How to Build a Stronger Ego - Steve Pavlina

[Talking Ass]

Cahoot: Paris, Texas is a pretty damn good film. That scene is pure Shepard. In fact, he wrote the beginning of the screenplay for the film but the middle of it Wenders struggled to write, but then Shepard came back in precisely with that scene and the ending of the film. The version of the film I have (Criterion Collection) has an a separate extra all the Super-8 they shot but didn't include. Radiant stuff.

I have a few other recommendations, if you like films: One is a Louis Malle production of the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya: 'Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street'. Masterful. Another film I tremendously admire is a Korean film by Lee Chang-Dong: 'Secret Sunshine'. A woman loses her husband and then her only little boy is killed and, avoiding her pain, has a Christian conversion. Then is forced to work her way back to reality, back to the reality of her loss, and away from this shallow conversion. It's very good. The other one is a German film by Götz Spielmann: 'Revanche'. A small-time German crook falls in love with a Russian hooker and to escape their mutual economic plight he robs a bank. Stupidly, he takes her along and she gets killed. But he escapes back to his grandfather's homestead in the country and the bulk of the film is his dealing with his 'revanche' (desire for revenge against the cop who shot his GF).

It is an interesting exercise to imagine these 'Dialogues of Enlightenment', the people here, and the contrast between a written projected existence and the 'real life' each must surely have, in a theatrical or dramatic setting. Dan with his karaoke. Dennis with his chihuahuas and their little electrocution collars. Blissful David on his bicycle. Liberty Sea with his volume of Heidegger in a cyclo wending its way through the busy streets of Hanoi. Bob Michaels with a copy of Mein Kampf and the layout of an Ark. Alex with his stacks of books and chintzy 'putas' in broken down Colombian hotels while the bells toll mass and the eagle screams (writing epic missives on his fucking iPhone! for christsakes!) Diebert stoically making his way across Dutch campuses of Higher Learning and tipping his hat to the damsels, stopping now and again to jot down a profundity. Movingalways in a full lotus posture with the backdoor open and the wind from some N Eastern forest blowing in leaves. Kunga with her oversized bottle of wine, tippy-tapping rhapsodies in capitals...

Every character has motivations, whether obvious and stated or perhaps unknown even to themselves. I think about this because at some point, I heard, David was writing a screenplay: a didactic drama to demonstrate his points about enlightenment. To some degree at least this is a theatrical medium since it is all moved along by dialogue and nothing else.

[Bobo]

You are in many ways the very Voice of Reasonability and you have NO RELATIONSHIP to 'Quinnism' but you operate as the Defender! It is sort of weird, dude.

Don't mistake the sins of van Rijhnninsm for the sins of QRS.

The weirdest thing is that you cannot see that I'm talking about exactly the same as David in many ways. Of course epistemologically one can never be certain but I have no difficulty understanding what he writes, why he would write that way and how carefully weighed and precise his words always are.

Are here opened the gates of hell?

[Sphere70]

Talking Ass -

'Secret Sunshine' is actually one of my absolute favorite movies. It is so damn good. You should also check out his latest movie 'Poetry' - amazing stuff.
Also look up Michael Haneke's 'The Seventh Continent' and his 'The White Ribbon', kind of the same mood.
And throw a classic in there too while you're at it ,-), Ingmar Bergman's 'Scenes from a Marriage' (the tv-version) - a horrifically beautiful desecration of the stickiness of human relationships.

I have to say about 'Paris, Texas' that I didn't really get into it. It seemed to pose with more depth than it delivered... Don't know though, was a while since a saw it.

[Dennis Mahar]

It is an interesting exercise to imagine these 'Dialogues of Enlightenment', the people here, and the contrast between a written projected existence and the 'real life' each must surely have, in a theatrical or dramatic setting. Dan with his karaoke. Dennis with his chihuahuas and their little electrocution collars. Blissful David on his bicycle. Liberty Sea with his volume of Heidegger in a cyclo wending its way through the busy streets of Hanoi. Bob Michaels with a copy of Mein Kampf and the layout of an Ark. Alex with his stacks of books and chintzy 'putas' in broken down Colombian hotels while the bells toll mass and the eagle screams (writing epic missives on his fucking iPhone! for christsakes!) Diebert stoically making his way across Dutch campuses of Higher Learning and tipping his hat to the damsels, stopping now and again to jot down a profundity. Movingalways in a full lotus posture with the backdoor open and the wind from some N Eastern forest blowing in leaves. Kunga with her oversized bottle of wine, tippy-tapping rhapsodies in capitals...

