Perspective

I’m going to go on a rant here so bear with me (warning my brain is dead).

Over my last adventure to my grandparents, I get the pleasure of sharing my four day vacation with my  family.  Now if you don’t know me :P, I had a small attachment to a cartoon show over my high school years.  My mom brings this up, non-chalantly and to get a shortcut to the point, she played it off as me being a emo child that had nothing better than a stupid tv show.  So the family spent 15 minutes giving me shit over me yelling over this show.  What was this show to me?

Alright so I move from a school, where I feel comfortable and have a good group of friends to a school in the middle of no where in MIssouri.  I’m already self conscious about my weight (180 at about 5’ 3”), but I have engrained in my head that people don’t like me because of my weight.  I don’t go out of my way to talk to anyone, even with the people I know (because I don’t want to get in the way or be a hamper), much less with people that I don’t.  Ever get that weird feeling that people wonder what you are doing when you walk up and start a random conversation? well its always like that.  What is my escape?

This t.v. show that I went emo over, was the one thing that kept me happy.   I was so attached to the characters in the story and the story itself that I didn’t really care about not talking to many people, but at least I could get my thrills through this story.

This sets up my rant on perspective.  The older generation loses their sight of the future with their attachment to the ideas of the past.  At a certain point our parents were once the pioneers of the future, so the new generation has to take over. Not everyone gets blinded to their experience, but in the case of my family they get blinded by their experience and forget to apply it to the new.  Sometimes the thinkers are shoved down vs. the appliers of our knowledge.

I think this is probably the fundamental part of our problem in our society.  We are blinded by our own perspectives to see the other side.  Science for religion, Christianity vs. Islam.   Young vs. old.

We are penalized by this inability of the human race, and really as a whole we are held back by this fact.  I think if you are too dumb to be able to cast yourself into someone else’s shoes, you should be cast out of the pool (you can take this as you will).  Thinkers should prevail for our society vs. the mechanical appliers of what we’ve learned. 

P.S. politicians are dumb and most of the government is really too dumb to make it operate right, but that’s for another day.

The Legacy

vs.

 

 

 

I fit in more to the latter of the  two.  Yet my reception will never quite hit the level of THE BEAST.  So Exciting its like

vs

Long time since I posted

Its been a heck of a long time since I posted on here.  I went back and re read all my previous posts.  I still get in this conundrum, but I've got more intellectual evidence to support some of my claims. 

I like the idea of nihlism, but not necissarily as a rule to live by.  A nihlist belives that values are falsely invented.  To clarify, a nihlist believes that we ourselves place values onto our conceptions.  This view brings about many ideas on what would be considered to be attributed to a meaningful life.  One of which, and one that I consider the most important is morality.

A nihilistic moralist would view the world as many people would commonly view as being immoral.  The nihlistic moralistic would take everything for themselves and refuse to think that anything is immoral on the grounds that morality is something that we have defined.  You can not be immoral on the grounds that there is no real morality.

I don't look at morallity as something that is really defined, but more of a feeling and a compromise between people.  I used this example in a paper that I wrote for a class, but lets say you are travelling down the highway and some old cotton top lady cuts you off.  A morallist would likely react in at worst just yelling profannities through the confines of their car.  This doesn't cause any harm to anyone, adn even improves the situation because you are able to vent your anger.   Another way to react is to go ahead and ram the lady to run her off the road causing her to die in the ditch.  This is hugely gratifying and this cotton top fugly biatch deserved to die.  There is something about this that seems wrong.  This feeling closely lies with our moral standards or our conceptions of what is moral.  Lets take morality as an abstraction.

What morality seems to be is a definition of common ground between people.  If there were no trusts at all between people then we would constantly have to live with our backs against the wall.  A cornered tiger is forced to destroy while a cornered mouse is doomed for destruction.   Humans can take place of the mouse and the lion both at the same time or disjointly.  Now if each person is equal then they deserve the same rights to life and opportunity for existance.  In the scenario before this seems to be violated because by killing the old lady we are taking away her potential to living.  

How far should morality stretch.  Should it only be limited to the confines of our body or to exentions outwardly.  Should that T.V. be considered to be mine or is it really have any belonging to me.  It seems that if you put in the effort to work towards owning a place to put it, enough food to sustain your self, and something to watch on it, it should be something that I can guarantee to entertain myself with as I please.  So along with the metaphysical obligation to a valuable life we also have extensions of our thought to the physical world onto things that we work and invest our time for.  It seems more beneficial to be able to not see the purchase of a tv as a risk of having to get stolen.  Nowadays its all but dissappeared.

Hiding behind our in securities: reminder to myself.

• "Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength."

It is easy to hide behind our insecurities.  Turn the failures into something positive and don't give up.  Conquer everything that holds you back.

• "Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy."

Breaking the mold of habit is hard.  The only way to reap the benefits is to suffer through it.  There are no easy parts in life, but hiding behind normality will never allow anyone to better themselves.

 

• "Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity."
  - Christopher Morle

Dive into new stuff.  This is the only way to find more out about ourselves.  Continue to keep your mind learning.  Never let  yourself get so habitual you don't have to think during the day.  The mind will die.

 

• Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.
  - James F. Byrnes

Take risks.  If you try to stay too safe people are missing too much life.  But don't be so risky as to completely disregard your experiences.  Learning is slow.

