end of my story.

I want to clear something up real quick first though. It's fairly out of character for me to act like Buddhism (or anything, or anyone) has all the answers. I don't think anyone has all the answers and even if someone did as soon as they tried to transmit those answers through words the meaning would change and the message would be lost. However, Buddhism has provided me with more wisdom and hope then any other school of philosophy or religion has even come close to doing. It's certainly provided me with more wisdom and hope then our education system, our society, and the religion of my family's choosing: Christianity. So, at least for the time being, I'm gonna stick with it.

Sidenote: My co-worker just tried to tell me she was sick from work for two days because she's type 2 diabetes, ate too much fruit, and had a reaction from high blood sugar levels. FOR TWO DAYS?!?!?! I know a thing or two about diabetes, and I know, this is some BS. Whatever, she's a bona fide hypochondriac. She can think whatever she wants.

So. Me having a ton of harmful addictions of which I am not in denial is the result of thinking that death is the end. I think this makes a lot of sense. I mean, who really cares what happens, or what you do to yourself if you're just going to die anyway. The real snag is, how do I fix this. How to I alter a core belief of my own that when we die, it is the end. I really have no information to suggest otherwise, yet continuing to believe this will get me nowhere but an early grave. Then again, look 2 posts back and an early grave seems to be all I'm after.

I think I'm searching for the early grave because I have difficulty seeing the value in life. What I'm not sure about is whether or not this is my true perception, or a result of my addictions. Maybe if I did not have so many addictions demanding my attention I would be able to more clearly see the value in life.

Then again, not seeing the value in life may go back to the root cause of believing that after we die it is the end. If after death, it is the end, and as time goes on forever, everything dies, then the end value, no matter what, appears to be zero. The same as the start value. From zero you get -1 and+1, and so the universe began. When the universe ends, -1 and +1 converge to zero, and we're back to where we started. From this philosophy comes the view that it doesn't matter if you are a + or a - because in the end you will still be zero. This is not to say I think it's ok to be a bad person, I certainly think causing others to suffer is wrong, though I can't really explain that belief if nothing matters in the end.

Hmm. My belief that causing others to suffer is wrong clearly shows me that I think now matters. People suffering now matter. People feeling good now matters. But this leads right in to me having addictions that please me now but harm me in the long run. Yaaarrgghh. Apparently I am more of a nihilist then I thought.

The Buddhist philosophy gets around the whole "nothing matters because we all die" mentality by throwing rebirth in there. They say there is no constant unchanging self (in fact, there was no self to begin with) which is reborn (not eternalism) but there is rebirth in some form (not annihilationism/nihilism). This is by far the most confusing and hardest to swallow pill there is in Buddhism. I still haven't swallowed it. There are actually endless debates on the Buddhist board that I read regarding rebirth. So many in fact that they posted a few stickies on rebirth and changed the whole forum rules regarding conversations on the topic. This is always the topic that turns me off of Buddhist wisdom. Every time I remove Buddhist, from my religion field on Facebook, you can bet it's because of rebirth.

I seem to be at an impasse. I require new information to break the root cause which is the belief that death is the end. As long as I believe that death is the end, I will continue to whittle away at myself, I will continue to dig my own grave.

Words to Live By

1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.


I need to remember this more often. I also, on a whim, looked up the definition of Sophistocate.

Sophistocate:

1) To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly.
2) To make impure; adulterate.
3) To make more complex or inclusive; refine.

Funny. I feel society has definately made me feel less natural, impure, and more complex. Yay, I am sophisticated!

Er...... normally being told I was sophisticated I would consider a compliment. After reading this definition, I'm not so sure. Being sophisticated kinda sucks.

"If you cannot be at ease with yourself when alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it."

Ain't this the truth? There's a billion signals in our culture every day that tell us, all you need to be happy is to find love and get married! What a crock of shit. If you aren't happy alone, what the fuck makes you think spending an outrageous amount of time with another person of the opposite sex is going to fix it? I assure all ye readers (1!) happiness lies not in love.

Only One Cure for the Disease of Life

Man I'm fucking miserable. And you know, when you tell people that, usually they are full of advice. Fucking retarded advice. Maybe if I had a lifetime to explain myself to you, you could give me some worthwhile advice, but in general, your advice can go to hell.

I keep thinking somehow WoW and weed and my many other vices are preventing me from being happy. But somehow "happy" gets mixed up in there and replaced with lonely. Suddenly I think I want to replace all these things by surrounding myself with people. But then everytime I do fuckin hang out with people they just drive me crazy. Thats when I realize I'm just replacing one vice with another. It's like drinking booze to help you quit smoking weed, which I've also done.

How does this make any fuckin sense?

You know... I want to quit all these things I've called "vices" but what the fuck else am I supposed to do? Just sit, all day and all night? What do you do when you don't like anything, and nothing is fun?

