Truth

It also means erasing the term poverty (categorization) - and no, it doesn’t mean all looking the same.

It depends on the severity of the sprain, there’s three categories and the worst includes rupturing of ligaments and the like. I had my foot dislocated when playing football, it took like 18 months to fully recover, but only like 8 weeks before I could walk normally.

Most ankle sprains are roughly 4-8 weeks to heal and another few weeks to rehabilitate it back to where you were previously.

No, what’s up?

I sprained my ankle once. It only took around, all-told, five or six days for it to heal.
Maybe you broke your ankle, gib. That supposedly takes up to six weeks to heal under normal conditions and considering who the individual is.
You might want to see an orthopedist NOW.
GO right now, gib. :mrgreen:

There is the story of a group of fox hunters who encountered a man walking down their path. The men asked the man if he had seen the fox, and, if so, in what direction was the fox going? The man had seen the fox, but told the hunters the fox was going in a different direction from the one it was actually going in.
A life saved by a lie!!!

Warlock wrote:

I disagree.

Passion, yes but love, no.

Henry Miller “was an authentic pig who saw women as nothing but sex objects, not a womanizer, but a brutaliser”, no doubt about that.

He instructed (Anais Nin, his lover) in the craft of writing and her role in turn was a source of inspiration for him and his wife (June) was the muse for both of them. They wrote about her for many years, even though she had left Henry and moved on. I like his sexually frank and rebellious style of writing.

“If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on [. . .]If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.” HM

But the hunters aren’t too happy. :laughing:

,and neither will be the farmer around the bend whose children will go hungry for a while.
But that hungry fox certainly feasted on the chicken. Yummy!

Ah, if we could only live and let live.

Ah, gib, aren’t there so many grey areas within that line? I’ve been known to utter those words.
Did you get your self to the orthopedist?

Nah, I think I’m going to hobble for the rest of my life.

The fox kills for food; the hunters kill for sport.

Food can be one’s livelihood, Ierrellus. The fox kills for food but who’s food?
The point I was trying to make is that we never know the consequences of even our so-called good actions.

As the buddhist monk says in the story - “So what”!

We all kill in order to survive. There has to be some moral distinction between killing in order to survive and killing to get a trophy hide1 What story? What Buddhist monk? So what is a lazy or immature way to approach the need to make clear moral distinctions. When my daughter was being a brat and I reprimanded her, her response was “So what!”

I’ll try to find the story for you, Ierrellus.
The gist of it is that everything which at first appears to be good, to have turned out well, and thus says the buddhist “SO WHAT”, can then evolve into some negative, and thus says the buddhist “SO WHAT”, which negative result can then lead to something positive, and thus says the buddhist “SO WHAT” and ad continuum.
lol

I felt it was a really profound lesson when I first read it ~~ much food for thought ~~albeit we can’t help but judge results/conclusions at first glance.
But we just never know how each link on the chain, for lack of a better expression, can be effected.

SO, SO WHAT!!!

A bit of stoicism, nihilism and perhaps amor fati

If we have to draw any moral lines here, I’d say Ierrellus is on the right track. Killing for food in order to survive is a necessity; killing for sport is not. There’s also one’s awareness of moral imperatives to consider. The fox doesn’t even know about “right” and “wrong”–he runs on instinct.

Unfortunately, maybe even the hunters “run on instinct.” Or ignorance.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Warlock,

There was a time when I felt this way too. I think it may have been just another coping mechanism but I may be wrong. If there is no hope, you cannot be disappointed if something goes wrong. The thought of hoping for me was irrational - like jumping off of a precipice. Why bother with the hoping? Things are going to turn out the way they do - either way. So dispense with it. There was rationalization there - not necessarily right reason.
But hope is a natural function of the mind and the spirit I intuit. I wonder just how far we would have evolved in different ways without it. Hope gives us wings but those wings must be balanced and know how to fly rightly.
Perhaps hope is one of those stirrings of the emotions/spirit that we find to be irrational because we try to stifle our humanity.
Why is it that many of the things which make us more human we disregard as being stupid, silly and just being weak?
Hope isn’t necessarily the same as having expectations ~~ it’s just the realization that that which IS possible CAN/MAY come to fruition. Doesn’t one have to have HEART in order to accomplish anything? That’s not to say that something cannot be accomplished without heart and hope but it’s kind of a sterile objective, don’t you think?
One who cannot have hope is a pessimist (at times I may have been a borderline one) just as one who does not have discerning or realistic hope is delusional or one who sees all of life through rose-colored glasses. Both are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Balance is important in carrying hope in our hearts.

