The Interview With God

[novella]

through oneness.

Hi Bobby,

"we eat from that same pot, we sleep on the same pillow"

 

[bobbyburns]

I see your point. let me ask you this, though. if the person you love was someone else, would you still love him?

 

[bobbyburns]

me no like that word.

love

 

[novella]

I see your point. let me ask you this, though. if the person you love was someone else, would you still love him?

That would depend on who we are at the time.

 

[bobbyburns]

then you're describing pleasure.

 

[novella]

What is the point of reducing a complex human relationship with multiple conscious and subconscious motivations down to one idea?

I think the Self seeks more than pleasure--unless you define pleasure as anything the Self seeks, which is circular and too reductive for me.

For instance, how many people recapitulate their parents' lives? Why do they do that? It seems that they are not free to make their own pleasure-seeking choices. I don't think it's a love of the familiar, but an instinctive choice for the known versus the unknown and an inability to see one's own narrative as a separate story.

 

[bobbyburns]

in a sense, there's no relationship to begin with. the self, or whatever you want to call it, can't experience through other people's senses, so, feeling isolated, it separates from the world. that separation is why compassion can't enter into the mind. as long as it exists, the mind can't form a connection with anything. that's why I asked you, if the person you love was someone else, would it change anything? you kind of answered yes, which is why I said the thing you've described as love is pleasure. it's not that there is anything wrong with pleasure, but it becomes a really ugly thing when it is sought after and crystallized by thought. love, on the other hand, has nothing to do with thought. thought is just a reaction to experience. love is not a reaction. it's not even an experience, it's your relationship to what is around you and inside you. as soon as you start to talk about it, it's meaningless, because it becomes just another object to be sought after.

 

[Stewart]

If Jeffery Dahmer and Mother Teresa were born on the same day, at the same hospital and were accidentally switched at birth would the outcome at the end of their lives have been the same?

Well, the notion of the late Mr. Dahmer waring a habit is quite entertaining.

The thought of some old prune luring gay black and Laotian guys back to her flat in Milwaukee, taking photos of their cadavers and pinning them to her fridge, and keeping their body parts in various kitchen tools is even funnier.

 

[novella]

in a sense, there's no relationship to begin with. the self, or whatever you want to call it, can't experience through other people's senses, so, feeling isolated, it separates from the world. that separation is why compassion can't enter into the mind.

Compassion that is fully imagined exists in the mind and can be the impetus for compassionate action. Are you saying that because we can't know another's thoughts, we can't know compassion? To me, if it exists in the mind, it's real.

. . .the mind can't form a connection with anything. . . . love is not a reaction. it's not even an experience, it's your relationship to what is around you and inside you. as soon as you start to talk about it, it's meaningless, because it becomes just another object to be sought after.

I disagree. Love is also brought into being in the imagination, and it extends outwardly through attitude and action.

One can talk about it without seeking it as an object. Professions of love are tricky, but circumscribing love with words happens all the time.

This is a poem that circumscribes love beautifully:

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

 

[bobbyburns]

One can talk about it without seeking it as an object. Professions of love are tricky, but circumscribing love with words happens all the time.

I agree, something has to be said about it, or the awareness might never come, but you've already tricked yourself into thinking that love is the idea or the experience, and that it can be acquired. even if I say it's neither one of those, that fact that thought is translating what you're reading, and trying to imagine what this state is like, forces you into a catch-22. I guess the point is for thought to realize that it's not needed every second of your waking and sleeping existence.

Compassion that is fully imagined exists in the mind and can be the impetus for compassionate action ... Love is also brought into being in the imagination, and it extends outwardly through attitude and action.

you're seeing it all backwards. the whole isn't brought into being through the part, it's the other way around. compassion is not the thing you experience, it's your connection to it, as a whole, which in turn shapes your thoughts and actions and all of the parts that exist within that field. trust me, whatever your senses are telling you is "compassion" is a lie. it's like the comparison I made earlier between people like dave pelzer or tony robbins, those self-help guys with that kind of message where you can magically solve all of your problems by reprogramming thought, and people like gandhi or krishnamurti, who saw that thought, being unintelligent, can't free itself from a problem its responsible for creating. the solution comes from the awareness of the problem. it's understanding how it all operates. but with the self and its conditioning, it's kind of like we're touching a hot stove and we don't understand the connection to the pain we feel. the self isn't going to surrender, so you sort of have to see the problem in spite of yourself.

 

[novella]

I agree, something has to be said about it, or the awareness might never come, but you've already tricked yourself into thinking that love is the idea or the experience, and that it can be acquired. even if I say it's neither one of those, that fact that thought is translating what you're reading, and trying to imagine what this state is like, forces you into a catch-22. . . . the whole isn't brought into being through the part, it's the other way around.



compassion is not the thing you experience, it's your connection to it, as a whole, which in turn shapes your thoughts and actions and all of the parts that exist within that field. .

