[courtf]

Counterpoint: enlightenment is overrated and life is meant to be taken personally. In some senses, it is a bit cowardly to run away from the current moment we live in by stepping back and viewing the big picture too often. "Negative" emotions and experiences are valid parts of life. Anger, anxiety, fear etc are all part of being a human being and have evolved over billions of years to reach their current forms. We may not always enjoy these parts of life, but avoiding them completely would mean stunting ourselves.

Learning to observe and not react to the complex interplay of emotional states that constantly dance across our consciousness is a powerful tool, but you cannot survive inside the epiphany. We all must descend back into the messy day-to-day needs of maintaining our bodies, no one is actually the Buddha. I think we should all have more patience with inability to behave appropriately under all circumstances, because we will all fall short of grace.

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."

[pessimizer]

It's important not to judge the world by its effect on your internal state. The world isn't party to your internal state, although you walk around with an illusion of transparency. People are doing things for their own reasons, not for yours.

Referring to the Buddha in order to make emotional regulation seem like an unachievable perfection is not really a good support, because the argument you're making is that we shouldn't always try to control our irrational emotions, not that we sometimes fail to control our irrational emotions, even when we try. That's just an objective fact.

Getting away from billions of years of reaction is the reason why we have civilization. It's a little more cowardly to interpret the world in terms of how it makes you feel rather than the complicated, messy problem of navigating the world in terms of how it may be making everyone feel.

[courtf]

> It's important not to judge the world by its effect on your internal state. The world isn't party to your internal state, although you walk around with an illusion of transparency. People are doing things for their own reasons, not for yours.

Sure, I agree. This isn't a contradiction with my post.

> Referring to the Buddha in order to make emotional regulation seem like an unachievable perfection is not really a good support, because the argument you're making is that we shouldn't always try to control our irrational emotions, not that we sometimes fail to control our irrational emotions, even when we try.

One core message of Buddhism is that we fundamentally cannot control ourselves, even when we try. You are correct that I am saying we shouldn't always try, and I stand by that, but the idea is that it isn't actually possible to achieve. Buddha is indeed an unachievable perfection, and supports my point because trying is truly futile in the end.

That is not to say we should always act however we want and treat others terribly for our own amusement, just that we are not actually in control. We can try to steer the elephant, and may have some success with that on occasion, but complete control is not possible. What I am saying, is that it's ok to let the elephant do what it wants sometimes, because ultimately it's going to do that a lot of the time anyway.

> Getting away from billions of years of reaction is the reason why we have civilization.

How would you say that experiment is going? Civilization isn't more powerful than evolution is what I would say, and we have seen a lot of man's worst impulses expressed with greater force than ever during the modern period. We haven't escaped evolution yet.

> It's a little more cowardly to interpret the world in terms of how it makes you feel rather than the complicated, messy problem of navigating the world in terms of how it may be making everyone feel.

Not sure how this relates to what I said. Sounds like you just wanted to turn my words around. I never said anything about substituting personal feelings for the act of being empathetic with others, and the topic is about not taking things personally, so this is a new goalpost. Nonetheless, I don't disagree. Part of having empathy for others is not judging their behavior from a position of assumed superiority.

[lmm]

> We can try to steer the elephant, and may have some success with that on occasion, but complete control is not possible. What I am saying, is that it's ok to let the elephant do what it wants sometimes, because ultimately it's going to do that a lot of the time anyway.

That's not a sound argument though. E.g. the fact that you can't save every starving child in no way proves that you shouldn't try as hard as you can to save those that you can.

[throwawaylinux]

This isn't related to the prior subject of the thread, but:

> E.g. the fact that you can't save every starving child in no way proves that you shouldn't try as hard as you can to save those that you can.

"Shouldn't" is doing a lot of work there. Why should anything be done? It's a question of morals.

So on the moral question of whether someone should try as hard as they can to save as many starving children as possible: I don't do that. I'm pretty certain 100% of people here including you don't either. Actually 100% of the world aside from perhaps the parents of said starving children plus a rounding error of extremely passionate and dedicated people will do so.

So I think that is pretty well established isn't it? You need not try as hard as you can to save starving children.

Better analogy might be that you can't prevent being in an automobile accident all the time, that doesn't make it okay to stop paying attention sometimes.

[qqtt]

I agree. A lot of discussion and these philosophical quotes about living tend to want to inspire you to rebel against your nature. Think abstractly. Think rationally. Make the right decisions (for some value of "right").

But people aren't really wired like this. Maybe rebelling against your nature is the "right" choice, but maybe just living your life isn't so bad either. Take things personally. Don't take things personally. Be angry, be frustrated. Get depressed. Also, be happy sometimes.

You only have one life. The guy who never gets angry is going to the same place as the guy who fully feels those emotions. Maybe one will be less productive at a certain point in time than the other, but does it matter?

These cosmic balance scale games are at the end of the day silly and superfluous.

[courtf]

It's always a bit fraught to bring up the upsides of irrationality and potentially dangerous/destructive emotions and impulses. Bukowski didn't win a lot of popularity contests. I agree with what you've said here though.

We may be abstracting the conversation beyond the limits of what is appropriate in the workplace here, but I tend to think the workplace should and could be a more relaxed space if we were more patient with the negative emotions of others. At least for me, that starts with recognizing my own emotional states, and not always being afraid to experience them authentically.

[scns]

Khalil Gibran expressed it like this: "You can avoid crying all your tears, but you won't laugh all you laughter then." Highly recommend reading The Prophet by him. A thin book, saying a lot with a few words.