Only if we have faulty expectations. To hope for something is not the same as expecting something, is it?
Hope gives us the momentum to spur us on. Hope is the lens which sees possibilities.

I firmly believe that ALSO denying something which may be built into us, as part of our hardwiring, can equally make us if not psychotic than at least neurotic…which is a denial of legitimate suffering. What was it that was at the bottom of Pandora’s Box?

True, denying what’s human and normal and acting in contradiction to that can do the same as what you say above.

All to counteract the emptiness which is sometimes a part of being human. Trying to fill ourselves up with meaningless fillings instead of allowing that space within us to know ourselves.

“There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

That’s hope, Warlock…it’s the crack within our armor you might say.
:laughing:

Hope and expectation are conceptually similar, the only difference is in the individual’s ideology of the future event. It’s basically probability vs possibility, expectation being more agressive and hope being more passive. I hope you understand this vs I expect you to understand this… your ability to understand is what it is… regardless of whether I hope or expect you to understand. This is a disconnection from reality, a delusion of how things actually are. Both of these concepts make it so that I perceive reality differently than it is or it isn’t. Rather than accepting that you have a specific understanding of the topic and react accordingly, such concepts influence me to approach the situation in a biased manner.

All expectations are flawed. We don’t require hope to be motivated, we require purpose. I don’t expect the emotionally and behaviorally disabled teens that I work with to change, nor do I hope they change… I do it because I enjoy being a mentor, it fulfills me, it gives me a sense of purpose. I accept that some of these teens are too heavily damaged to transcend their conditioning/acculturation/indoctrination. Just as I accept that some will transcend their issues. Just because you do not hope/expect doesn’t mean that you lack motivation or purpose, it just means that you’re unencumbered and free to do what you authentically desire to do.

I agree. Which is why my personal ideology is based on my Nature, rather than my Nurture. Many times, our Nurture is in direct opposition to our Nature and it causes dysfunction in us. For instance, as a child I was heavily abused (phsyically, sexually, emotionally) and I couldn’t make sense of it, because I didn’t want to hurt others. This led to a lot of dysfunction in my psyche. I was constantly seeking to escape and when I couldn’t escape, I would degenerate into fits of irrational rage at those who prevented me from escaping. I suffered bouts with depression, as I had no purpose and whenever I hoped/expected, I was always disappointed… leading to frustration and eventually resentment. This made me quite bitter, shifting between anger and apathy all the time. I withdrew from everyone, because people had only ever hurt me.

Finally, when looking honestly at my life due to health issues and the possibility of my own mortality, I started to see all these things. I decided that I was tired of being something that I’m not, I was fed up being a puppet. I started to retrain myself, to be the person I want to be, rather than the person I was conditioned to be. I noticed the patterns of dysfunction and started to be conscious of how they influenced/manipulated/controlled me. I discovered that I was finally free to make conscious decisions, rather than ingrained ones. I’m only a couple of months into the process and I have almost 40 years worth of conditioning to undo, but I’m getting there.

Emptiness is not a part of being human, it’s an ideology that we’re force fed. We don’t have holes in us that need to be filled, that is merely what we’ve been conditioned to believe. We cannot accept ourselves as we currently exist, so we chase things to bring us happiness… but we’re not chasing happiness, we’re chasing things that we think will make us happy… it’s pretty amusing actually, because we’re doing the exact opposite of what will bring us happiness, being content in who we are. We place conditions on happiness, i.e. I won’t allow myself to be happy until my list of things (e.g. conditions) is complete, but it never gets complete… because we get so focused on the items that we will prioritize them over actual happiness.