My flesh is a prison.

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Entropy and suffering seems to rule this world. i feel like I am an awareness imprisoned in this material existence. I have urges and lusts I doubt I'll ever be able to act on, because I'm not sexually desirable to women. I've been programmed to believe sex is the highest form of human fulfillment, and everything seems engineered to mock me every step of the way. I resent sex, I resent pornographic degradation, disgusting bodily fluids, and I I resent what the passions result in, being that it only brings more people into this miserable plane of existence, filled with pain, desperation, destruction, scarcity, envy, etc etc.

If human existence is all about stuffing our fat faces, ejaculating, and getting drunk, I don't have much use for it. Existence should be about love, growth, justice, discovery, exploration, not the degradation it is now. It seems like most of our scientific inquiry isn't really about uncovering knowledge for its own sake. Ultimately, its about figuring out how to rape the world of its resources even more efficiently so we can buy more stuff, get in more debt, and grow more obese.

Last edited by JNathanK on 20 Mar 2012, 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think that the media does capitalize on sex and other appetites in order to sell stuff. However, the fact that people such as yourself still believe that there is more to life suggests that other things really are important. I know there are a lot of things that I want to do that don't necessarily involve sex or drinking. I have to eat food to live though. I'm soon to start grad school in a subject that I've been interested in since I was a child--pre-modern Japanese history. I couldn't imagine living without pursuing this as well as my artistit interests. Granted, I often explore sexual issues in my art and scholarship but I don't see sex as the only subject worth addressing.

Sounds like you're wrestling with your flesh. The whole spirit vs. flesh battle thing has been a hot topic for a while. Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, and Bill Clinton have all talked about this, in their own ways. Our animal drives to possess, mate with, and ingest everything we see, while full of self loathing for being so, are all symptoms of the most diabolical mental madness to ever exist; human awareness.

A lot of that doesn't get funding though. I just saw a documentary on Fukushima actually, and an archeologist, for years was trying to show the nuclear regulatory agencies that the levies weren't high enough based on sediment layers he discovered from pre-modern Japan. However, he was persistently ignored over several decades.

Eating is necessary, but the whole fast food culture is excessive. Billions have been put into the marketing of crap food, genetically modifying it to get more yields, creating artificial dyes and preservatives that are carcinogenic, etc. The corn industry is even heavily subsidized with government funds, so there's an artificially cheap supply of high fructose corn syrup that's in virtually everything. So, as a result, we have an obesity epidemic, childhood diabetes, increased cancer, etc etc. Its just a symptom that we have a highly materialist culture that lives for stuff. At least on a subconscious level, many people believe the highest goal in life is to eat a lot of food, get a big house, get a lot of stuff, have a lot of sex, and somehow win against everyone else when they hit the big one.

I don't mean to sound pretentious, but, as of late, this is my overall sense of things.

People are born into the world with pure intentions. As they grow older, they start to notice corruption and selfishness in society. Reasoning that it is nearly impossible for one person to completely eliminate corruption and selfishness in society, they conform to that society because their selfish desires are easier to fulfill than their selfless ones in that society. As a result of this cycle, humanity cheats itself of a higher existence in which all members of society could benefit eachother and much suffering could be eliminated. Much of the companionship between people has been replaced with selfishness and materialism. Ironically, people turn to selfishness and materialism to try to fill the emptiness inside of themselves that results from the lack of companionship. Thus contributing to keeping society selfish, materialistic, and lacking companionship. The bad things that you listed are the way they are because people use them as a replacement for the things they can't get from this society. These things give people purpose. The people around them and the media contribute to fueling these desires. The desires of people will stay the same until society as a whole decides that they're not satisfied with the way things are and make an effort to improve the companionship between people. It will most likely take a very long time until society as a whole comes to this conclusion if it ever happens at all because people have no reason to cooperate with eachother and are complacent with the way things are.

Look, it aint all that great. I'll be at my Mom's tomorrow night cause my daughter is watching her for me tonight. I "celebrated" my 25th anniversary with my husband tonight. Know how long it took him? About 45 seconds. It's that or nothing at all. I feel ya about being unfulfilled.

He went to sleep. I kicked him in the back of his knee then got up and ate cake.

Snap.