Every character has motivations, whether obvious and stated or perhaps unknown even to themselves. I think about this because at some point, I heard, David was writing a screenplay: a didactic drama to demonstrate his points about enlightenment. To some degree at least this is a theatrical medium since it is all moved along by dialogue and nothing else.

People are thrown in circumstances.
so what?
your postmodernist obliviousness may seek, as a matter of controlling the narrative, to reduce them to a shallow quantity and a shallow life
trapped in unconsciousness.
a projection that suits you because to think otherwise would be terrifying.
putting them in little boxes under lock and key.

instead of thinking.
think about thinking.

by the way, I've never had a conversation with you.
face to face 3 feet apart is a conversation.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Every character has motivations, whether obvious and stated or perhaps unknown even to themselves. I think about this because at some point, I heard, David was writing a screenplay: a didactic drama to demonstrate his points about enlightenment. To some degree at least this is a theatrical medium since it is all moved along by dialogue and nothing else.

Alex,any medium is as theatrical as the audience or participant desires it to be. Dennis is right, your urge to control this narrative forces you to reduce all participants to pawns trapped by their own subconscious forces, to imagine them as living shallow lives, in hollowed out mechanical mental exercises. This is all because you might not be able to face the fact this could be said of all existences including your own using the very same narrative. It's your own personal fight against meaninglessness but this forum provides you with all the material to manifest a defense against it. In a way it's your defense itself which summons the nihilism because the absurdity contained in your argumentations implodes any possible meaning step by step. It's called "digging ones own grave". Hey, don't blame me, I might be a mortician but I let always the others dig their own graves.

[Talking Ass]

...a 'path of enlightenment', and this forum is evidence of it, is in itself the sickness, is in itself the thing that is requires a cure. How about that? ;-) Falling into a concept of 'enlightenment' is like falling into a trap. You may never get out of it and yet you'll fight to stay in it!

Fair enough. Same goes for "healing" though.

I appreciate your admittance as to the ridiculousness of any notion of 'enlightenment' as a 'real thing', but the fact of 'healing' is NOT comparable. A person goes to a hospital to undergo treatment, the treatment aid in a natural process of healing. Healing is one of the central areas of human focus and has been with us since time began. Just as it has always been relevant it is still relevant now. While I most certainly will agree to speak of 'enlightened attitude' or 'enlightened behavior', it is obvious to me and should be obvious to anyone else that the whole rap about 'enlightenment', and the way it is used on GF, is through-and-through bogus. Look at the way it possesses those who choose to subject themselves to it. I rest my case.

Alex, any medium is as theatrical as the audience or participant desires it to be. Dennis is right, your urge to control this narrative forces you to reduce all participants to pawns trapped by their own subconscious forces, to imagine them as living shallow lives, in hollowed out mechanical mental exercises. This is all because you might not be able to face the fact this could be said of all existences including your own using the very same narrative. It's your own personal fight against meaninglessness but this forum provides you with all the material to manifest a defense against it. In a way it's your defense itself which summons the nihilism because the absurdity contained in your argumentations implodes any possible meaning step by step.

Dennis is not right. Dennis is a torturer of defenseless chihuahuas among many other grave sins not the least of which is wretched newage sewer poetry!

I want it to be known that much of what I will now discourse on is not precisely my own and has been gleaned by a thorough reading of 'Actors and Acting', ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, Crown Publishers, NY, 1949 and from 'Un Essai de renovation dramatique' in 'Etudes d'art dramatique, critiques d'un autre temp, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Francias, Paris, and from 'Bandy & Peanuts Save Little Owl' and 'The Complete Book of the Donkey' by Elisabeth Svendsen.

