Acquaintances are Better than Friends

[Altair]

Originally Posted by Gem

It's amazing how little choice is actually going on, and also amazing how things that are happening are interpreted as chosen.

I have to disagree with this. Sure, many things we do happen cruise control, but there are many conscious choices made as well. I do it every day. If you have plans or if you have to think things over, at work or elsewhere, you are activating your reasoning capacities and you will have to make choices. Sometimes things become very routine, like driving the same road every day, but you probably realize a joy again when you taste a different road.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by Altair

disagree with this.

I didn't say there are no conscious choices, which seems to be what you disagree with, but you can't just imagine I said something I didn't and claim to disagree, because although you rebuke, I agree with everything you said without changing my initial position. This implies you don;t disagree with what I think, but you disagree with with what you think I think.

I'm just skeptical that isolated lifestyles are chosen, even if it's preferred. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but using an exception to the rule as a counterpoint actually supports the claim rather than provides evidence against it. Like if I say people have ten fingers, and another says I know someone with only nine - that actually supports the rule by citing the exception to it. Likewise, people will disagree and say, I know someone who chose it and has no influencing hangups, but generally speaking, the increasing incidence of lonesome lifestyles isn't chosen and it's rarely preferred.

In my case it isn't chosen because personal issues make me more remote, and most lonesome folks have issues like that. Plus then there are overall social trends that influence increasingly lone ways of life.

On this forum we want to say its spiritual, but then you find out that self-proclaimed lonesome people have a best mate and close friends, which... how is that a lonesome way?. A lonesome way is by definition having no one to turn to. For me it's different. No partner, no friends and I do everything on my own, but because I get along with my siblings and their kids - I think those are close relationships, and I don't feel lonely.

[Maisy]

Well we are conditioned to think we are making choices anyway. The brain is doing billions of calculations a second to make our thoughts. We are aware of zero of those calculations and have nothing to do with their creation. Eventually we are conscious of the final product, thoughts, and assume they are from ourselves. Then onward goes the delusional life. If we are not the maker of our thoughts, conscious awareness, then how can we be in control of anything? Choice would be a fiction from the brain. What better way to convince us there is a self than to make it think it is making choices.

[Maisy]

What is an individual conscious awareness if not a self? Well it is a witness, an observer, that usually is tricked into believing it is a person and feels guilt and so on over things that happened due to identification with the life the brain is making. "I did this and that." Did we really? We can wake up, go to the bathroom and brush our teeth, make and eat breakfast, and drive to work and have every one of those things be done by the brain. We don't even have to pay attention. We can live on auto pilot. We can even talk with others and have the brain behind all of it.

Buddhism teaches there is no self or such and such is non-self or we are empty or whatever idea we like or don't like according to how our brain makes our thoughts. Can one be free of all thought? Worth a try I think! But then my brain thought that thought. My brain made every word I typed in this post. Don't believe the reality of any of it!

[Maisy]

Originally Posted by Gem

Likewise, people will disagree and say,

The brain likes to disagree as that gives one a sense of self I think. Like I am this unique individual that knows stuff. More than this other person. I believe x y z lol. It's all just words. What reality does a word have? It's wholly conceptual. In the mind or imagination. Though one could say something objectively true I suppose. Like the sky is blue... but then I've been disagreed with a lot even with that idea. Blue is subjective as somebody may be standing where it is black or pink etc. There is also no way to be sure we are seeing the same thing no matter words we agree on to say. It's been proven we have different taste. So we all say apple, but we are tasting different things.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by Maisy

The brain likes to disagree

A lot of people don't realise that a lot of what they think are choices are really only psychological reactions impelling them to this and that. Even the mind that leaps to disagree and agree is usually just being reactive, and I find that when people disagree with me, I actually agree with them, so I'm not sure what's going on there, but it's all context and nuance. However, there is such a thing as being wrong, misguided, deluded and so on, and I think most of us are at a most fundamental level. I'm more comfortable with uncertainty that the average bear, and I can tell you for free, everything I say I know ends up dissolving where the mind reaches its comprehensive limit, and ironically, what I am certain and doubtless about is entirely subjective: "this is what it's like".