Dying for something

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Most people with decent motivations who die in an attempt to save someone else most usually think only about successfully doing the saving, not dying in the attempt. The dying occurs as an accompanying unexpected tragedy and is not one of the ends of the effort. People are willing to take extreme chances in completing a noble effort.

I've never understood this, maybe never will.

What that indicates is that the immense satisfactions I derive from each moment of my existence, the avalanche of raw sensation and their interaction and almost infinite fascinating implications has never touched you. Your confession reveals a depressingly deprived existence and it arouses great pity in me.

I think I could say that I can really relate to Will Smith's character in Seven Pounds, its not that I'd be running out to do that sort of thing over what I wish my life had - it has more to do with an understanding of shame, a sense that a life can be rendered unworthy of experiencing if it carries enough weight, enough grief, enough scars on your honor, a dead enough future, those things of course take placing a social construct and honor/what people think of on perhaps a bit more of a pedestal than where you have you're sense of self at. Admittedly though, as depressed as I may have been from time to time in my life, I look at most people's lives now and I wouldn't trade places, living most 'common' lives I'd probably be gone by now.

As for taking the 'Mindfulness' approach though and trying to get ecstatic pleasure just feeling myself breath or trying to imagine feeling the rain of photons down upon me - I don't think I'd want to go that route. There are certain things about this reality that I feel like I'd be completely out of the loop, out of the know, and that my intuition would be cleaved from reality if I were not paying attention to what I find to be the bottom line of life - for better or worse.

Suffice to say though, perhaps there isn't a better or worse answer, some people will have lives that make certain things possible and other things largely impossible if not at least extremely unlikely, the next person just by genetics and upbringing could have that same picture largely flipped through no blessing nor faults of their own - it just is I suppose. You really enjoy being in touch with your senses in that way and would find life inferior otherwise, I find myself in touch with honor and achievement in a similar sort of way at the exclusion of lacking the two.

Honor and achievement are powerful social evaluations and I have nothing in my long life to declare in that direction. I have experienced a good deal of personal pain and disappointment but the vital force inherent in my living is my immediate presence in a fabulous universe full of wonders and surprises. That you should be so socially oriented strikes me as odd if you truly are involved with Asperger Syndrome. In general I avoid people, they make me uncomfortable and have very different basic values from my own. I am an artist, a poet, and something of an innovator and those values that most people strive for leave me cold. Light, color, sound, touch, taste, scent are my world and in this I find animals other than humans much more in line with my perspectives than humans in general. In this, I suppose, I am to large degree, not human. I find this delightful and never have had my fill and intend to fully take advantage in this rather brief sojourn in being alive.

I was just thinking about something else - was going to add it as addendum to my last post but see you already replied, I'll say a bit more.

What I was going to say, I probably get the kinds of pleasure you speak of with life out of a different source - I said honor and things like that before, they mean a lot to me on a personal level, but that's more stick than carrot. Where I think I actually get the most pleasure out of things, perhaps to a similar level, music clearly I'm there, but also a lot of astral/Jungian type imagry that I'll get in my mind, you could refer to it as spacey, serene, epic, though I think much more 'etherial' than 'sci-fi'.

You're path is well matched, nothing wrong with that.


To me, while much of it has seemed physically beautiful or majestic - anything from a beautiful nature scene to pictures of galaxies, nebula, even great art or atchitecture; the things nonliving seem cold and loveless, the things living seem like writhing nashing mold growing on a crumb under a heat lamp in the middle of the biggest empty room in existence.

As for how this probably rolls back to the human experience; meet enough rednecks, meet enough people who'll call you a fa--ot for feeling like anything is beautiful or sacred, when you look at how the universe seems to endorse the vulgar, the coarse, the violent, the narcissistic, when you see that the animal world is built of much the same nasty order, all the static beauty that I might have found in the world from a sensory standpoint got wisked away - not from the standpoint of it not being real in a literal sense but it terms of it being somewhat void in any value.

