Would you still feel so pro war if your involvement in one meant the death of most of your male relatives, and the rape of most of your female ones, including your mother and a teenaged sister? This is the sort of outcome commonly faced across the world. Hey bartender over here Two more shots And two more beers Sir turn up the TV sound The war has started on the ground Just love those laser guided bombs They're really great For righting wrongs You hit the target And win the game From bars 3,000 miles away 3,000 miles away We play the game With the bravery of being out of range We zap and maim With the bravery of being out of range We strafe the train With the bravery of being out of range We gain terrain With the bravery of being out of range With the bravery of being out of range We play the game With the bravery of being out of range http://www.lyricsdepot.com/roger-waters/the-bravery-of-being-out-of-range.html
Then why seek Nirvana? Pardon, but in order to achieve Nirvana, certain actions need to be consciously made (change from the state of need for pleasure and pain); which means, Nirvana is a state to be sought after. Do you have a need for Nirvana? I don't. I do not need pleasure or pain; I enjoy them both as they come, recognising both for what they are.
Can't fight nirvana? I dunno. People, and thus minds, can certainly we warred against. Shouldn't be a problem as anyone who is in that state supposedly accepts anything with a smile... even their eventual extinction. Glory is proof that you exist. It is a shout to all the universe that you are more than an unusual chemical reaction and that you will be heard. You will be remembered, at least in deeds if not in name, for as long as a human heart beats anywhere on any world and perhaps far longer. The Spartans standing fast at the Thermopylae against vastly larger armies of the Persians and dying... but enacting an ungodly toll before they went that echoed through the Old World. America sending a man to space and then to the moon, someday farther. Every power or individual that ever chisled itself into history and in doing so raised the human race one rung higher on the endless ladder of achievement.
Those who seek Nirvana don't know what they seek for. But in the process of searching and if in that process one gets rid of delusions, desires and hostility, he becomes what he sought for. What I want is not Nirvana, I want what I am. Sorry, this now is more a discussion suited for the phylosophy thread, but I already told in that one thread that I have found out what I am, but I can not fully grasp it yet. My wish is to grasp it and fulfill it in order to return and fulfill it again.
Lets say you find peace and refrain from any sort of competition for a thousand years. What happens when you come face to face with someone that is forged through a thousand years of bloodshed? You die or are enslaved or at least displaced.
Hm. You ask "What do you need?" and thus address the mind, not the body. The mind says it needs nothing. Yet it needs oxygen and sugar to survive. The mind needs the body to be sustained. The mind's function is to think. There is no thought without food for it, tangible and non-tangible. If there is no pleasure or pain, no desire, there is no food for thought. Yet the sensation of the need for thought is rarely there, such is our human nature. The mind ceises to exist with no food for thought. A being with no desires is another form of a sheep, useful to its shepherd for an array of reasons.
Why do you want to fight people who have no wish to fight you? Those people are only vessels of a state of mind. In fighting them you fight yourself, in killing them you are hostile towards yourself. They know no hostility. There is no extinction. The universe remains. Ah, the "I have a big penis" sindrome. Well, I've got news for you, you are just a chemical reaction, what you regard as yourself is but a small manifestation.
Not "I have a big penis." "My penis is bigger than yours." Well, the news is that a vagina is only 6 inches deep [please go on with the metaphor here].
You can not enslave mind. Death is only one more transformation. As told, you can not destroy the universe. It doesn't matter what you do against such a being. It's the same as hitting light with a sword.
Body is just a tool. A good craftsman always keeps his tools in good condition. The universe is the food. You are the food. The universe is eating you and you are eating the universe. The universe is feasting on itself.
What has it showed? How can you enslave something which has nothing to be enslaved? You can enslive desires, hostility, delusions, but not a tranquil mind.
A mind that does not control the body which sustains it is enslaved by that body. The body, and its mind, are then enslaved by a stronger mind. In order for the mind to control the body it has to have wants. Without a want, there is no cause for action. A mind which has absolutely no wants and fully rejects the warnings of the body simply sits there and dies. You have no proof that death is merely another transofrmation (and into what?) You die, and become the worms which feasted upon you. And then there's no "you" anymore, as worms are themselves. How about that for a transformation? Edit: Ah yes! recall Bush to your mind. Has he not enslaved the minds of some americans? And americans were fully tranquil in their manifold obesity.
Or the mind lets the body to die. If the body continues to sustain the mind, the mind is not enslaved. I am the universe. Body may die, my consciousness may be gone, but life goes on, the life what is myself. I am not some body parts detached from the whole of existance. The stars produce dust, the dust forms planets and animals. And I am equally the star, the animal, and the planet all at once. He just guides and uses their desires.
As I am agnostic, I make no claim to know what happens after you die. Is there a god, what kind of god is there if there is one, are we consumed by blackness and simply cease to be, or something else never thought of by man. I don't know and neither does anyone else. At least anyone alive. I take the safe assumption. I live for this world and any immortality I seek will be bound to it and its people. I will strain to do great things for myself and man and lifekind itself, perhaps engraving some shadow of myself on that which I touch. When I die some bit of myself will persist in human culture and in my descendants; some mark will have been made. But when I die I accept that I, everything that thinks or feels, will be gone. The dust and the worms will not be me and will be essentially interchangable with the dust and worms that exists elsewhere or would exist had you never been born. Material is material, without memory. Leave your mark on people and that which lasts. If I die and yet persist, I will be pleasantly surprised. Knowledge that that may or may not happen doesn't change how I live my life. Do what you can do now as hard as you can and as long as you can. There is no assurance that there will be anything else or that you will like it when and if you find it.
I don't really think you can fight utopia or Nirvana. Nirvana is a higher state of awareness, an enlightenment if you will, and utopia only exists within the confines of one's imagination. The only way to defeat them is to not go there because it isn't so much a place but a way of thinking. It does seem that war is a primal instinct as it occurs in Chimpanzees but we have the ability to control those urges. We have a knowlege of right and wrong that our close primate relatives don't. Is the cost of war really worth what you gain from it? Yes, new technologies have been discovered time and time again in times of war but look at the cost. Is it really worth it? We have also made advancements without war.
We have made advancements without war, but rarely without conflict. There must be a real and threatening need. Barring war, either there is a threat to you or there is something to exploit for your enhanced comfort or glory. Still conflict and not something allowed for by anything near Utopia. I will argue the rest at another time.
War seems to be the penultimate in conflict. Everything needs to be in moderation; don't eat too much or too little, don't work too hard or too little. Same with conflict. Too much and nothing gets done, too little and the same result. That's probably why so much is cyclical in history– oscillations from too much to too little. Trying to find a happy middle and all that.
1. it's a great song (ill email it to you if you wish) 2. it's not truely usefull at all, but humans always want the best so they kill for it