Does love or envy or hate exist in me even when I am not consciously thinking of them? Yes, in a sense, these states do exist beyond conscious thought because the experience of them and their associations are mapped into my associative memory. So that seeing an object that I associate with one of these feelings will bring a flood of that feeling to mind. So the whole is brought into being through the part.

What does compassion consist of, if not thought? It is a state of the imagination, nothing else. It doesn't connect to anything. Rather, it is a feeling that one should connect. But we are all essentially alone.

 

[bobbyburns]

you mentioned the subconscious earlier, and I left it alone because, in a way, it's not important. thought is fundamentally the same on all scales. the function of the subconscious, as I see it, is like that of a combination lock. it's possible that you'll hear something and this will all come apart in an instant, but more than likely it will be little by little, because, like you were saying, a lot of it you can't even see. I don't know, I guess the point I'm driving at is there's really nothing you can do to change it. it's what you're already doing that is the problem. heh, if you were a christian I'd tell you that your religious beliefs are what's holding you back. in your case, it's this belief you have that thought is indispensable, that's it feeding you the truth. it's not though, it's feeding you a lie. it's giving you a piece of the truth and tricking you into thinking it's giving you the whole. it only knows what the five senses tell it. so thought, being limited, can't bring about compassion. it's not in consciousness, it's not in the area of the imagination. you can't capture it. it's a relationship.

 

[Motokid]

Question for Mr. bobbyburns

Hey bobbyburns, I have a question for you. It’s very difficult for those of us who have only been in this forum for about a month to know who you really are, so I’m hoping you can shed some light on you?

After reading your posts in this thread I’m trying to figure out if you are going through life as a generally happy person? I’m not being sarcastic, or implying anything. I’m truly interested in knowing if somebody who thinks, on the level that you appear to, can be honestly happy with day-to-day life?

When you take basic human emotions to such a level as you have in this thread I wonder if you are missing out on true happiness. And I know you’ll probably pound me on supplying some kind of definition of what true happiness is. Which, in a way, is exactly why I’m asking.

As you perceive life, are you happy with yours?

 

[novella]

you mentioned the subconscious earlier, and I left it alone because, in a way, it's not important. thought is fundamentally the same on all scales. the function of the subconscious, as I see it, is like that of a combination lock. it's possible that you'll hear something and this will all come apart in an instant, but more than likely it will be little by little, because, like you were saying, a lot of it you can't even see. I don't know, I guess the point I'm driving at is there's really nothing you can do to change it. it's what you're already doing that is the problem. heh, if you were a christian I'd tell you that your religious beliefs are what's holding you back. in your case, it's this belief you have that thought is indispensable, that's it feeding you the truth. it's not though, it's feeding you a lie. it's giving you a piece of the truth and tricking you into thinking it's giving you the whole. it only knows what the five senses tell it. so thought, being limited, can't bring about compassion. it's not in consciousness, it's not in the area of the imagination. you can't capture it. it's a relationship.

I think your conception of compassion is radically different from mine, so we are talking about two different things. I refer to compassion in the sense of a human emotion based on sympathetic imagination. I think your definition would be something outside that?

I don't believe that thought is the entirety of experience or that it privileges us in any way. I'm one of those who believes the human mind and other natural systems are capable of much more than rational connections. If you think of perception and interpretation as a "trick" of thought, then you are just taking a skeptic's view of the natural human impulse to find order and draw lines of relationships in the world. But there's nothing wrong with that attempt to find relationships and causality. Putting time into that and accumulating knowledge that way certainly doesn't mean that I assume that that's all there is. In fact, I believe that there are worlds within worlds that we have no insight into. I just don't buy into blind mysticism. It's a cop out.

Do you know that trees communicate with each other to coordinate certain multi-year cycles of reproduction? I read that in the naturalist Bernd Heinrich's book on trees. It's a new discovery that nobody has looked into much. Stuff like that is mind-bending to me, but I don't just ascribe it to some unformed fuzzy idea about nature. There are things happening that I don't understand, and I respect the process of inquiry.

 

[bobbyburns]

I think your conception of compassion is radically different from mine, so we are talking about two different things. I refer to compassion in the sense of a human emotion based on sympathetic imagination. I think your definition would be something outside that?

psychologically, you can define feelings, experiences, thoughts, and all that, because they are things that the self can possess. they are my feelings, my experiences, my thoughts. they become crystallized in memory. when you talk about my definition of compassion, the thing you're defining is not compassion, but the image of it put together by thought. thought doesn't understand this though. it wants something it can do. it can't see that this is not an ability to be cultivated. it's like silence. it isn't somethin that you possess, it exists in everything, but if all you hear is noise, then it only exists as an idea. it's the same with thought. it doesn't allow you to see past its veil, the self. so, in the end, it becomes very difficult to understand what compassion is. you kind of have to define it through what it is not before you can understand what it is. the point is that none of this it. this is not compassion. I don't even like using that word, it's too limited. if you don't mind, I'm going to invoke a star wars term and simply refer to it from now on as "the force". it will keep us from getting stuck on semantics.

