Are yoiu anything in yourself?

[china]

Are you anything in yourself? Strip yourself of your name, title, money, position, your capacity to write a book and be flattered—and what are you? So, why not realize and be that? You see, we have an image of what it is to be nothing, and we don’t like that image; but the actual fact of being nothing, when you have no image, may be entirely different. And it is entirely different. It is not a state that can be realized in terms of being nothing or of being something. It is entirely different when there is no image of yourself. And to have no image of yourself demands tremendous attention, tremendous seriousness. I,m surethat it is only the attentive, the serious, that live, not the people who have images of themselves.Are you anything in yourself ??

 

[darkbeaver]

The image of the stripped self is still ego.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Are you anything in yourself?

Of course I am. I'm a man, a husband, a father, a child, a brother, a friend, and a lot of other things. You seem to me to be asking, if I strip myself of everyhing that defines me and matters to me, is there anything left? No there isn't, and how could there be? By definition there's nothing left if you take everything away.

Not one of your better questions china. Nothing equals nothing. That's trivially obvious, and so what?

 

[china]

darkbeaver:
The image of the stripped self is still ego


......It is entirely different when there is no image of yourself. And to have no image of yourself demands tremendous attention, tremendous seriousness. I,m surethat it is only the attentive, the serious, that live....._________________________________________

You have to be serious and pay attention when reading a poste.

 

[Kreskin]

How would anyone know? Who has never had a self image?

 

[china]

The Dexter Sinister :



Quote:
Originally Posted by china
Are you anything in yourself?

Of course I am. I'm a man, a husband, a father, a child, a brother, a friend, and a lot of other things. You seem to me to be asking, if I strip myself of everyhing that defines me and matters to me, is there anything left? No there isn't, and how could there be? By definition there's nothing left if you take everything away.

Not one of your better questions china. Nothing equals nothing. That's trivially obvious, and so what?





One has an idea, a symbol of oneself, an image of oneself: what one should be, what one is, or what one should not be. Why does one create an image about oneself? Because one has never studied what one is, actually. You think you should be this or that: the ideal, the husband ,the hero, the example. What awakens anger is that your ideal, the idea you have of yourselves, is attacked. And your idea about yourselves is your escape from the fact of what you are. But when you are observing the actual fact of what you are, no one can hurt you. Then, if one is a liar and is told that one is a liar, it does not mean that one is hurt: it is a fact. But when you are pretending you are not a liar and are told that you are, then you get angry, violent. So, one is always living in an ideational world, a world of myth, and never in the world of actuality. To observe what is, to see it, actually be familiar with it, there must be no judgment, no evaluation, no opinion, no fear

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Why does one create an image about oneself? Because one has never studied what one is, actually.

Good question, wrong answer. We create an image of ourselves because we must, that's just the way our minds work. We don't create an image of ourselves because we don't examine ourselves, we do it because we *do* examine ourselves. In many cases that examination is shallow and self-serving (i.e. there are fools everywhere), but we all do it.

What awakens anger is that your ideal, the idea you have of yourselves, is attacked. And your idea about yourselves is your escape from the fact of what you are.

No, I don't buy that one either. Lots of things anger me that have nothing to do with my self image. Nor do I accept that my image of myself is an escape from or denial of reality. I think 30+ years of thought and introspection have given me an accurate view of myself and what my strengths and weaknesses are.

But when you are observing the actual fact of what you are, no one can hurt you.

I have no clear idea what that really means, but it doesn't have the ring of truth about it. I'm pretty sure I know who and what I am, but the people closest to me can still hurt me. That's an inevitable consequence of letting people get close to you, and it has nothing to do with me observing the actual fact of what I am. If you let yourself love someone, you can be hurt, and if you don't , you're hurting yourself.

To observe what is, to see it, actually be familiar with it, there must be no judgment, no evaluation, no opinion, no fear

Nonsense. Nobody can observe without forming judgements and opinions. Conceivably some god-like being might be able to do that, though all the gods I've ever heard of are extremely judgemental and opinionated, but that's asking too much of mere humans.

 

[china]

Dexter Sinister,

I have no clear idea what that really means, but it doesn't have the ring of truth about it. I'm pretty sure I know who and what I am, but the people closest to me can still hurt me. That's an inevitable consequence of letting people get close to you, and it has nothing to do with me observing the actual fact of what I am. If you let yourself love someone, you can be hurt, and if you don't , you're hurting yourself.

Dear friend, No one is going to hurt you.I ,ll make sure of that, OK?

 

[El Barto]

I ahd a teacher who taught me that as I was growing up, my dad. He always said I'd amount to nothing. Thats a joke with some truth to it.

 

[TomG]

Borrowing from David Whyte in his wiritings about the corporation: ‘…We are not our job descriptions and the small prisons those descriptions have made for ourselves. We are not our profit and loss statements. Nor are we are ambitions and career prospects. As the Chinese sage Wu Wei Wu admonished:

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9% of what you think,
And everything you do,
Is for your self,
And there isn’t one.

Why is the present corporation such a well of anxiety and stress? Because all of its strivings are to preserve its identity for the future, and for the most part, it doesn’t have an identity, or at least one the soul might consider worth wanting.’

We have become our work, and like Oscar Wilde observed of an acquaintance, ‘The job has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all its friends.’

Wu Wei—the action of non-action in Taoism
http://www.jadedragon.com/archives/june98/tao.html
A crude idea in Taoism, which is all I’m capable of, is that we must rid ourselves of the false self that comes from our separateness from the world. We must seek to become part of the world and exist in balance and harmony. To be corporate, to become our jobs, is to become like a gated community where we spend all our time inside defending and none of our time living. A place to live that isn’t. A thing our souls would not care to possess.

