What is life all about?

[china]

What is life all about? Does it mean anything? Where are we looking for happiness or liberation? Do we have free will? What is enlightenment and how can I get it? Can anything be done to free ourselves from depression, anxiety, compulsive behavior, wars, holocausts, prejudices? What is spiritual , what isn’t. What happens when we die?
The thinking mind wants to find answers to questions. When you’re trying to find out which bus to take or how to build a house, this ability to find answers is a useful function. But the thinking mind doesn’t know when to stop thinking or when thinking is useful and when it isn’t. And so, as we grow up, we live more and more in a conceptual world trying to think our way to happiness. We lose touch with the immediacy and wonder we had as children.
When I was very young, my mother used to give me a pail of water and a paintbrush so that I could "paint" on the sidewalk. I’d paint these paintings on the sidewalk with water, and they would disappear in a matter of minutes, but that didn’t matter because what I was enjoying was the sheer joy of doing it. It needed no reward, no praise, no permanence. It was complete in itself. Stop thinking and start living .
Your point of view .

 

[tamarin]

What is life all about?
That's the question.
It's about experience. And wonder. And keeping childhood faith as long as possible. And then fighting the hardening of attitudes that comes with the years.

 

[MikeyDB]

Life it seems is all about genuflecting before the dollar.... Establishing "entitlements"...the wealthy to theirs and the poor to poverty...

We've been so convinced that "greed is good" that our appetites have grown beyond the capacity of this planet to sustain....

Life is "about" it would appear...the preparedness that human beings have to regard their own existence (personal individual) as more important than the happiness and sustainability of the whole.

Life is about "greed"....well that's what we've manufactured in our post industrial world...and what drives petroleum wars, genocides and all the darker angels of our human nature...

We have embraced our propensity to self-extermination in the name of profit and pleaure...

 

[MikeyDB]

A quick survey of the threads here at CC would lead one to believe that "life is about" all the isolated issues from the wheat board to Al Gore....with nothing else involved.

Small wonder the world's in the mess it's in...

If we accept the participation of people here at CC as exemplar...everyone things their own little focus on some discrete item out of the millions that surround us ...is THE meaning of life....

As soon as you surrender your thinking to media and to the idea that the world and life is only that part of life and the world that you are familiar with...then you lay yourself open to having your thinking channelled and your "mindset" manipulated....

It's gotten us to where we are..... and is that a good thing?????

 

[TekJansen]

Life is about life. Too many people think that life is about death, or about dodging death for as long as possible. Life is merely ended by death. The journey is about the journey itself, not the destination.

Life is a brief moment. It is beautiful, it is ugly......it is all we have.

Life is too short to worry about the small ****.

ps- It's ALL small ****.

 

[china]

MickeyDB
It's gotten us to where we are..... and is that a good thing?????

Something to think about Mickey or, perhaps something can be done abut it?

 

[TekJansen]

It's gotten us to where we are..... and is that a good thing?????

I think where I am in life is a good thing. it took me a long time to get in a good, happy place in life.

 

[china]

Can the "world" teach you how to live , if not ...who can ?

 

[darkbeaver]

Life is all about death, you forget that at your peril.

 

[TekJansen]

Life is all about death, you forget that at your peril.

I disagree, life is near death. Life is only about death in the sense of proximity, imAo.

Death is dependant on life and life is dependant on death, but life is about itself just as death is about itself.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

From Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

...we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder."

LIfe is about whatever you make it to be about. It's up to you. You're responsible, so make the best of it that you can, with all the love and laughter and caring and concern and interest that you can generate. To do less is to fail at it. Words of wisdom from my late father: only the best you can do is good enough.

 

[MikeyDB]

Wonderful quote Dexter..

Now get Dawkins on the phone and ask him to give us the answers...

 

[Niflmir]

Can we be taught how to live by the world?

For a long time I thought no. Then, after a psychotic episode, I changed that answer to yes. I suppose, depending on how you see it, maybe my psychosis really taught me more. But when I think of how much all the members of my family did for me, I cannot find the selfishness to say that they didn't show me the way I was missing.

Now, I continuously make decisions for a better way of life over a fatter wallet. I would rather have my time than money. For the work that I do, I enjoy, for the money I have, I enjoy. For any extra money, I just can not put a reasonable figure to it. My remaining time has become priceless.

If I lived my life all over again, I would do everything different, just to experience it in a new and exciting way. If I could only change one thing, I would change nothing. I like my life, regrets and all.

 

[MikeyDB]

I'm really starting to like you Niflmir!

Be happy with what you have. If you become convinced that a bigger and better XYZ is the "meaning" of life...you end up playing the competition game....

You end up allowing yourself to become a pawn to businessess and people who don't care about your existence or your well-being...only in sucking your life out of you in the name of reaping a harvest of wealth and servitude. We are conditioned from birth to evaluate our relative "worth" to society by the objectification of the principles we pay lip-service to...

If you're "successful"...if you can demonstrate an ability to accumulate things...money houses cars...then the assumption made is that you're a "good" person. We're in the mess we're in ...climate war and poverty...not because life's challenges are insurmountable but because it's easier to lean toward apathy and complacency than it is to challenge...or perhaps be even combative...

We're conditioned to consumption. We're conditioned to sexual and societal stereoyping...

Our appetites are what are addressed first...long before our needs are acknowledged.

 

[Curiosity]

China

In February I was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer - and strangely enough since then life has had much more meaning for me.

Each day hasn't enough time for me to do all the things I hope to accomplish while I am still able.

Perhaps if we lived as if time was more important - that tomorrow may never come - we would enjoy more what we have today.

It has nothing to do with what has gone on before either - which surprised me - it is what I do with the information I now have and how I put it to use.

Another good subject China! Curio

 

[MikeyDB]

I'd give you a lung if I could Curio....

The ones I have still work....even though I've abused them for fifty years....

Be strong....

Hugs 4U

 

[jimmoyer]

My girl friend's mom who is now 79, had one lung taken out 15 years ago.

We go to her house whose husband is 84 to play Texas Hold-em poker on a work night
to about midnight and after too much Makers Mark and a significant loss of money
we walk home, not wanting to risk a DUI.

Wednesday's Child, you're not supposed to be inoperable.

 

[Curiosity]

Haha Thanks Mikey DB

Hang on to the ones you have - be selfish and take care of them!

 

[Curiosity]

Hi JimMoyer

Lucky lady with her new lung - I am jealous and medical science never ceases to amaze me...along with their courageous patients who are actually explorers in our world of internal things.

I can't even have a biopsy because the lung condition is such I wouldn't survive.... I am going to have another CT in June to see the growth rate...this will give me a better time frame for sorting out things....

Other than the news I feel fine and strangely enough feel more vital that I won't be getting too many of what we term: 'second chances' to amend our boo boos....gotta try and do it right the first time around.

Wednesday's Child

 

[Outta here]

8O

Curiosity, I'm so sorry to hear of this. That's all I can say.

Please take as good care of yourself as you can.

:-(