People call WoW a hamster wheel, even I have. Thing is, you get out of that hamster wheel and you're just back into the bigger hamster wheel of life where you get to run until you're dead. Driven by fear of death, by fear of hunger, fear of having control over your own life fall into someone else's hands. For what? When does the fucking good part come? It's no fucking wonder people invented a place like heaven, cause it stands to reason that perhaps there's some decent reason for this rat race. However that's totally false logic. That's like saying life is fair.

Other times like this I've said "This is as good as it gets. You aren't hungry, you got air to breathe, you aren't in physical pain. Just accept it and be happy." But it's just not working today. Feels like it's hard to enjoy pizza for the 100th day in a row, metaphorically speaking. Heh and right as I think, I don't know what I want that would make me feel fine, I know, nothing I can get will make me feel better. It's got nothing to do with what I have or don't have, or what I'm doing or not doing. There is no cure for this.

I think the icing on the cake is that... I'm at work, about to get off in 20 minutes, and I couldn't care less. What the hell am I gonna do when I get off work? Facking nothing. What am I doing at work? Facking nothing. I don't even know what I want to do after work. I hate that feeling. I like to think I work my job so I can have fun and be happy the rest of the time. Not so I can get off work and say "uhhh now what?". I'll probably end up playing WoW, not because I want to, but just, you know, familiar patterns. It's like how water will take the path of least resistance.

It's days like this I'm thankful I'm not immortal.

How words destroy experience

"So if I am eating a steak hot off the BBQ, I perceive that it tastes good and comment in my mind that "this steak is delicious". Is this considered being "unmindful" of the process of eating, because of mental commentary? If so, then what else would there be to be aware and mindful of?"

Says some random dude in a post. My reply was:

"In my humble opinion, if you label the steak as "delicious" as you eat it, you are placing it into a box labeled delicious which you have created and has various properties. Basically, saying a steak is delicious is an extreme over simplification of what eating a steak is really like.

Here's an analogy. You tell your deaf friend "Wow this is a great song!". Does he have any freaking idea what you're talking about? No. The actual song is infinatley more detailed then the words which can be used to describe it.

Therefore everytime you analyze a moment and break it down into words (mental commentary) you are over simplifying. The words are simply not accurate.

My 2 cents. "

Yea. Freakin words man. It's funny that the second you describe something, you're fucking wrong! Words just fail, that's all there is to it. I really feel they can cheapen an experience by placing it in a box. You end up with a ton of experiences which all belong in the same box and you think, i'm bored, this is all the same. But really, it's not all the same. You just don't fucking notice cause you threw everything into the same box.

Yes, coffee is coffee. But no 2 cups of coffee are the same. God, even different SIPS of coffee have different consistancies and different temperatures. If you think everytime you drink a cup of coffee it's just another tally on the box labeled "coffee" you're fuckin doing it wrong! Pay attention grasshopper!

Don't get me wrong here, this has very little to do with coffee, and I'm as guilty as the next guy. I guess the buzzword here is:

conceptualize

1. to form into a concept; make a concept of. –verb (used without object)
2. to form a concept; think in concepts.

Once you conceptualize anything, you're probably wrong. There are some exceptions, rigid science can reach certain truth's through words, though most science these days isn't really science at all. Now that I think about it, the science that expresses real truth's can be represented in numbers like the acceleration of an object under the influence of Earth's gravity slightly above sea level. However even with that there is some inaccuracy. Wind resistance isn't taken into account for one thing. You could measure the force of gravity on an object at a particular altitude, but if the Earth isn't perfectly round, that altitude measurement becomes a bit fuzzy.

Man I'm just proving my own fuckin point trying to disprove it. Once you conceptualize something, you're wrong. Shit is just too complicated. You could spend a lifetime describing the interactions of atoms and molecules when you take a bite out of a sandwich and you still wouldn't have described the taste.

Weak Beggining

Funny how you can have a million random thoughts bouncing around in your brain yet when it comes time to put pen on paper (or fingers on keys in this case) there's nothing.

Currently reading Freud theories, re-reading I should say. I'm not sure if it's because I wan't to figure out other people or myself. His theories on Id, Ego, and Superego remind me of things I've learning visiting E-Sangha (www.lioncity.net/buddhism) which is a Buddhist forum where I learned (or was linked to) pretty much everything I know about Buddhism. I suppose I already read some very short books. They had to be short, because I have a short attention span. AFK washroom.....

Well now that the ice is broken, I'm content to just ramble on to myself, since likely I will end up reading this more then anyone else. Seems my memory just doesn't have extra room these days, so I better fuckin write this shit down if I ever want to remember anything.

Some guy on the Buddhist forum posts "is using psychic powers to win the lottery wrong?" man... some fucking people. It just makes you wonder if they missed the whole point? IF (big if) enlightened people DO INDEED have psychic powers... do you think they give a rats ass about the lottery? The fact that this guy cares about the lottery clearly demonstrates he's not enlightened which even further reduces the believability that he has psychic powers. And as someone just posted... just because random numbers pop into your head doesn't mean they are lottery numbers. The lottery bit is a self intepretation and a sign of greed, clinging and attatchment.

