nevermore
A wave of the ocean
Hi. I've been interested in religion and philosophy for a long time. I've taken a deterministic view of the universe since I was between 3 and 6, can't quite remember how old. I observed my own mind and tried to figure out how what I now know is called free will, could possibly be behind it. Didn't think about it much on a daily basis afterwards, so it didn't affect my behaviour to make me much more forgiving, unfortunately, because in everyday arguments it always very much FELT like everybody has free will. To cut a very long story short though, I've been listening to Alan Watts lectures, meditating and reading about Buddhist explanations of dependent origination, impermanence and no-self, and eventually they too clicked into place, in a way that makes determinism far more palatable. All together, in fact, those seemingly nihilistic attitudes are actually extremely comforting, and yes, "liberating". Very recently, I've been experiencing these intellectual concepts as "feeling" like reality, instead of just believing it while still feeling a sense of reality being composed of non-arbitrarily defined separate, inherently existing "things". This experience involves feeling that every "thing" is actually me (within an expanded definition of "me", because the ordinary definition of what is and isn't a particular person is arbitrary), and fear, anger and hostility make absolutely no sense. A warm, calm feeling go with it. I'm interested in exploring this kind of philosophy/experience more and looking into the mystical, esoteric traditions of various religions, like Sufism, to broaden my horizons beyond the Buddhist and Hindu interpretations of it that I'm familiar with.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for reading.
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