How does one love life? What actions does the verb ‘love’ refer to when speaking of loving life?
(Alternatively, how does one hate life, and what actions does the verb ‘hate’ refer to when one hates life, or is said to be anti-life?)
It seems that a relationship of the action, the verb, to its object, life, depends on how the concept of life is perceived and defined by a given person, and also how the person sees himself in relationship to life, itself. Then, what is life? or does it ultimately become a pointless question if one is already a part of it, like an answer continuously trying to re-label itself as a question?
I really do think that a person’s state of mind dictates whether a person loves or hates life and subsequently lives it accordingly. Perhaps states of minds are dictated by seratonin/dopamine, and therefore cannot be veered from too much.
For me, it means that in those moments when I can’t find any hedonistic pleasure in life (and by “hedonistic” I mean physical pleasures as well as emotional), I can at least find some aesthetic value in life, even in my pain and suffering, that I can appreciate my experience whether they be pleasurable or painful.
Well, besides the opposite of what I just said above (that would be too easy, right? ), to hate life would be to loath one’s pain and suffering, to wallow in grief and despair. The interesting thing about this, for me at least, is that one can do both this and what I said above. I do it all the time! One can sit there being grumpy about everything that sucks in one’s life, and at the same time, step back for a moment and laugh at one’s folly, recognizing that even this moment of angst and despair is, in its own way, beautiful when taken as part of the whole.
What the verb “hate” denotes, I not sure–maybe throwing a tantrum?
You lost me here. Yes, how we act towards life depends on how we understand “life” as a concept. Are you questioning what it means to hate (or love) life given that it’s not clear what life is?
As for the answer continuously trying to re-label itself as a question… talk to finishedman.
Nothing of what I said above necessarily implies simplication, MagsJy. Take any of those words or many of them and see how complex their action, living them, flowing through them, can be. Many require great energy, discipline, practice, attention, insight, etc.
If someone says he likes this but doesn’t like that he would just be cherry-picking things out of life - And that would only reflect his own relationship to life, not life itself.
Life itself is more than personal preference, more than personal anything in fact, so how is one to understand and accept life for what it is if he, himself, stands in the way of understanding, of seeing?
The question of love and hate is a personal profiling question. It has nothing to do with life itself, only with personal interpretation.
I think that a better analogy might be going food shopping - more of a variety there than simply picking cherries off trees.
But why would you EXCLUDE one’s own relationship to life from Life itself? It’s all interconnected.
Yes, I think that might be called “tunnel” vision. What is preferable is panoramic vision, which includes one’s relationship to the world surrounding him/her too.
I don’t know about that, Pandora unless you’re just saying that Life itself (life outside of any interference from us) remains neutral.
But just about everything is about personal interpretation, subjective perspective.
But again, I don’t know. Life itself IS about us human beings ALSO, Pandora, and the questions of love and hate cannot just be a personal profiling question - because it includes everyone and everything who has ever been a part of our lives, all of our human experiences which have touched us and created our perspectives/interpretations, and also about the way in which our brains personally operate and our minds think and how we feel. Well, I don’t know - unless what you said and i said is just a matter of semantics.
Who or what is asking the question? Is life asking the question of itself through a ‘separate’ conscious limited entity? If you’re just one small part of phenomenon called life, then your answers will be limited to what you are. We are interconnected - yet separate. It is this sense of separateness that first lead to the question, otherwise, if life ‘knew’ that everything was of itself, it wouldn’t need to ask these questions of loving itself or hating itself- or any questions for that matter, because it would know it was being itself. In fact, there would be no phenomenon of question at all. What’s question? It represents lack of information, it points to separation, duality. We are part of life, we are interconnected, yet we are asking questions.
If you’re referring to my question above, it is my brain interfacing with my consciousness lol which is asking that question.
It’s also my need to know.
i don’t think that life is capable of asking questions. It needs a medium, us, to do that. We are the Life and the life is us or in us.
We think that life is asking the question but it is our projecting of the universe within which asks.
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Unless I’m misunderstanding you here, I’m not so sure that that is true. If we’re fully conscious and are explorers of life and truth, we can exeed those boundaries, don’t you think and go beyond what we think, what our normal perspectives are, take a risk and see things more without limitation.
Sure, there are limitations but when we see that there is more, we can go beyond them. I mean, it isn’t as though we’ve solved all of life’s puzzles and reality.
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True, we’re individual selves too.
Are you speaking of human solidarity here?
So, knowing something is being itself, would take it no further? Wouldn’t life’s next question that came from that be:
And just what does it mean - my knowing I’m myself, that everything is of myself?
Not necessarily just a lack of information or separation. Questioning can also come from a sense of wonder.
Do you practice Buddhism, Pandora - or however I could have asked that question?
The quest doesn’t end because we know we are a part of something and interconnected. We want to know how, when, why, and how can we continue in this way or if necessary how can we end this or that?
I think what Pandora is trying to say is that just the fact of asking questions can only be possible for finite beings–beings whom are not the totality of life and existence–for to ask a question presupposes an answer that is yet to be discovered, and therefore presupposes something else beyond ourselves, beyond what we know. At the very least, it presupposes the possibility of more beyond what we are and what we know, and this itself is enough to let the feeling of our individuality and finitude sink in. Even if it happens to be a inexplicable brute fact that existence is exhaustively composed of nothing more than what we know and feel–that somehow there is nothing more despite how ungrounded and absurd that would seem–the fact remains that we don’t know this, that we can still ask the question: is this all there is? If that question can be asked, then at least there is this to reality which we have yet to discover and know: that it is a brute fact of existence that this is all there is. That we don’t know this yet, that we are unsure and must pose the question, indicates that this brute fact is still beyond us and therefore must count as something more than what we are and what we know.
This seems contradictory to me if you try to embrace both views as true. And they both seem to be true.
Yet, you just agreed that we are life too.
I just don’t see why that would need to happen, unless there was some kind of separation, a gap in totality present. If you have an answer already you wouldn’t need to question its meaning if you know you are it already. Just the question itself wouldn’t happen. What do I mean to myself if I know that everything is of myself? It doesn’t make sense. I’m asking myself when myself is the same I? It’s impossible - without some kind of separation, which is obviously still a whole…since we are life, too. Right?
I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but I do question existence in its totality sometimes and my place in it, but I guess most philosophers question that at one point or another also.
Well, I guess as opposed to thinking we are some spiritual ethereal beings from another plane of existence visiting this life. Being in it but not of it. Some religions do seem to claim that.
If we are life and have the ability to ask questions, we are life asking questions as well. We are the universe. If we are the universe we are the universe asking questions consciously.
If we are all extensions of the universe, then everything we feel, know, and experience is the universe feeling, knowing, and experiencing, right? So what if you know something I don’t. For example, you know what street you grew up on. I don’t. So the universe does and doesn’t know, at the same time, what street you grew up on.
), to hate life would be to loath one’s pain and suffering, to wallow in grief and despair. The interesting thing about this, for me at least, is that one can do both this and what I said above. I do it all the time! One can sit there being grumpy about everything that sucks in one’s life, and at the same time, step back for a moment and laugh at one’s folly, recognizing that even this moment of angst and despair is, in its own way, beautiful when taken as part of the whole.