Ah yes, a little more of me projecting my superego on others. Clearly worded on this site.

"The Superego Inside Oneself but Directed at Someone Outside "
http://www.freud.org.uk/superego.html

I think I've been doing this pretty hardcore for a month or two. Feels like I am generating some pretty seriously bad karma these last months. When you just want to lash out at stupid people and infuriate them because their stupid comments infurate me so much I need revenge or something.... yea... that's bad. It's not going to get me anywhere, but I apparently love to tell people when they are wrong in the most blunt manner possible. Sometimes I even manage to convince myself that I am just about always right.... what a horribly unattractive quality.

Speaking of unattractive, I'm sick of attraction. It's easy to be attracted to someone, catch is it almost never turns out as good as you would think. And by almost never, I mean never. There's such a huge gap to bridge between men and women I sometimes wonder if it's worth the effort. Of course that's not to say I'm gay. I just think sex has got to be one of the most over-rated things on the planet, yet since I am "blessed" with a pair of nuts, I can't stop thinking about it. How nice. And thankfully society is kind enough to constantly display flawless half naked females everywhere possible while at the same time displaying the most idealized men possible thus making everyone miserable. You can't compete with your own sex's ideal, and you'll never get the other sex's ideal, but lets all torture ourselves about it so we can sell some shit. Don't I sound like an emo girl? Yes I do.

Hey self, stop being such an emo crybaby bitch and blaming everyone else for your problems eh? Show some fucking discipline eh? Is conciousness in control of the mind, or am I going to just let my mind wander all willy nilly doing whatever it wants? Heh.... I suppose I can tell myself that all I want. I'm not sure if discipline will ever conquor loneliness though. I'd like to think it can.

I can't help it. I can help it. Hmmm. I like to say modern society likes to adpot a "I can't help it" attitude. Blame genetics, blame upbringing, blame your friends, your environment, your job, the government, whatever, it's not my fault, I can't help it. It frustrates me because people don't accept responsibility for their own actions. Like a post on the Blizzard forums the other day. Someone was asking if Blizzard was taking any action to be responsible and make their game less addictive. First of all addictive is a loaded word and people throw it around without defining it which pisses me off. The whole modern concept of "addiction" is just another way of saying "it's not my fault I can't help it". Anyway to shed the blame right? Second of all, if people get addicted to WoW it's their own goddamn fault, not Blizzards. I mean shit... should Ice Cream vendor's be taking action to ensure people who eat ice cream are eating responsibly? It's fucking ridiculous if you take this addiction thing too far.

There's some more bad karma for me. Why do I require all the strong language? For some reason I must curse to make my point? Ungh... this is one of those things I sway back and forth on. Curse language... is it bad? Makes some people uncomfortable I think. But at the same time when people tell me to stop swearing, man it makes me want to swear up a storm. How about I fucking curse up and fucking down shitting all over your values and completely fucking disrespecting anything you care about cause I'm an ass who doesn't give a shit. Then I like to point out that despite my swearing, the person is still ok, they are breathing, seemingly healthy, and don't appear to be physically affected. Pretty cold way of thinking about it I guess. It's like if someone's standing on the edge of the pool saying "is the water cold?" and you just throw them in instead of answering. Shit, they'll live right? At the same time... they'll die eventually too. Is what really matters what happens on the physical plane, or is their emotional state what really matters? Then again, what is the impact on my emotional state when someone else wants to censor my speech?

I suppose what makes foul language bad is the hightened emotions that come with it. I suppose I swear so much cause I'm this big fucking ball of anxiety unless I'm totally stoned. Then when you get totally stoned you don't really pay attention to what your saying and just swear all nonchelant like. I suppose calm swearing is ok. When I say things like "Stop fucking standing in the whirlwind!" the hightened emotional value attatched to the curse is probably not helping. Just some more bad karma.

I say karma but I'm not sure thats what I really think. I don't beleive in rebirth or reincarnation in the literal sense, that's for sure. If anything my philosophy on rebirth is something like waves on the ocean. Is a wave a wave? Is it itself? Or is it just a part of the ocean. When does a wave start and when does a wave end? Another wave can appear in the same place at another time, but is it the same wave? Sort of..... not really. Thats how I think of rebirth. Like some big pool of conciousness. Like taking a small chunk of play-dough from a big chunk, then putting it back on, mushing it all up, then taking another small chunk off. You never really get the exact same chunk twice but it's all the same play-dough.

I do feel however that negativity festers in a person. This is what I mean by karma. I guarentee thinking bad things about everyone around you will make you more miserable then thinking good things about everyone around you. The catch is not to think TOOOO good things about everyone around you, otherwise you're going to get scammed, and walked all over. It's hard to find that balance though. Getting scammed, used, or walked on, sure turns you (and me) into a jaded, grumpy, son of a bitch. Not to say I've been scammed or walked on lately. I'm just being a grumpy son of a bitch for no reason.

This post has probably gone on long enough, I better end it and start a new one before it becomes a massive TLDR wall of text.