I'm starting to recant that view a bit and try to see beauty in things again, I'm just very used to that being a mark of what's made me so 'less than' in my life and needing to hide it to a large extent.



I marvel that there aren't more people out there who are built as I am, I know for certain that I have it but my construct perhaps is very unusual. I'm PDD NOS but, you could say that I'm very much NT at heart, AS in function, and that reeks a hell that being all one or the other simply can't touch. Not to say that I'm not being a big boy about it and getting on with things, its f'd though. I pretty much have NT if not above average social awareness and emotional quotient but still have neurological stops that keep me from ever being able to be myself as I feel myself and have others see me, that makes the rift between my understanding and my social capacities like a constant drip..drip..drip, because I see exactly what's happening and I can't stop it - I'm pretty much bound and forced to watch.



I'm a bit of both - as in I love the purity of math, science, art, music, I wish I could live with that much purity but I'm stuck wanting certain things from society and the world around me and for what I meant through in the past - the meaning of those circumstances, experiences, what happened, why, what it means in the bigger picture, in an existential view, is both immersive and inescapable - I can push it back by grappling with reality for what it is but I can't blind myself to what I can see either.


That's definitely quite different. I guess in that sense, for as much as people clash, diversity has quite a silver lining for those who wish to understand it and get a sense of perspectives foreign to their own as it can be a bit like a filtered or lensed mirror reflecting back at themselves.

I think from this conversation I could sum up some of the more abstract angles of my partial theism or perhaps 'true north' agnosticism, when I see that kind of splendor and when I see that we live in a place that's full of visual or emotional splendor on some levels all the while filled with far more malice, barbarism, violence, and general lovelessness under that pristine surface - it grows difficult not to separate the two, and just like how things that both humans and animals do often utterly nauseate me (not in a seeing God sense of course) I also notice that in the rare shining moments when I'm battle weary, feel like I can barely keep my head up, I hear someone, either a great radio personality or author all the way down to just a random passer by, who will say something touching, inspirational, and I'll see that speck or flicker of all the things I do love about existence - momentarily issuing forth from them, transcendent moments like that, transcendent moments of hearing a great and epic work by a musician who's in the same mind-space as myself or who really understands what it is to reach into the sublime, that's what gives me chills in the best possible way. On one hand that's theistically indifferent, on the other - with or without data it seems like a compass that attempts to sway me toward whatever sensible or logical theistic possibilities that I can find, partly because of my awareness of that dichotomy and partly because without that - the malice, barbarism, violence, and lovelessness of nature are not only king but thoughts of love, inspiration, transcendence, deeper imagry, all are in a sense left to be complete and utter garbage, far far far inferior to being the basic minded animal that plows through the world soullessly looking to use and abuse anything that it can - ie. I've always had a sense that, without a human soul or a reason of being here, it comes down to nothing but brass tacks; consequently the most violent narcissist is not only far superior to both of us, he's the exact model of what a man should be according the motion of what kind of place we live within. That kind of world - I guess looking at it from a stand point of either that or oblivion - oblivion really doesn't sound too bad, especially if I'm to see myself as 'weak' or 'inferior' for having a higher mindset than that.

You are obviously very much into accepting normal human social evaluations. I am not. Humanity, in general, seems to me a total madhouse with a few bright intelligent people facing reality and the bulk entrained into profound idiocies scammed onto them by advertising, religion, national ideals and a few other influences that have very little to do with rational good sense and general welfare. I have not much time left in my life and I find it best to turn my back on these surface oddities and involve myself with the tangibles I encounter every day. I find them very rewarding.

It gets much worse than religion, advertising, or national ideals - its general malice, vitriol, barbarism, most of these things exist in a sense fully disconnected from the first three things, those things can give odd shape to those traits but the violence and coarseness is there completely without those things, they're human characteristics as much as they're animal characteristics, probably a better way to say it is that they're characteristic of most things living that have the apparatus to express themselves.

That's why I have difficulty in just seeing that as social valuations.