 

• "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
• "Consider again that dot, that's here, that's home, that's us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know everyone you ever heard of lived out their lives."

We live on a planet in a universe.  Earth is 1/300th of the size of the sun.  Will our lives actually impact much in the scheme things?  We are but a lonely spec, not much bigger than a piece of dust.  Why fear when it doesn't really matter other than to ourselves.  Don't hold back and live without fear!  Don't be stupid

 

There are three truths:

1) a student, forever, weather i liked it or not

2) a philosopher, as we ALL are, each and every one of us are always going to living our own lives our way and that is the living representation of our own philosophies of life

3) my life as me defined by my actions

-Zi Jing Pan

All we can do is live, experience, understand, and learn.  We live by what we learn.  It may only be our personal understandings of things, but there is no way to know the true way of what it is the world is, so that's the next best thing.

W 2nd St to Stephendale Ct - Google Maps

W 2nd St to Stephendale Ct - Google Maps

First day that the weather is decent on the weekend.

The Meaning of Life

The meaning of life. Who would have ever thought googling the meaning of life would bring about the answer, but I realize that there is really no wrong meaning of life; there is no right answer and I decided what ever I choose it to be.

I worried about this for several years. Probably since I started college and bounced around what the popular ones were, but they don't really fit it. It was the drive to conform to society, but in most cases I don't really like where society is and where it is going. When I take a step back and look at it from different point of views, it seems more like humanity is just a fancy ant farm.

I tried to use the logics of society to convince myself that I needed to find a Super power above my comprehension. Philosophy on this is still very interesting and I went to this realm to answer that ultimate question. I'm not ruling out that there is a philosophical God, its just no longer going to impact that endless dread of not knowing what the reason to live is for.

Trying to fit in with the ways of my upbringing impacted some of my career decisions, but still there are some things that I do conform to. That may be hypocritical but its hard to operate in society with out conforming to some patterns that it lays out. I have to eat and have shelter.

I'm no longer going to worry about the mark I leave on the world. That was another struggle, I wanted to leave remnince of my existance on the world, but even the invention of the lightbulb has been mostly forgotten. They are there, and they are no longer an object of admiration. So what this leads me to is if I'm not enjoying the things I'm doing just to make that mark that will eventually be forgotten, its just a waste of my time. If its meant to leave a mark it will.

Even if there is a right answer and I'm completely wrong, I will wait for it to show up, but I'm going to quit worrying about it. Overall this has helped me to become happier (even though its only been a couple days).

Live happy, get big(thing bicepts!), and ride fast.

Turnmoil

What am I? Why do I exist? This is where my path is lost. Its almost like I'm going down a path that just keeps circling around, and I can't quite grasp what the answer is. This is a continuation from my theory of God, which is also still undecided except that I am convinced that there is a higher power, either good or bad.

What is it that drives me to do the things I do? One major part of my lifestyle is exercise, and over the last 6 months has become my most important priority. And yes even more than Grad school. I'll admit I have an exercise problem, I don't really have a reason for doing it besides not becoming a fatty again. I wasn't even that fat to begin with, but I'm very critical of myself and that's another line of thought all together. So, while I was running I started pondering on why it is I do the things I do.

There are two major idea's that sum up why life exists. There is the traditional story of religion, which I do not understand very well. What I can gather from it is that, we live my a certain set of rules ( not always a concreted set of rules, but driven by some inate force). This is irregardless of any religion because I see them all leading to the same idea. Religion basically tells me how I should live my live devoted to the word of their diety and by doing so, I will achieve eternal life. This eternal life happens in a world that we cannot touch, feel, see, smell, or taste. It is supposed to contain all the good that we can imagine. No sweat.

The other idea comes back to a world without a good God or the nonexistance of even having one. This means I'm driven by society and sex. Looking at other animals that we have theoretically evolved from (in this stand point) there are three fundamental parts of their life. They are: eat to live, reproduce to keep life flowing, and sleep to avoid dying.

By abstracting this (geeze I sound like a comp sci) as humans we have the choice to sleep, food is readily available, and to reproduce. Sleeping isn't really necessary to avoid dying because we have circumvented this by developing morales. The bulk of our morales are a derivative of religion and expectations of society. They almost guarantee that we will survive because killing each other is considered bad or evil. That only leaves one part to worry about, and that is reproduction.

Reproduction requires a male and female and a driven attraction to doing this. By way of evolution there is a certain sensation that each gender experiences when this happens. This sensation encourages it to happen again and again because it doesn't really cause pain :P. If I generalize again to animals, the more times sex happens the more likely babies occur. The population grows in effect. Anyway, this is the challenging part for the society. As we are raised we live to please our parents and to not get in trouble, but eventually we transition from that to trying to impress the opposite sex and achieving our own personal goals.

So what I want to achieve is in effect driven by the idea that there are certain expectations of society and that there is a God that I need to do the "right things". Am I doing what was destined for me to do by the higher power or simply an exercise of biology.

I still haven't affirmed that religion is truth or that the God's that they correspond to are even good, but they do ensure that I'm just not a piece of rotting meat destined to fertilize the ground. Death is somewhat of a mystery and is the reason why I start to wonder about these things. Am I destined to an eternal life that has temporarily been put on hold to experience this one or am I going to be eaten by bugs?