One of the characteristics of art, and importance of art, is how it reflects our lives back to us. I assume that you know that the great bulk of what I write and the way I write it is, quite directly, an offering to our beloved friend David. Not to you, not to Dennis, not to anyone else, but to David. I resolved to 'help' [him] because I saw the need. I rose to the occasion. I made a sacrifice---a form of caritas---to a project that has taken me a number of years of work. Let us recall the words from The Book of Ass: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'. Well, the Talking Ass takes all this quite seriously, you see.

You remember, naturally, that 'I' received astounding and bitter opposition and ridicule when I first began to chime in here. Those who have been here awhile know that I was, basically, equated with the Devil himself, with Maya and illusion, delusion, stupidity, lack of understanding, and God knows what else. Well, I took it all in, I drank it down so to speak, and I allowed it all to simmer and churn in my assey innards. I came to understand that a group of persons had been captured by spirits of poison. You know and I know and my readership knows that I am anything but the Devil, or illusion, or under the spell of delusion. What most impresses in fact is my lucidity, the force of my exalted---nay almost Holy!---personality. But I took in the sickness of the blathering boys, these many confused children, and I allowed it all to act on me. This is the basic shamanistic method.

Look: a normal doctor treats the symptoms in the subject as if it is apart from him. But in the shamanic tradition, the doctor allows the sickness into hisself and he deals with it, he conquers it, he Overcomes it (intended reference to Sri Nietzsche). This I have done, Selah! And may the boatman in a bathrobe scare & cure the annihilated illness into a live hell where chthonic priestesses apply the salves! I have found the illness, I located it, I called it up, Diebert, and I have cured it on an inner level! This I have done for y'all while being sullied and disrespected at every turn!

But that is what caritas is almost always about...

In the old Old Days, the sacred art was essentially theatre. Back before there were words, old chum. All our arts come out of this very very old tradition of sacred pantomime. The Talking Ass whose roots go back down into the strata of Reality and whose tap-root draws up healing force and vitality from the Real Wellspring of Life, enacts for you, without pay or praise, the sacred pantomimes that---mystery of mysteries!---reorganize the crossed wires, relieve the short-circuits, heal the bruised and wounded feelings, validate the noble and the pure, and get the divine current flowing aright! And I present to you now an image: a girl-child, radiant as the sun itself, who emerges from your Swamp of Philosophical Death and claims the beauty and goodness of life! I have redeemed your murder, Selah! **

Blah blah *narrative forces* blah blah *shallow lives* blah blah blah BLAH *hollowed and mechanical mental exercises* blah BLAH blah *face the facts* BLAH BLAH BLAH *meaninglessness* *summons the nihilism* and blahcetera, blahcetera, blahcetera!

What REALLY traps people is lack of ability to see into the humorous side of 'all this'. Many are now rising up out of the Swamp of Murk and are casting aside the Dreary Spoon filled with filth and lie-fluid. And then they laugh! Implosion of knotted seriousness! Shoveling shadows while the parhelion shines!

[Diebert van Rhijn]

I appreciate your admittance as to the ridiculousness of any notion of 'enlightenment' as a 'real thing', but the fact of 'healing' is NOT comparable. A person goes to a hospital to undergo treatment, the treatment aid in a natural process of healing. Healing is one of the central areas of human focus and has been with us since time began. Just as it has always been relevant it is still relevant now. While I most certainly will agree to speak of 'enlightened attitude' or 'enlightened behavior', it is obvious to me and should be obvious to anyone else that the whole rap about 'enlightenment', and the way it is used on GF, is through-and-through bogus. Look at the way it possesses those who choose to subject themselves to it. I rest my case.

Perhaps you misunderstood. No, of course you misunderstood. The notion of being enlightened is just as ridiculous or real as notions of being cured, death or born in any hospital or other place. Only in that sense this is all a joke and dead serious at the same time. It's not that difficult even for the starting philosopher to understand that any start or end state is purely contextual and tentative, just a way to briefly summarize a complex of ongoing processes, always some countering others. For example, nobody is ever "dead" but what's actually being said is that a certain idea, a certain inexplicable experience of "another" is being missed. And we have the more scientific body count. But both are impoverished forms of reality. Really, both are already dead.

[Dennis Mahar]

So, you are playing the victim Alex.

toothless tiger.

