Careful - there must be no trying to get anywhere, nor trying to stay anywhere - (even if we tell ourselves that we are trying effortlessly 
)
No struggling or choosing one thing over the other - we donât even know what these things are - we just have fanciful ideas about them.
If there is anything to be done, it is to be aware when we are getting carried away as usual by, believing in, reacting to the thoughts arising unbidden as if they were the truth rather than past delusions resurfacing. - by seeing the false we are free of it - not by pursuing some holy grail.
So now its just the curtains that are on fire? Maybe we are suffering from metaphor overload?
The only thought that comes to mind is that the whole planet was on fire when the giant meteor struck us and wiped out all the dinosaurs. Thanks to that mass destruction, extinction and horrendous loss of life, I am now able to listen to music, read poetry, kiss my wife and talk to you.
PS however I do wear a mask when told to, recycle my rubbish and moderate my production of CO2 where possible
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I agree, and maybe thatâs similar to what Thomas said about fulfillment. We have some unreasonable expectation about reaching an end point or a goal. Then something or someone comes along, and it or they challenge that structure, and we donât like that.
This seems E, to be a good description of psychological thought, that it has been âconditionedâ to believe in its own importance, value, significance, etc. And by giving this importance to itself, it separates usâŠbut it is all just differences in conditioned thought , with its different contents?
But when I have a strong attachment to a goal or pleasure âŠbe it football or my career success âŠand someone threatens it or questions itâŠthere can be major conflictâŠor violence. Like if my girlfriend wants to go shopping and I want to watch a big football playoff game and she wants me to drive her to the mall with her mother. Isnât attachment the cause of violence in the world? Pleasure and attachment? Along with the fear thatâs behind all of it?
Dan: This seems E, to be a good description of psychological thought, that it has been âconditionedâ to believe in its own importance, value, significance, etc. And by giving this importance to itself, it separates usâŠbut it is all just differences in conditioned thought , with its different contents?
Ah, but we donât see it like thatâŠas all just differences. We are totally attached and cling for life to our pleasures and goals and fulfillments. How is it possible to just see it all as conditioned thought? Not saying it isnât . Perhaps it might be transformational to see it like that.
Just one thing my mind is wondering after reading your words: if as it seems there is great difficulty in finding the right words, why this urge to put an inner feeling into words? For whom, or for what? ⊠And also another thing, is that difficulty in finding the correct words rooted in the image of knowledge of âwhat wasâ?
Or maybe itâs that weâre suffering from ignorance overload.
Did you take your temperature? I say this because delirium is usually a symptom of fever. 
(with love)
I take it you do not approve ?
The stuff about the extinction of the dinosaurs leading to the world as it is now is not something Iâve made up - its the current scientific model - please direct your diagnosis towards the appropriate specialists (eg Geologists)
Oh Iâm sorry! I didnât get your message the first time. Actually what you were saying is that the extinction of the dinosaurs by a large meteorite has led us to this current world full of ignorance and division and therefore full of suffering, isnât it?
Please let us not debate whether life is good or bad.
Life is a mystery - it is I that am a victim of my own confusion.
A confusion that not only affects your life but also that of many others. So life is often a mystery (and most of the times a justification for inactivity) only for those who donât want to look closely at how their âown confusionâ affects others. The âIâ you mention, with its âown confusion,â it just happens that it doesnât live completely isolated from the world, so there are more victims of your âown confusionâ than you.
Well, youâre in luck (or not). I am a geologist and I would like to correct a few things you wrote, add a few things and ask you a very serious question.
First, it was an asteroid (nine miles wide) that struck the earth off the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago that brought the Mesozoic Era (which lasted from 252.2 million years ago to 65 million years ago), Age of the Dinosaurs, to an end. The asteroid was nine miles wide and rather than setting the world on fire it actually (according to new evidence) created a tsunami one mile high (giant wave of water frequently caused by powerful earth quakes) to travel through all of the ocean basins and over much of terrestrial earth. The asteroid wiped out about 75% of the life on earth at the time.
From a paleontology course I took once years ago I learned that human beings eventually evolved from a small, screw-like animal. But first, of course, there were the apes (and whatever before the apes) and then proto-man like homo erectus and all the other humanoid like animals before and after.
