Originally posted by pawnhandler
You don't see folks concentrating? This is one of the few threads I've read that has stayed remarkably on-task. A question was asked and answers given according to the experiences and world views of the readers. Most of the answers seem to show that the writer did indeed think about the question at hand before answering. The background of each writer ...[text shortened]... tating. Are you suggesting that each point of view requires something you consider proof?
Of course not. And I am not necessarily impatient with this thread, but in general I have a lot of impatience to overcome. That is one strong reason I engage in the study and practice of Insight Meditation -- I've been too impatient all my life. This is a fault.
The impatence comes from anxiety. And when my anxiety collides with my appreciation of the basic absurdity of existence, I experience what is known as angst. I find the study and practice of Insight Meditation and the contemplation of Buddhist philosophy in general, in a non-religious context, most helpful.
When one who desires there to be some reason and order to existence faces the inherent contradiction between that desire and what can seem to be the utter formless, cold and indifferent chaos of reality, that contradiction gives rise to the sense that life is absurd, meaningless. Camus wrote of this in his Myth of Sisyphus and tried to make the case that it is enough that we fight back against this contradiction by living fully and that we should be happy, as Sisyphus was happy, to live an absurd existence because at least we know the truth of it. Well, that's not good enough, I've come to think.
So I study and train and try to widen my awareness without judgment. I do not hold with most of the existentialists, although I do think, as did Viktor Frankl, that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to it being created for them by deities or authorities or defined for them by philosophical or theological doctrines.
When I minored in philosophy in college so many decades ago, I recall Walter Kaufmann describing existentialism as "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life"
Well, I'm still sort of in there with Walter -- but I do not thereby espouse any alternative school of thought as the truth of the whole.
I'll explain further.