by Tinker » Tue Jun 28, 2011 4:06 am
I know what you mean DoU. I tried to point out to Pastaneta that she was an inspiration to anti-semites everywhere.
I try not to let it get to me though. I am pretty much a crypto-judeophile. There's a lot about Jewish culture that I like and I think that there is a practical spirituality there that really has found some of the best ways of walking through this life as a community of people. A lot of the changes I'd make to America would be inspired by Israelis. But you have to take the good with the bad, there are a lot of things that are pretty repulsive about it too.
But I can't fault someone for wanting to minimize the suffering as best they can.
When smoking DMT I came to a recognition of something in death. So many people think that DMT brings you an understanding of death and will claim that DMT is dying and being reborn. In a way that's true, but mostly it really isn't. What it did do for me was bring me right to the edge. It peeled away all of the blocks on suffering and I realized what agony I am in 24/7. Then it began to strip away my personality to a core, 'me', a me without properties other than simply being me, there was nothing else, I perceived nothing at all other than myself and a sense of the divine presence. The horror that I should take the very next step the one beyond death was terrible to behold. When stripped of all sense, there was no time, there was no space, at least not forward, there was the faint memory of there once having been that, but even that was stripped away. And what I realized about death is that when you are dying a quick death is no different from a long and agonizing one. When your mind begins to shut down, when it loses attachment to sensory perception, when it loses the concept of time and space, the moment feels eternal, the very notion of a 'quick and painless death' is absurd. The only way a death can be quick and painless is if your mind is obliterated faster than neurons can communicate signals to one another. And slitting a throat simply is not that. There is plenty of time to be in anguish for eternity when your blood is pouring out your neck.
The canary didn't die because this mine is dangerous, it died because it's lazy and wasn't raised with a proper work ethic.