When I’m in my full embodiment: I love a neutral-ass time. Nice things are nice until they’re not.
And if our happiness goes out the door with the supposed nice things, we’re shit out of luck.
Life’s complex and when it comes to our perspectives, I think we should collectively question ourselves more. And by collectively, I mean you.
Why do we believe what we believe? Regardless of the answer, the prevailing truth is that all answers are conditioned answers.
This structurally has implications for the weight of our human expression as it writes into the void of readily observable impermanence. Fruits spoil; revealing their final form on the windshield of our awareness.
There’s a limit to linguistics. Our language evolved into allowing us to contextually navigate perceptual events. It maps to thoughts and constructs that enable our body to manifest function in perceived space-time.
To present this experience, our brain filters things out. Like the ringing in our ears, the amorphous shapes and colors floating around our vision, the sensations of the body, the arbitrary/contextually-irrelevant thoughts, the moments we deem too mundane to categorize as an event in and of itself (like the socks you put on today,) etc.
The list of all it’s ongoing processes are actually too long to list here.
Even the voice in the mind, the inner monologue we tend to identify with, is not as stable and continuous as it seems.
If you listen close there are snippets of artifacts that have nothing to do with anything - even if our mind is quick to snap a storyline in place or drive us to action not observing this truth.
This is why when you think of your car you think of your car bill.
Or when you think of work, the concomitant emotions, body sensations, and mental images and mental chatter occurs.
The nebulosity and lack of storyline inherent in all objects of attention go mostly unnoticed because attention is pulled by more stimulating perceived possibilities, the brain rewards and steers according to exercised models.
The mind filters millions of things to present a stable sense of continuity, the same way an editor brings together a bunch of disjointed scenes and constructs a movie in accordance to their likings and displeasures.
Recognizing this on the fundamental level is on the spectrum of what’s possible in human development - this option is off the radar for the bulk of us because it’s not mapped to some perceived need. Also, most people don’t have time for it.
Whether we like it or not, we are a “look, water!” species, not a “oh, this is reality” species.
And human behavior is driven entirely by perceived need, not actual need.
“Truth itself is independent of the utility of the truth.
“We don’t work based off our needs, we work based off our models of our needs. We call them purposes - they are the things we think we need to serve in order to meet our needs.
“Survival is not a need, it’s way too complicated for a reptilian brain to understand the nature of life and death. It’s a purpose; it’s a model you make of all your needs.” - Joscha Bach, AI researcher and cognitive scientist at Harvard, MIT.
It’s not surprising for viewpoints contrasting the materialist paradigm to be socially filtered from our world because the unfortunate truth is that many times, we only see people in the way we objectify them.
When we don’t question this process enough, this objectification goes unchecked.
And in my experience, whatever is practiced tends to become more ingrained into our being.
We oppress our loved ones with our old views of them.
And the dominate paradigm, materialism, fallaciously assumes it’s objectifications to be a stable default. This is baseless.
Materialism is a story.
We pass our stories and traumas to our children but unspoken in this is also the truth that we share the limits of our perspectives of the world; painting reality through confines.
“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” - Karl Marx
For most of us, our perspective is molded by being in a goldilocks zone, striving to never be uncomfortable and having pleasure within reach.
This doesn’t allow us to see our false perceptions very clearly, however.
People who are enabled and obliged to break their family’s intergenerational traumas are often perceptive of the degrees humans are capable of being deluded.
And equally important, how that delusion socially spreads from one person to another.
If it seems like these things are small things, they’re not.
These are all the topics being appear internationally in their presenting forms. it’s just in bites and smaller contexts; disconnected from the broader canon, many times attributed and argued from the historical precedence of each individual problem - in many ways, it’s as if it’s disconnected from everything else.
This, because of the difficulty it would be in challenging the underlying notions people can ignorantly hold. We’re often self-righteous and identified with whatever we grew up with.
This is one way we get the oppressive, contracted views many of us have with perceived gender identities, for example. And the subsequent expressing of this social conditioning.
The insistence some of us have that “men are men and women are women” overlooks the fullness of our lived realities.
What it means to be human is to not be inherently tied to particular perceptions of biology; those are relics of our indoctrinations.
And they often sculpt our estimations for how the world works; our ignorance trailing us like a shadow, the light of our reality still shining regardless of our recognition.
“All I really know is the extent of my own ignorance” - Plato
Our realities are far more expansive and abundant than the servants of ignorance and disharmony manifest.
Science is splitting; everything available to be investigated perpetually reveal themselves to be another layer of complexity than initial estimations.
This means science and closed (read: determined) minds are mortal enemies.
But of course, those folks aren’t in the business of seeing reality: they’re in the business of enforcing their indoctrinated ideas onto the world around them in a hopeless effort to exercise control. Reifying their existence oppositional to their perceived problems.
It seems our species is stuck mostly just for the tradition of being stuck. It lies where it lies - these are social constructs we inherit.
IMO, the sooner we recognize and accept the limitations of our lived realities - which directly implicate our posture towards the world - the easier life will be for us.
The world speaks its spectrum.
If we were to go back in time and we could ask you “hey do you want to live a bunch of storylines… and be confined by them, just for the heck of it?” We’d be like “hell nah.”
The mind wants to be free, unburdened by the stories we tell ourselves.
Happiness exists within the confines of what can be attained, and everything that can be attained: fades. So, when we talk about happiness, it’s not often we’re referring to the inherent joy we can have by simply existing. We look for happiness. But “looking” is functionally for navigating to resources for furtherance of the body and mind, it’s limits are what they are.
So when I say happiness is an inadequate concept, what I really mean is the majority of models we approach happiness with carries with it equations that can only end in our displeasure.
End.