This Christmas, I have been on a spiritual quest through Southern Asia. I have been looking for the meaning of man..
What have I seen and discovered, that Georgetown in Malaysia is a rat infested sewer of a place. The fleshpots of Bangkok can still get you a virgin and that Cambodia has a new religion, neither Hindu or Buddhist, it is simply the almighty dollar. Everyone wants a piece of you, life just seems to be a way of struggling to overcome each other. For every true smile we come across a thousand false ones. Ones whose soul purpose is merely to take. Afterall everyone wants something from someone, often just to feel superior or to hurt. Cute children holding snakes, you can take their picture for 'ah dollar', massage and 'boom boom', in Siem Reap I was offered a 13 year old girl today - I declined and made my excuses. In Angkor Watt, beautiful child beggars will sell you 'the book' for 'ah dollar' and older ones with try and scam you for 'ah dollar' more.
I met a lovely taxi driver; who, I hired for two days for 70 dollars. He had been a primary school teacher, an educator; yet, in Cambodia a taxi driver earns more in two days than the 66 'doller' a teacher gets in a month. False Policemen on the take, real Policemen on the take. Yet of all the places i've travelled, through Egypt and Africa, Europe, Iceland, China, Japan and almost everywhere else; nowhere, has touched and disturbed me this much. Vietnam in a few days and the floating villages of refugees on Reap river have perhaps given me a taste; although, they say Vietnam is much a game of two halves these days and eveloping quickly. Have I learnt anything spiritual? I've seen shanty towns of unbelievable poverty yards from a KFC. I've seen children mutilated to be better beggars. I've seen the dollar destroy religion (good or bad?).
I've seen the killing fields.
I've met mystics and shamen and still I've seen no miracles, nothing to convince me that any of us have a purpose on this small ball of rock orbiting a non-descript star, in an unimportant arm of an average Galaxy, in one of countless un-special galactic clusters, in the vastness of the Universe.
I still think Life is a joke and the punchline is 'nothing matters'.
Care to convine me i'm wrong?
Last edited by Khmer_before on Jan 5th, 2011 at 05:07 PM
Nope I was in New York in the early nineties, mid eighties and noughties. New York is as nothing to this. I grew up in South London and parts of that are as bad for violent crime as anywhere in New York, it's one of the reasons we had more heavyweight boxing champions in the nineties from London than New York or anywhere in the US for that matter.
It was a joke. I'm sure if you spent all your time in these places, you'd find meaning in something. You can't really talk about how important and devestating the dollar is when you went there to spend money on your vacation.
I've had an idea for a movie for a few years, about a group of yuppie Westerners that take a hedonistic mission through India to "discover" themselves, only to have a major interpersonal crisis in the group, and eventually, to die in the tsunami that struck the east coast of India on boxing day (the same one that wiped out much of SE Asia), with absolutly no sense of resolution of any issues [actually, ending the movie where a traditional film would be just about to resolve the issues, lol, ok, I wont rant on it].
I don't see why people go to these "mystical" places to try and find themselves. Of course all you will see is the suffering and the poverty, the world wont make you feel better if you look at it through the eyes of someone who thinks there is no purpose. You have literally biased yourself away from ever being able to see the positive, as you have an a priori position that there is no positive.
Find meaning for yourself, don't expect the universe to do it for you, then you will be able to see how wonderful some things are.
I realised that, the dollar is not what's devastating, it's need that's devastating. Desire is the problem, I find little positive in desire as it's perpetuated by the pervasive cultures. I think it eats away at the soul.
That's semantics, desire tends to be more about obsession and need in the context i'm applying it; Although, it can be used your way, I didn't think I needed to define that far.
But you are saying that the desire for wealth has left the desires(needs) of the majority of people in that part of the world in the streets begging for "ah dollar", yes?
Sort of but not exactly, i'm saying quite a bit more, that when people have very little and they see people with what they percieve as a lot, it makes them think the values thehy have are 'worthless' even though the intrinsic value of these vlues has a greater 'worth' in itself; However, Cambodia given it's history... Is always going to be a place with a need, like a child that has never been held by it's mother, it will want more than most. Happy smiles, hard eyes.
no, i don't think so. You want to find meaning in the world, though you have decided there is none, and now you gripe that you only see meaningless suffering.
Anyway moving on....quickly and no offense the epistemological psychs out there......but what your saying isn't really that and what they say is incredibly subjective... Ha, did you see what I did there? Subjective......Haha.
What is your meaning and purpose and do you matter?
oh ya, attentional biases toward schematic difference and generalizations are funny stuff. I normally bust a gut when I read my latest TiCS. ap&p is nothing but a good time too, that crazy jeremey Wolfe and his guided search 2.0
my only guess here is that you have a much different idea of what "cognitive psychology" means, than do, oh-I-don't-know, cognitive psychologists...
I actually spend little time on questions such as these. I do wank a lot, so I guess we do have that in common
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Jan 5th, 2011 04:58 PM