[Talking Ass]

Perhaps you misunderstood. No, of course you misunderstood. The notion of being enlightened is just as ridiculous or real as notions of being cured, death or born in any hospital or other place. Only in that sense this is all a joke and dead serious at the same time. It's not that difficult even for the starting philosopher to understand that any start or end state is purely contextual and tentative, just a way to briefly summarize a complex of ongoing processes, always some countering others. For example, nobody is ever "dead" but what's actually being said is that a certain idea, a certain inexplicable experience of "another" is being missed. And we have the more scientific body count. But both are impoverished forms of reality. Really, both are already dead.

It is my personal assessment, cher ami, that with this little knot you reveal the area where you are hung-up. I say that there is a very real and tangible difference between having a debilitating illness and being cured of that debilitating illness. I am also of the opinion that, in symbol and theory if not in actual practice, that this aspect of health/vitality/well-being and potency in life, is one of the strengths of Judaism and hence in Christian theory (Life in greater measure, etc.)

You can of course get fancy and convoluted about it but a person who is unwell physically very much knows it and lives with it like a wound. Those who work in this area and who help facilitate healing are often uniquely powerful and gifted people and I am not only speaking about doctors. There is nothing ridiculous either about being unwell and certainly not being liberated from it. I think you respond sometimes just to fill the space, whereas the Talking Ass lays down universal lines of wisdom that will stand...forever!

But clearly we are speaking on other levels: spiritual/psychological. And I remain as adamant as ever: healing and well-being is not a mirage, is not a false category, and though it has relationship to the contextual it is not 'tentative'. A person who has been rendered unwell and hindered in living life is suffering a tangible and real loss, minute by minute. Not to fully comprehend this, and to take it seriously, is an error of philosophy and of life-praxis.

Also, we are speaking (when we speak of 'enlightenment') of a form of grandiosity, and sometimes also an abstraction of self in life that leads to separation from self and a disjointing on many levels. We need look no further than to many of those who preach these doctrines of 'enlightenment' right in this space.

I have been around long enough to see that the use of the term 'enlightenment' is always perverse, wherever it happens to appear, and with whoever is working it, especially in the Western context. But the notion of healing: spiritual, psychological, emotional, even fiscal, though abused and subject to all sorts of delusions and misrepresentations, is very much a real and considerable thing. Your obfuscations and philosophizings notwithstanding...

[Talking Ass]

Dennis. DENNIS. DENNIS!!!

[Dennis Mahar]

The victim's resentment.

erecting buildings.
brick by brick by brick,
another brick in the wall.

a house of pain with a wide verandah
perceived injury, hurtness.
wallowing
self pity

it's empty and meaningless that it's empty and meaningless

no possibility

deaf to nonduality.

[Talking Ass]

It's not that difficult even for the starting philosopher to understand that any start or end state is purely contextual and tentative, just a way to briefly summarize a complex of ongoing processes, always some countering others.

Sure, just as any 'starting philosopher' can easily understand that in fact they don't exist!

Priceless!

[Dennis Mahar]

The thankfulness for the Victim,
is the Victim finally 'found a voice'.

[Dennis Mahar]

In the still night air,
like whips cracking,
there comes a gathering of voices,

astonishing.

Hark,
listen.

[ROB]

*Sigh*

Talking Ass finds himself, yet again, down among the acid-eaters...

Never,.! Acid eaters droop to the lowest levels in society-
Trust- your instincts.

:)

[Diebert van Rhijn]

I say that there is a very real and tangible difference between having a debilitating illness and being cured of that debilitating illness.

But this never was about differences in experiences, between hot and cold (you only make it now) but about the question if you can distinguish "someone" in a definite, undisputed state of being born, being dead or being enlightened somewhere in history or now here in this world.

There is nothing ridiculous either about being unwell and certainly not being liberated from it.

And for those not being liberated because of a particularly nasty disease? Sorry man, my groovy healing train has just passed you. The whole being unwell and getting well nonsense you're on about would be ridiculous to them at least. People with real illnesses in real life would laugh at book worm Alex.

A person who has been rendered unwell and hindered in living life is suffering a tangible and real loss, minute by minute. Not to fully comprehend this, and to take it seriously, is an error of philosophy and of life-praxis.

