“All you need is love.” ?
@Huguette has said some stuff recently which I have taken to be a kind of lamentation about the mechanical aspect of being. We are like cogs in a cosmic wheel with no real understanding or choice in the matter.
Would the universe be a better place if I was in control? Or you maybe?
Maybe my brain is merely a biological machine, just like my guts, and I am a necessary product of that brain - some psychological bile. But thats not the whole picture. and an incomplete picture taken as truth is a lie.
There are no separate things. The idea of separate things is fundamentally nonsense. Meaning arises as relationship.
The whole and the processes that manifest within are a plastic and changing co-creation (the evolution of mind is ongoing right now in us). This brain did not exist billions of years ago when primitive stars were were forging the carbon that eventually became me. Was the sun giving its life for me? for some ideal of Love and Beauty? I don’t think so.
I might not create carbon, but the concept of Love and Beauty arose in this brain (or one like it). The promise of love and beauty arose with me.
We now have the possibility of going out to meet it. Until something better comes along. And just like the sun, maybe it is best we not know what these mysteries mean as we continue to forge them. And unlike abiogenesis and the evolution of brains, psychological evolution does not need billions of years.
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From what I keep hearing from these victims in Morroco: “It was God’s Will…It was God’s Will”….either one of you could do better!
What role does love play in the universe?
I have learned to never underestimate my potential for incompetence.
Doug,
What’s wrong with the mechanical aspect of being? The mechanical aspect of our being is only one aspect of our being, isn’t it, not the whole of it. Personally, I love the mechanical aspect, the ability to reason, to perceive, to feel emotion, to sense, to consider what is, to remember, to compare, to figure out, to calculate, to put a plan of action together, to devise methods and improve them, and so on.
But as I see it, the mechanical aspect of thought has been taken BY the mechanical aspect itself to be the essence of man, thereby entangling man in conflict, cruelty, deceit, conceit, unnecessary chaos and suffering and sorrow, and so on. Maybe unnecessary, maybe not. But questioning all this is spontaneous action. It might be totally irrelevant and unnecessary, but there it is. I do not choose it, it chooses me, if I can put it that way.
And what’s wrong with lamentation? The chaos and horrors that are observed out in the world have an involuntary impact, also unsolicited, on mankind (including me), do they not? Just seemingly not all of mankind. But who knows what really lies in dark, brutal, twisted hearts? I don’t. I can’t explain it. I don’t why, but I do lament it. I can’t explain my own failings. Do we not all lament the ubiquitous suffering both physical and psychological, the sorrow that is unbearable and yet must be borne, the injustices all around and within us?
There ARE separate things, distinguishable things. What does it mean to say there are not. That is part of the beauty and wonder. But there are also things which are mistakenly perceived as separate that are NOT really separate. No? If so, isn’t it important to distinguish between what is actually separate in quality, ability, composition, appearance, action, and so on, and what only seems to be separate but is not?
Do love and beauty exist merely, solely as concepts, as ideas? Is the word the thing?
It is not a question of whether it is best to know what the mysteries are. Who says it is best or worthless, useless, unnecessary? Is knowing understanding? Does knowing produce right action? Is abiogenesis a fact? Maybe but I don’t know. It seems nonsensical to me, but I still don’t know.
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I see it that Love has nothing to do with the ‘contents of my consciousness’? The love stuff (small ‘l’) in all of that has nothing or little to do with Love. That ‘Love’, if anything, is what unites us all and it’s obvious that we are not united. So this Love with a capital ‘L’ is an entirely different ‘ballgame’? Which, as has been suggested , may be available to us when and if the ‘contents of consciousness’ are, emptied? The ‘small potatoes’ of thought, eloquent as they present themselves, have to go? Have to give way to Silent Passive Awareness?
Whether they are solely ideas, partly ideas, or beyond ideas, they are tremendously powerful. In addition, love feels different from other mental-emotional phenomena. Like it’s its own category.
I like differentiating between love and Love, works for me. 
[quote=“rickScott, post:9, topic:2566, full:true”]
I like differentiating between love and Love, works for me. 
Right , as an acquaintance of mine once answered when asked: “what do you love?”
He said quite seriously: “I love conning people!”
In living my life the way I have been doing so for quite some time now, a way I can only try to describe with the word “peacefully”, I have felt no need either to understand anything or to choose anything that can at the very least be considered meaningful at all – I just live peacefully. If living life this way is like being a cog in a cosmic wheel, I give thanks to life for having made me a cog in a cosmic wheel.
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Discrimination is useful in order for us to communicate and navigate this world succesfully.
Doctors for example might need to distinguish between the heart and the cardiovascular sytem as distinct from the lungs and the respiratory system.
It has been suggested that discrimination might be in the eye of the beholder - that the cells that make up this body can also be seen as a whole. The same goes for this solar system, local universe and cosmos.
If we consider who I am, and all my conditioning, my atoms, the air that I breath, my mother, my father, the sun etc where do I start? Where do I end?
What is Love when there is discrimination? Where is the space that I experience between you and me?
When we hear words, we react to them. Some call it the authoritarian principal. Having absolutely no experience with or understanding of a particular subject will not stop me holding strong opinions about it. And I will react accordingly.
Abiogenesis has been achieved in laboratory conditions, has been demonstrated to be possible in many different ways and situations. We (those that specialise in the study and testing of the subject) understand various processes by which it might occur very well.
However, science is not allowed to make unfounded declarations, it cannot present models as true if they cannot be repeatedly demonstrated. Which is why we are not able to say how exactly life appeared on planet Earth - there being currently no record of the event(s) available.
Right. And we can only guess (cringingly) what Donald of Trump loves. 
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
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Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory | WIRED
Doug, I googled this assertion of yours and this is the crux of what I found:
“Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made … However, though researchers have been able to show how RNA’s component molecules, called ribonucleotides, could assemble into RNA, their many attempts to synthesize these ribonucleotides have failed. No matter how they combined the ingredients — a sugar, a phosphate, and one of four different nitrogenous molecules, or nucleobases — ribonucleotides just wouldn’t form.”
The article later implies that they DID produce ribonucleotides: “the team added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!”. Well, I don’t understand all of this. The article seems to be from 2009 so there might be more recent science.
Then the definition I find for abiogenesis on the internet is “the original evolution of life or living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances.”
To non-scientist me, producing ribonucleotides” in a lab does not sound to me like producing abiogenesis in a lab. Am I wrong? Has abiogenesis been achieved in a lab since then?
Does it matter?
How much resistance should my opinion about abiogenisis, or quantum physics, be allowed to generate? Or if that question is a bit too cagey : how much power is my opinion about something I do not understand, having?
Or if that is too hurtful : why is this question so important? I’m suspecting it goes against some deeply held belief (tied to my identity).
Also, if there is a real curiosity about this complex subject, I certainly will not be able to provide anything of substance. (I am the wrong person to ask)
@Huguette I’m wondering, can you see anything underlying this question? Is anything important (another issue) riding on the conclusion? Because the existence (or not) of a creator God is in no way tied to this issue. The problem for me is the belief that we somehow know the unknowable.
To see this you have to know what love is, don’t you?
My concern is not to accept anything as fact or proof with respect to the significance of life and creation that I cannot see for myself, whether scientific, philosophical, religious, political, spiritual and so on, to explain or interpret for me the Truth about life. As I often say, I love science and technology.
No. You have to know something about love to know where it is or isn’t, and since I admittedly know nothing about love, I can’t honestly say anything about it.
For I, love, compassion, intelligence, choiceless awareness, etc., are just words, concepts, and I can leave it at that or pretend to know more than that.