My question is how did you come to the sentence in bold above at the end of your statement? Did you mean that homo sapiens may not have evolved had there not been a catastrophic collision with the asteroid? If thatâs what you meant itâs an interesting point, for those who are interested, to contemplate.
[quote=âmacdougdoug, post:28, topic:277â]
The stuff about the extinction of the dinosaurs leading to the world as it is now is not something Iâve made up - its the current scientific model - please direct your diagnosis towards the appropriate specialists (eg Geologists)
Well, one thing we can say is that it certainly changed things here on earth. Exactly how is not clear.
Footnote: The information about the asteroid causing the mile high tsunamis around the world is from a new study by researcher Molly Range and others from the University of Michigan. It has yet to be published and hasnât undergone peer review.
[/quote]
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It was a throwaway statement based loosely on determinism, in order to try and shake up strongly held beliefs that bad things are bad and that good things are good.
(Iâm also reading âearth in human handsâ by D Grinspoon at the moment - Astrobiologist take on the current gaiastrophy)
Well thanks Doug for bringing up the whole subject, even though it may have been irrelevant. I really enjoy thinking about and talking about geology. Have a pleasant day.
Forgive me for pointing this out Peter, but the above is not entirely accurate. Note that the starting point is âI try.â No, you do not âtry to live in a society.â You live in a society. Trying has nothing to do with it.
The problem with starting from the wrong premise is that the logical extrapolation from that wrong premise brings one to wrong thoughts and wrong conclusions. Therefore it is important to start right.
The accent on the word âtryingâ is what impresses me most. You are not âtrying to liveâ so what are you actually trying? Give some thought to that. What you write later gives me the impression that you are trying to resolve at once all the problems that life throws at you. You want there to be a once-in-a-lifetime solution to everything. Wham, zham and all problems will be solved. You counterpose this to the mode of thought wherein only one problem is solved at a time and find that mode deficient as it does not do everything all at once.
Really, that is all you are saying. You are wishing for a miracle.
My impression is that it is the pursuit of miracles that is the invention, not the solving of problems.
I am trying to make a go of it. I am trying to make ends meet. I am trying to make sense of it. I am using the vernacular to make a point. Thatâs all. The point is, what is the fundamental, psychological, application of thought? Not the day to day, educated use of thought. Not the conversational use of thought. Not the use of thought in verbal discussions. Is there a deeper unconscious use of thought, and it is a distraction from all the distress and suffering, which we donât actually recognize, except intellectually. All the verbal discussion is a distraction? Maybe it is to be a miracle to understand this?
It is really out of hand. We have built up an image throughout the ages, from the Greeks, for example, and all this has gone hand in hand with the way of thinking and with individual practice. The usual way of thinking, using what is known, and the verbal interface, is not getting anywhere. Really there can be multitudes of interpretation of words and ideas. That multitude is attitude, personality, individuality, ego, self, etc. Can we look at what someone is saying, see the point, and not look for ways to make it an item of analysis and comparative thinking? When I see the point, not distracted by words and ideas, what happens? Do I see I might then find myself objecting, disagreeing, agreeing, disputing, discussing, revising, and, actually see this is thought? When I see this, I see the point was not intellectual, it was not someone trying to convert me, not someone cleverly using language, it was not about knowledge. Donât I see there is this image of knowledge and it is working automatically, occupying the mind, and it produces a line of thinking, which I take to be an appropriate response, and appears to be creative, and it can be seen clearly for its artifice, its technology?
Hi Peter
Be careful not to throw the baby, yourself and the forum out with the bath water! 
It seems youâre interested in going to depths of it, so as to solve the entire class of human problems in one go. Youâre looking for the meta-solution, and why not? But, weâre discussing how that can and does go wrong, both at the level of the mundane and the profound (well that might be stretching things a bit). Thought/feeling/action can go wrong at various levels of depth, and even the trivialities of life can reveal the iceberg below.
It goes wrong because I see myself as a separate individual. On the planet Earth there are no levels fundamentally.
What about non-fundamentally?