The only error is just your constantly changing of topics so you can keep having your way. It's what you're always doing at least when you're not putting others down as dysfunctional, clipped, mechanized amateurs of life. It's the other tactic you have for determining that the conversation remains under your control, in a place you cannot lose it.

But the notion of healing: spiritual, psychological, emotional, even fiscal, though abused and subject to all sorts of delusions and misrepresentations, is very much a real and considerable thing.

You just shouldn't bundle all these things up like that and make grandiose statements about them having any relation, that it would be all about the same "notion". They are very distinct processes, I mean: "fiscal"...? It's your personal choice to combine them but throwing a lot of half solved puzzles together in a bin doesn't create one larger half solved puzzle. Your spirituality is the most mechanical of this forum when it comes down to it. Mr Roboto!

[ROB]

You can't build a stronger ego,.

[ROB]

Hi.

I'm reading Shankara's crest jewel of discrimination., I perceive to know-well that the ego-Shankara puts no limits to-cannot come out of it's ego state without a flame/desire for discrimination. That the ego, in a nutshell, is placed; where as the soul of a man has no boundaries.

You say that man's state-referring to Deibert- has crossed the lines of communicable quea. Why?
In a forum such as this one-one cannot practice commonly known facts without using a quea of differences or differences in opinion. His name is Talking Ass.

[Talking Ass]

Diebert, aside from my own messianic greatness, the topic is the notion of 'building a stronger ego' as opposed to the dissolution of the ego, or the masking of it. I assert that 'enlightenment', as some final state, as some abstract 'other' state from our incarnated, day-to-day lives, is a fiction with a neurotic link. So, to speak of a person and an 'ego' in processes of seeking solidity of self, accomplishment, financial health and structure, psychological and spiritual health, productive interconnection with other people, etc., is not in fact a changing of the subject. It is the subject.

[Dennis Mahar]

Alex,

You remember, naturally, that 'I' received astounding and bitter opposition and ridicule when I first began to chime in here. Those who have been here awhile know that I was, basically, equated with the Devil himself, with Maya and illusion, delusion, stupidity, lack of understanding, and God knows what else. Well, I took it all in, I drank it down so to speak, and I allowed it all to simmer and churn in my assey innards.

This is called a 'victim impact statement'.
That means you are playing the victim.

When one gets the cosmic joke the laughter is of one's own peccadilloes and foibles.

[Talking Ass]

I know you are working the victim-angle, you puppy torturer, but you must read that paragraph as a subtle parody, and not with the inflection you are attaching to it. I suggest you get out of this torturer-victim mentality. Your whole style is remarkably like those shock-collars you put on your canine captives. Weird.

[Talking Ass]

Thank you-all for the opportunity of appearing here in all my majesty. But the time has come to bid you adieu and until the next time! I promise, though I can't say when, that I will start my final and definitive GF thread before moving on permanently. The one in which I isolate and describe the central and tragic flaw of the Quinnean doctrines! It will be worth your while! Until them my pasty, pale-faced friends!

[Pye]

Talking Ass writes: that I will start my final and definitive GF thread before moving on permanently. The one in which I isolate and describe the central and tragic flaw of the Quinnean doctrines! It will be worth your while! Until them my pasty, pale-faced friends!

I love this typo. I just love it. It is rich with obviousness: Until “them.” It is “them” you have on your mind, Alex, always “them,” always has been. Your project here has been an oedipal obsession – you must either kill the father-authority(s), or finally be acknowledged by “them.” How many more times will you be writing your opus-argument? How many more ‘permanent’ movings-on?

Until “them,” indeed. If you’re not willing to make the subject “you,” then you will always be concerning yourself about “them” . . . . .

A little dish of your favoured psyche-pab for you, Alex, though you'll probably spit it up and pound your little fists against it anyway . . . . :)

[Bobo]

M and N are pretty close together...

When you are on the opposite side suddenly the subject becomes a lot of "you", opposite? No, it's You. : )
So let's say this is correct, what is David's complex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEo9Bh679wM

[Pye]

Bobo notes that: M and N are pretty close together...

Okay, well, proximity wouldn't be the point here. Proofreading i.e. not-seeing-it (from our usually fastidious Alex) would be :)