Comments on: Holding On… Letting Go

By: The Necessity of Life at Shutterscript

The Necessity of Life at Shutterscript — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:25:39 +0000

[...] this post is the writing which was inspired by my friend Matt and uncle Ronni whose comments to a post I made earlier got me thinking. This is the result of that [...]

By: admin

admin — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:28:48 +0000

Matt and Roni, thank you both for your comments. They are rife with wisdom. In the near future I may post something that speaks a bit to what you’ve both brought up.

By: Capt Ron

Capt Ron — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 08:10:17 +0000

We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive.

If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another.

In our world the “original” is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies. There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself.

We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.

That being said, life is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. We are, after all, animated objects, objects in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the living.

By comparison, Art has no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction. Art is free. It stimulates the critic to insert their own meaning, their own value.

So while anyone might have this or that meaning of Life, I realize fully that any meaning or value Life might have comes exclusively from the beholder.

This is the highest value of any Life, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the living.

The experience is therefore the interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then experience is the form. So in that sense, the meaning of Life is whatever you wish to make of it.

This is its power.

By: Matt Tavares

Matt Tavares — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:14:03 +0000

In our country we avoid thoughts of death. It’s something that’s out there, not to be thought of internally, and taboo. When we don’t acknowledge death, I think we try to hold onto the things you mentioned. We try to attain artificial success and belongings that will soon be gone. I think throwing away the ego is a solid step forward, but I’m not sure there is a single answer to finding true happiness. Maybe one of the problems is defining happiness itself. Is it a pure physiological state? A sense of importance? A sense of feeling approval from others? Lack of worry about basic human needs?

Do you know that we live in one of the happiest countries in the world according to survey?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_happiness.png

Canada seems like an unlikely spot, but it ranks among the highest. I would guess they have a similar culture to ours, but they may understand balance better than we do.