Index 
Epistemology Idea of "Other" Purpose Souls
Contentment: Contentment seem to best sum up my goal in life, but perhaps it’s no longer just a goal, so I may, if I remember, ask my drug prescribing psychiatrist to change my goal on my treatment plan from “happiness” which I told him earlier to “contentment.” To me, contentment is more general and includes happiness, or at least it may, but happiness does not include contentment. When I was hurrying to a therapy group, I maxed out my wait time at stoplights and said, “Drats”, expressing anger and frustration. But angry at what? Not at me, but at fate it seems. Then I told the group, “How silly, to be angry at fate, she’s not likely to take any notice” Even Zeus must bow to the fates. What is this thing called “fate?” It seems to me it is everything beyond my control (Epictetus), that is everything except my thoughts, my consciousness. We can’t control things, only what we think of things. And thinking about things has given us “almost” control over a lot of things, a knowledge as a likelihood of predictability. Marcelo Gleiser claims we can only know what we can measure. I’m not sure that I agree. I know I am alive, Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream notwithstanding, though I can’t measure my “aliveness”, i.e. my consciousness. The Dali Lama bases emptiness at least in part on the observation that reality is not what it appears to be, but with due respect, reality is EXACTLY as it appears to be, it’s just that we only sense a particular aspect of it. A bacterium’s universe is different, as is a quark’s. Our pursuit to know reality, to know God, to achieve Nirvana seems to imply we need to know all of it when we can only know a tiny bit of it. Our machines that produce different combinations of hadrons and leptons to about 10-45 meters cubed. Yet physists claim they are “close” to a theory of everything, being able to describe the entire world, the entire universe. Maybe the way of generalized, abstracted particles (not real ones) behave as describe processes consistent with reality, but the particulars are too complex for Q.E.D. What is the probability cloud of electron 7 in an oxygen molecule? How does that particular oxygen molecule contribute to my “consciousness”? What will be the next leaf to fall from a tree, any tree? When physics can answer these question, I'll start to believe they are "close". |