I don't believe that thought is the entirety of experience or that it privileges us in any way. I'm one of those who believes the human mind and other natural systems are capable of much more than rational connections. If you think of perception and interpretation as a "trick" of thought, then you are just taking a skeptic's view of the natural human impulse to find order and draw lines of relationships in the world. But there's nothing wrong with that attempt to find relationships and causality. Putting time into that and accumulating knowledge that way certainly doesn't mean that I assume that that's all there is. In fact, I believe that there are worlds within worlds that we have no insight into. I just don't buy into blind mysticism. It's a cop out.

though it goes without saying, you're certainly not obligated to buy into anything you believe is unreasonable. that's your choice, in a sense. I'll keep going with this as long as you're interested. really, all we're describing is energy. thought, consciousness, the force, the universe, it's all made up of energy. don't pass this off as blind mysticism, think of it like I'm describing the way heat always seeks cold. the nature of the self is to seek permanancy. it's like a machine, and that's just how it operates. whether it's through belief, knowledge, power, sex, religion, and those sorts of things, it is seeking its own permanancy. in a way, even when it rejects permanancy that still brings about a kind of pride. I guess that's where atheists find their common ground with religious people. though they reject that which the other embraces to be true, both are equally comfortable with their explanations of the world. people will tell you they're open-minded, but, of course, they're lying. what they really mean is, "I can go from here ... to here, so I'm free to move everywhere in between." in actuality, everyone is conditioned, and everyone can find limits inside themselves that they will not cross. there's no such thing as free will. in fact, it's an oxymoron. you don't choose to like a certain kind of music, you either like it or you don't. I've heard people say, "well, each morning I make a choice between drinking orange juice and apple juice." again, people will assume they're in control, but if you try giving them a cup of cyanide, the conditioned response you'll get is, "I could drink it, but I choose not to." of course, that's a lie too. even if you pressed the cup against their lips, try as they might to control themselves, they'd automatically push it away. it's like trying to choose to like music you don't like. in other words, the thinker, or the thought, or whatever you want to call it, can't choose to see something outside of its conditioning, but it can observe how its conditioning operates, and that opens the window for the force to blow through. like a house, the self only exists as long as its walls are held together. when you see how it is built the force can destroy it, and then you're conscious of a much larger field.

Do you know that trees communicate with each other to coordinate certain multi-year cycles of reproduction? I read that in the naturalist Bernd Heinrich's book on trees. It's a new discovery that nobody has looked into much. Stuff like that is mind-bending to me, but I don't just ascribe it to some unformed fuzzy idea about nature. There are things happening that I don't understand, and I respect the process of inquiry.

I'm totally with you on that, novella. it's amazing what's going on around us, physically, without our even sensing it.

 

[novella]

the thing you're defining is not compassion, but the image of it put together by thought.

so, in the end, it becomes very difficult to understand what compassion is.

I'm going to invoke a star wars term and simply refer to it from now on as "the force". it will keep us from getting stuck on semantics.

See, we are talking about two different things. For the moment, then, let's drop my conception of compassion and look at yours. This force or compassion you are referring to is something I would regard as a pantheistic spirit-in-all-things type of notion, primarily because of your assumption of a deeper interconnectedness.

consciousness, the force, the universe, it's all made up of energy. don't pass this off as blind mysticism, think of it like I'm describing the way heat always seeks cold. the nature of the self is to seek permanancy.

To me, intangible things that are only described in terms of metaphor, for the sake of intellectual conception, are best supported by observation. It's the province of religions to rely on metaphor and allegory to "show" how things "really" are.

people will tell you they're open-minded, but, of course, they're lying. what they really mean is, "I can go from here ... to here, so I'm free to move everywhere in between."

Others may profess to be "open-minded", but even the best thinkers are prejudiced in all things. I wouldn't say I'm open-minded about blind belief, but I am tolerant of it where I find it. I don't pretend that I think it's cool to believe in hell and the eternal damnation of everyone who doesn't think like me, but I"ll put up with it, if only to keep the peace.


When it comes to terms like "free will" and "compassion", well, you just can't avoid getting into a little semantics. To the extent that we are what we are, there is no free will, but there is choice within a limited range. I don't put any stock in manifest destiny, but I do feel that individual choices are miniscule perturbations in the overall fabric of existence. That, however, does not diminish the value and potential consequences of choice for the individual. How do I barter my conscience, let me count the ways. Everything I chose has direct consequences for me.


As for seeking permanancy, if you mean immortality, I think most humans hope to leave a legacy but gladly accept mortality in many cases. I heard a very moving account of a man who'd inadvertently spent several years working with Mother Theresa's dying people in India. He thought he'd be there for a day, to pay back a debt, and stayed for years.

Everyone there was dying. There was no way around it, and no attempt to physically intervene, only to provide comfort. The guy said it was extremely peaceful, that there was little anguish or fear. There was an overall acceptance that life would end. He was contrasting it with a Western hospital where one is expected to intervene to extreme measures. I think the Western model is a long way from what the rest of the world experiences.