Nothing.

by Narkissos 55 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Satanus

  Less is more. Nothing is everything.

  S
• 

  jwfacts

  Great Post. I am now dogmatic about nothing, or should I say dogmatic about 'no thing'. My mind is filling with ideas of all kinds, and I contentedly accept none are more or less proven. There seems no reason to have to have to accept only one possible reality, or to need to assert my current reality are correct.

  This is why I have trouble with apostate narratives too. They don't offer freedom at all.

  Slimboyfat, I am not quite sure what you mean here, as there does not seem to be an apostate narrative as such. Apostate views are full spectrum, ranging from fundamental Christian to athiest. Which narratives in particular do you refer?
• 

  Tyrone van leyen

  Ok so what wer'e saying here is no anchors based on bogus beleifs are necessary in an ever changing world. Perhaps we might have something here. After all we are in the information age. I like the idea of floating through life. Personally the way I see it, the world is full of info and we must decide in this short life span of ours what is useful info and what is garbage. Many people indeed fill their heads with garbage without even knowing it. Nark confuses me cuz he knows more about the bible than anyone I've ever encountered and yet totally rejects it. If it's garbage then why does he fill his head with it. I think it's because it gives him further conviction for his beleif in nothing and also cuz it fascinates him. For me I could never see the relevance of studying in depth a book that had relevance in a society over 3000 years ago. Now I do see the relevance of it because our whole society has been affected by this book. Narc can help dig people out of their religious graves. It's where a lot of us came from but maybe we'd be better off burning the bible and starting anew with 21st century knowledge.
• 

  compound complex

  Greetings Narkissos,

  I am moved to respond to your eloquently-phrased declaration as I move about, lost, in the great nothingness [perdu dans le vide?]. Ever hungering for knowledge, I have found that my first step in reassembling my cranial store of random information and making it useful to me, was first to achieve some emotional balance. How so? Get rid of the cog-dis. I determined that I should never attend another meeting at the Kingdom Hall. After forty years as a JW, I still could not make sense of WT babel. I continually reverted back - mentally and spiritually - to what I perceived primitive Christianity to be. I could never bear the chaos that Fred Franz's and his minions' theological construsts did to my head.
  Now that I am starting over, as it were, "nothing," or at the very most, "simplicity," is quite all right with me. As you stated, I can already see and enjoy life in its simple beauty and people as they are; I am no longer influenced and tainted by the preconceived notions and judgments of the Society.
  Regarding that assemblage of mental notes that comprise my thinking and the subsequent need to catalogue and analyze everything, I am disciplining myself to turn my brain off and simply smile and gaze in wonder at all the beauty that surrounds me. Does that mean I'm leaving a place for the demons? [shudder]

  Thank you for a great topic. Hope I didn't wander too far off into the outer reaches of nothingness...........

  CoCo
• 

  Madame Quixote

  It's a little less scary to contemplate when I think in terms of what Mark Twain said about not fearing death or dying. I know I was nothing before I was conceived in my mother's womb; and it did not distress or discomfort me in the least, for many, many trillions of eons of time. I think Twain's attitude was that he'd been 'dead for billions of years and it didn't inconvenience me in the least.'
• 

  frankiespeakin

  "Much Ado About Nothing" Wrote Mr. Shakespeare.

  Everything comes from nothing and returns back into nothing. Nothing seems to be pregnant and barren at the same time.
• 

  nvrgnbk

  If you want somethin', dont ask for nothin'.

  If you want nothin', dont ask for somethin'.

  What jt said- .

  It's enough for me to simply be.
• 

  Narkissos

  Thanks everyone for responding. That was not easy.

  slim,

  I can relate to much of what you wrote. Especially:

  As soon as I assert something I doubt its truthfulness. It is as though something claimed is negated by the very claim.

  What every assertion denies or rules out comes back haunting it as its shade one way or another -- as Derrida magistrally pointed out regarding writing, for every "author"'s signature the text itself smuggles a counter-signature questioning every piece of "meaning" and "intention" s/he may have put into the writing.

  What (imo, and to an extent) saves "apostate narratives" from becoming another meta-narrative is their plurality and contradictions. There is actually little in common between those who have turned to another form of belief and see the WT as one or the foremost of devil's plots, and agnostic or atheist ex-JWs who regard it as just one weird sample of ideological and social construction among many others in history. Or between those who picture themselves as victims and those who admit to their own responsibility in the "deception". Fortunately we don't speak one language anymore (if we ever did) and this prevents us from building another big "tower" -- even a negative, anti-Tower. The dispersion of power, as you excellently stated, is the point. And from this perspective I also suscribe to your criticism of "evidence," which reminds of Nietzsche and Cioran ("the more I know, the less I want").

  I agree that "nothingness" as a concept and "nihilism" as an ideology can become meta-narratives, too. Our mind would read consistency into anything, even nothing. The "nothing" I'm after is definitely a part of language -- another signifier without an extra-linguistic signifié. "No-word" (lo-dabar) would be more adequate maybe but that would still be a word. My "no-thing" is actually a confession of language coming full circle -- a repentance and an acknowledgement, both joyful and desperate (in the sense of not entertaining the hope of entirely escaping language).

  Better keep quiet then? Why better?

  As Tyrone said, "Is there anyone capable of really shutting out the noise?"

  My first reply to that was: if there really were, we would hardly hear of him/her again.

  And, while writing that, the thought occurred to me: perhaps this happens all the time, who knows? Through each breath of perception, interest, fascination, contemplation, extasis (CoCo reminds me of the "simple eye" of the Gospels), maybe the wordless "within" and "without" communicates beyond language, unbeknownst to our "conscious self".

  Is there anything more inaccessible to our language-mediated minds than immediacy?

  The most intimate we "know" only poetically.

  (Off-topic to Tyrone: I don't reject the Bible. I just read it and enjoy it otherwise than I used to.)
• 

  poppers

  "Is there anyone capable of really shutting out the noise?" ........ Here is an important question that gets to the root of problems; the question is fertile ground for the investigation of SELF-enquiry. Find out just who/what it is that identifies with the "noise" of the mind - is there an "I" that is separate and distinct apart from the mind? Discover this directly and see what happens to "noise".
• 

  Tyrone van leyen

  Again,I'm not sure if I'm on the right track,but the discovery of self through meditation might be a means of acheiving this. We all have an inner voice or a pilot that we might even call a gut feeling. When we grow up with all this noise or distraction from others ideas,opinions, beleifs in the search for belonging and meaning we can stray from our own natural instincts. I'm not even sure what my natural way is supposed to be since my own,opinions thoughts and beleifs were never given consideration or explored. I beleive the witnesses are conditioning people to shut off every natural instinct there ever was.

  I also beleive there is a point of no return if you deny your "self"fortoo long. In order to reach that very special place inside you need complete silence and faith in your self. You must turn off all emotion to be ina semi conscious state for full acess. This helps shut off bias and judgement in dealing with issues and then pick a topic which you want a gut answer too and focus on just that. These are things I have dicovered for myself but I am still a troubled soul. The abscence of emotion in pure thought is perhaps the best state of nothingness in the conscious world.