muddi [he/him]

  • 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2020

help-circle






  • I’ll check it out! Thanks for the rec

    And about the Indian stories, I think you’ll find a rhythmic pattern. Maybe the translations can ruin it, I can’t confirm or deny this.

    I think you’re right, I’m probably missing out on certain contexts and linguistic play reading the English translations. It adds to the melancholy in a way though, knowing there’s more beneath the surface of the words I can only barely grasp



  • There is a baggage associated with the word “cult” now.

    It used to mean pretty much a specific practice of a religion. For example, in a polytheistic religion, you can choose a favorite god and perhaps even worship that figure exclusively, even while believing in all the others eg. later Hindu ishtadevata practices

    This kind of cult evolved into those around mysteries or mysterious figures (eg. Eleusinia, Mithraism) and real-world figures like monarchs like the Roman emperor. Eventually you have the death cults of the last few decades which cemented the pejorative sense of “cult” and also inspired the sociology around the same. I should also mention, there is a chauvinism in this as well eg. cargo cults

    To answer your question, there is this historical context to it. But also the perspective: one can look back through history or across the world to identify “cults” but not recognize that one lives in a culture or participates in cultish behavior themselves





  • Others have mentioned, everything is moving away from each other, like the surface of an expanding balloon. But that is what we observe, and there is more beyond the observable universe.

    There is an idea that our universe might actually be in a black hole in a higher universe. To expand on the balloon simile (pun intended), this would be like a balloon expanding uniformly except in a spot, a bubble appears and expands faster. A bubble within a bubble. Kind of a tumor, an outgrowth universe. Hope I’ve been illustrative enough.

    It’s not exactly what you asked, but a higher level black hole is kind of something pulling all matter in our universe instead of pushing.






  • I guess if getting new data is not allowed, then interpolation or extrapolation would be the next best option. Interpolation would be connecting existing thoughts to form or find new ones in between. Extrapolation would be following a train of thought to its ultimate end. This could be done in either the diffused or focused mental states. I like to draw up diagrams for this so I can see the blank spots to fill or direction things seem to be going.

    There is also the semantics of the question. It’s actually quite an ancient topic, where our thoughts come from. What does “original” mean? The thought originating in our mind, or from some higher realm? I won’t go too deep into this, just bringing it up to think about it. The only thing I wanted to say is that maybe our mind is not entirely free and agentive, but actually there is a “darkness that comes before” to reference The Second Apocalypse which we can’t conquer, but are conquered by.

    On a lighter note, and from my own experience, it is definitely possible to generate new thoughts outside of that diffuse cloud of repeated thoughts formed on the storehouse of experience accumulated so far in our lives. Following practices of mindfulness, we can learn to recognize the noise of our mind and separate those “thoughts” from what we might call more agentive thoughts that we can control over, wherever they come from. I do meditations in these styles and achieve a mental state beyond the diffuse and focused, kind of inverse to dreaming (cf. turiya for this kind of formulation of a fourth state of mind). In this state, you can come to understand things which you could probably never do in the other mental states. Those thoughts feel “cleaner” as if coming from a true origin rather than bounced around a cloud of repeated thoughts like you mention.

    But I feel like maybe these thoughts are not exactly the ones you are looking for. They are removed from our everyday sense of living, and not really invested in disciplines we have come up with socially as humans. It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote. It would have been an original thought for him sure, but kind of besides the point.

    Edit: as an example for the interpolation/extrapolation, consider sentences like “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” or actual usages of this sort of thing in literature:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirātārjunīya#Linguistic_ingenuity

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

    The interesting part is that constrained thinking is what produces this


  • Think of it dialectically, not in a polar way. So called “good” and “bad” have to come together in one for one to be able to surpass the apparent duality. Any enlightenment, individual or social, should come from the stage after good/bad

    This is what the sages will say, on the individual level: it’s not so much good vs bad as useful or not useful (to some end). We need to understand and maybe learn to control what this “end” is. Similar thing with socialism: it’s not class war for the sake of one class winning, but rather abolishing class as a system altogether