My self is the thing that makes me what I am--the soul. It is the thing called I. It is something that strives to exist as part of and in harmony with the world. In Taoism, the act of purposeless wandering unites us closer with the world. Acts of intentional will separate us from the world. The will comes from the false self.

If I were intentionally willful and all my things, my substance, then desert me (as the things of those who live separately for themselves will do) I might write as did Vachel Lindsay. I would not be part of the world.

GHOSTS IN LOVE

Tell me, where do ghosts in love
Find their bridal veils?

If you and I were ghosts in love,
We’d climb the cliffs of Mystery,
Above the sea of Wails.
I’d trim your gray and streaming hair
With veils of Fantasy
From the tree of Memory.
‘Tis there where the ghosts that fall in love
Find their bridal veils.

Poemhunter.com

Vachel Lindsay was an iterant American Poet and social activist who wandered, but perhaps with purpose, and wrote poems for food.

 

[Curiosity]

Am I anything?

I am my best friend;
I am my worst critic;
I am a daughter, widow, sibling to many, stepmother, aunt, cousin,
I am a generous and loyal friend, cruel enemy, caring neighbor, busy professional;
I am happy;
I am sad;
I am intelligent;
I am stupid;
I am curious;
I am lazy;
I am determined;
I am stubborn;
I am willing;
I am unwilling;
I am perfect;
I am imperfect;
I am human.

 

[AmberEyes]

Strip me of all my posessions, my title and my identity, and what you have left is a plain, ordinary human being with a soul.

We create images of ourselves so that we may strive to be what we aren't. We develope an archtype, an image that posesses all of the qualities we wish to see in our own lives - sometimes it's honesty, sometimes it's power, sometimes it's love. It can be anything, but if we don't have it - we want it. Yes, it can be very selfish - but to deny servitude to one's self is to deny servitude to the world. If we are content as angry, greedy individuals we will hardly contribute to the growth of our world's future. When we take the time to develope our soul and become good people, we actively participate in helping our world become better. Selfishness isn't always evil.

 

[darkbeaver]

darkbeaver:
The image of the stripped self is still ego


......It is entirely different when there is no image of yourself. And to have no image of yourself demands tremendous attention, tremendous seriousness. I,m surethat it is only the attentive, the serious, that live....._________________________________________

You have to be serious and pay attention when reading a poste.

I will try.But that is a long road.:smile:

 

[darkbeaver]

Nothing is impossible. When we first get here we are as full of the one as we can ever be and as empty of the other as we will never be again. We are reflections, if you don't reflect you have rejoined the one in your entirety.
Life requires constant reflected renewal from the one or the whole, the individual is a fraction of that whole or one. You seem to be speaking of minimalization of the reflections
to select only the bare requirements of necessary maintenance of your vulgar fraction.
Of course these ideas are bound by Sinister logic, but still we don't have to submit to the trap of reason lightly. We do not exist separate from the one (universe) when we have no sense of it we have returned the borrowed part back to the whole. We can only approach emtyness in life.IMHO

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Dear friend, No one is going to hurt you.I ,ll make sure of that, OK?

Nice offer, but that's not really something you can do. Not even if you were right here beside me.

 

[tamarin]

If I'm not me
Am I you?
Whatever can we do
Identity is true
To its maker.

 

[talloola]

Who I really am, without all of the priviledge of this country, would be the me without an image, the me
who could go out everyday, without shoes, and "happily", think of getting enough food for myself and my
family, being warm, clean, and free of harm.
When I look into the faces of the families in the parts of the world, who actually do this everyday, I
amazingly feel a little sad, not for them, but for us, who have so much, that we don't even recognize
the "real" us, without "image", as, we are really them, in disguise.

 

[tamarin]

You are two things. Mind and body. When you're alone and with time to think about it and with no distraction, you realize how separate the two are. And you wonder how this mind got placed in this body and which is the better for it. We are who we are when no one else is around. And not one thing disturbs the hour.

 

[darkbeaver]

We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot. It's an essentially preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue because what we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In fact not "a" religious sensibility, the religious sensibility. Not built on some con game spun out by eunuchs, but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000 years before the advent of history riding priestcraft and propaganda. So it's a clarion call to recover a birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. A call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in this mysterious mama matrix which is all around us and which apparently extends to infinity and where our historical future actually lies. This is the other thing.
It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techinques, all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture. And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple. The shamanic response in this situation I think is to push the art pedal through the floor.
Years and years ago before the term "psychedelic" was settled on there was just a phenomenological description. These things were called "consciousness-expanding" drugs. I think that's a very good term. Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be? To my mind the psychedelic position is most fundamentally threatening when fully logically thought out because it is an anti-drug position, and make no mistake about it, the issue is "drugged." How drugged shall you be? Or to put it another way: consciousness. How conscious shall you be? Who shall be conscious? Who shall be unconscious? Imagine if the Japanese had won World War II, taken over America, and introduced an insidious drug which caused the average American to spend six and a half hours a day consuming enemy propaganda. But this is what was done. Not by the Japanese but by ourselves. This is television. Six and a half hours a day! Average! That's the average! So there must be people out there hooked on twenty-four hours a day. I visit people in L.A. who have one set on in every room so they're racking up a lot of time for the rest of us.
Terence McKenna

 

[tamarin]

DB, tell Terence to learn how to write. Surely, even though you might support his ideas you can't possibly support his style. I can't read prose like that without shutting down.