[marbletimes]

This is one of those witty sentences that sound good (the balance of life, laughs here, tears there, if you want to enjoy living you need to accept dying, everything happens for a reason), but they are just biblical nonsense. There are plenty of very accomplished, successful (internally and externally) people who feel much more joy than sorrow, and plenty of evil people who have an internal life that is no worse than much more saintly people, but according to The Prophet they all should cry more. I remember I went on a date, and they said, "when a relationship is ending, I really want to feel the pain, as it makes the relationship something of value". I thought it was bananas, there is very little to be gained by pain and spiraling introspection after a break-up. But the other side of the coin says, should I keep my mouth shut during cringy conversation, so I can then have more enlightened, or presumably enlightened, conversations with someone else?

[scns]

I read it differently, like: if you suppress feelings you want to avoid (labeled negative usually), you won't feel all the feelings you would like to (labeled positive usually).

(edit) Another favourite quote of mine is from the chapter about pain: "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding."

You can read the full chapter here: https://poets.org/poem/pain-1

[akomtu]

That's the territory of natural philosophy. The typical answer from "occult" books to your argument would be that there are two almost independent beings posing as one human: the lower one, which includes autonomous body capable of feeling and primitive thinking; and the upper triad that includes abstract mind, also capable of independent existence. Most people are unsure which part they identify with. Your argument is basically identifying with the lower half. This is basically what the upside down pentagram means: a human who chose to go downwards. Of course, you can dismiss this counter-argument as unscientific and forget about it.

[sammalloy]

> no one is actually the Buddha

I'm an atheist, but I've studied this, and I think this is a matter of major disagreement in the different schools.

In the west, more contemporary (and often secular) teachers talk about how everyone is a potential Buddha.

There are also close parallels with the more hippie, Christian schools that arose in the 1960s-1970s era (intentional communities) which also taught (quietly I might add), that everyone is a potential Christ.

While this might seem like a trivial point, we do see signs of these teachings arising in the past, from century to century.

These ideas are generally criticized as heretical and repressed because they threaten the hegemonic, institutional nature of religion, which still maintains that the one true interpretation is that there is a single figure (Christ, Buddha, etc) that adherents should aspire to worship, and that they can never equal or match.

The heretical version states the opposite. These adherents believe that Christ and Buddha (assuming for the sake of this argument that they are real, historical figures) did not teach so that they could be worshipped, they taught so that others could become like them.

When you see the religions in this way, then yes, everyone is truly the potential Buddha and the potential Christ, and the vast institutional power of the church disappears, and the roles of priests and clerics vanishes with them.

This kind of change has the effect of emphasizing philosophy over ideology, and places the onus of being a good person and doing good works on the here and now, not on some mythical afterlife or legendary heaven or hell.

[empressplay]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_mysticism

Historically, Christian mysticism has taught that for Christians the major emphasis of mysticism concerns a spiritual transformation of the egoic self, the following of a path designed to produce more fully realized human persons, "created in the Image and Likeness of God" and as such, living in harmonious communion with God, the Church, the rest of the world, and all creation, including oneself. For Christians, this human potential is realized most perfectly in Jesus, precisely because he is both God and human, and is manifested in others through their association with him, whether conscious, as in the case of Christian mystics, or unconscious, with regard to spiritual persons who follow other traditions, such as Gandhi. The Eastern Christian tradition speaks of this transformation in terms of theosis or divinization, perhaps best summed up by an ancient aphorism usually attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria: "God became human so that man might become god."[a]

[pqs]

As a Catholic, I believe that the imitation of Christ is an obligation for every Christian. We should always aim to imitate Christ. This is a very old idea. The 15h-century book by Thomas à Kempis is an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_of_Christ

[dragonwriter]

> The heretical version states the opposite. These adherents believe that Christ and Buddha (assuming for the sake of this argument that they are real, historical figures) did not teach so that they could be worshipped, they taught so that others could become like them.

That view is orthodox in mainstream Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox), not heretical; its a central part of the mainstream understanding of the purpose of the incarnation; that Christ is, above all, a model.

[courtf]

That seems reasonable to me, emphasis on "potential."

Whether that potentiality can be realized here on earth, in this life, is where I would start to quibble.

[sammalloy]

Yes, I am reminded of the differences between, let's say, Joseph Goldstein, who non-dogmatically insists (hopefully that's not too strong a word, but it was the impression that I got from him) that one must conclude in the reality of rebirth; whereas someone like Gil Fronsdal can't quite be pinned down, but I have seen an essay by him (again, I hope I'm not misinterpreting things) that suggests that the concept of rebirth was invented by later Buddhists, which would support the secular endeavor.

The best description of the doctrinal differences between the Buddhist schools that I've ever heard expressed clearly and with great humor was by Hyon Gak Sunim.

[courtf]

Thanks for these names! I will have to look into them.

Rebirth is a tricky one for me because it just seems too fantastical, but then many things about our world and our selves remain inexplicable, if not outright fantastical themselves.

Rebirth also might not be a true continuation of our individual consciousness, but a repackaging of sorts.

I try to square these ideas with the physical world we inhabit, where our consciousness is very much affected by the environment and the state of our bodies and minds. It seems hard to believe in a soul (or anything ineffable that is a part of us lasting beyond death) in the traditional sense, when we are so malleable and our experiences so subjective. A tweak to my brain chemistry can drastically alter my behavior etc.

So if I still want to think about rebirth, I feel I must conclude that whatever can survive death must be quite a bit more abstract than the consciousness I am familiar with.

[thegrimmest]

I would say that the most human experience is one that shares the least with our animal relatives. It is therefore one that maximises the uniquely human aspects of our neurobiology - our ability to reason, introspect and construct detailed mental models. Emotions are just primate social impulses. There's nothing particularly human about them.