+1

Well, that's assuming things are going to stay as they currently are where people have the luxury to be selfish and un-engaged. Our global eco-system is collapsing fast though and thus the support for the economic globalist culture that's been sold to us as a bill of goods. A lot of people are probably going to die from famine within the next several decades before humans re-adopt a more decentralized mode of living that's more harmonized with the environment. Myself, I've been studying permaculture to demonstrate a viable, working alternative before s**t does hit the fan. Monoculture and industrial farming desertifies whole regions. That's partially why there's so many civil wars in Africa, because all the arable land has been depleted by so-called "developers", and the tribes have to fight it out for remaining food resources. We can re-green the desert with permaculture though, and people are doing it.

I've got it under control through meditation though. I find I can re-divert a lot of the sexual energy into other tasks. Its transmutable, and I think its my lot in life. In the old days people in my predicament would become monks or nuns. Nowadays, you're told you're a loser if you're not getting laid. Because of how over-sexualized everything is and the wide availability to pornography, people not cut out for romantic relationships really do look like losers, because they end up becoming porn addicts who spend all their time with a make believe harem, when they could be studying Plato or impressionist painting or something else. From my understanding, an intellectual pursuit in life can be just as potent as a genuine, romantic pursuit. To me, internet pornography, strip clubs, toxic relationships, reality tv, etc, all just harbor pathetic fantasies.

I used to be an avid painter until I discovered masturbation and pornography at the age of 13. My brother in law had stacks of it in his room, and my friends at school introduced me to surfing it on the internet. It took me years to finally break, and I just don't think this was something people had to deal with 100 years ago. Its not normal.

I don't like how much society encourages lust and fetishes. I resent a lot of that stuff, although I don't think that sex is all bad. I think that being obsessed with sex is bad. Sex is essential to the survival of the human race though. It is supposed to strengthen the bond between partners, but I think that the sacredness of it has disappeared in today's culture for the most part. Now it's mostly about lust and people do it whether or not they are emotionally attracted to the person they do it with.

If you really believed that none of this stuff mattered, you wouldn't feel so bad about being unsuccessful in these areas.

Your desire for a successful life as an ordinary creature is no less valid than any supposedly intellectual desires that you have. It seems like a typical case of someone lying to their self about the unimportance of doing something, just to make their self feel better about not having done it.

It makes a person feel superior to claim that they value art and intellectual pursuits above all else, but there is no purpose in any of that unless it benefits the living creatures who pursue it. If you cannot meet your needs as an animal, trivial interests are of no real value, they are nothing but attempts at escapism under the guise of being related to some higher purpose, when they are not.

All knowledge and discovery exists solely for the purpose of furthering human agendas and aiding them as both individuals and as a species. Knowledge has no value of its own in its own right, there is no reason to learn just for the sake of learning, knowledge only has value as something we can use to make life easier.

And that includes feeding us, meeting our material requirements, meeting our reproductive requirements, and generally easing all of our struggles inbetween as we set about acquiring these things.

If your body was to disappear, along with all of your feelings and desires, you wouldn't just be some magical intellectual being who pursues knowledge and art, you would be nothing. Your appreciation of these things come exclusively from the animal body that you inhabit, every single interest that you have in anything, is directly linked to some animal desire or another.

You can only perceive beauty or meaning in art because your animal body has certain values, there are things that it desires and things that it is repulsed by. Take away those desires and values, you have no art.

You only perceive value in knowledge because your animal mind is programmed to enjoy gaining greater awareness, because this will serve it in its efforts to survive and offer greater control over its surroundings. Without the desire to control things, with no animal need to survive, with nothing to accomplish, all knowledge would be useless to you. It would serve no purpose and would provide you with zero satisfaction of any kind.

Even your desire to bury your head in a book in an effort to ignore the pain of failure, is something that you only gain satisfaction from because your animal mind wishes to avoid pain.

I'm basically rambling here but the general point is that valuing intellect above life itself is senseless, as success at the latter is 100% necessary in order for the former to even exist.

If you can't feed yourself, you're dead, so thinking about philosophy isn't more important.

If you can't reproduce, there will be no more life, so anything you have learned will be lost, again proving simply that it is of lesser importance.

And all this stuff about the media forcing sex on us is bull. The only reason it sells is because people already want it. It has not been popularized by force, it is popular because everyone is already programmed that way. Stop making excuses and placing blame on others for your own unsatisfied desire to have sex. The most prized things in the world are prized for a good reason.

What I'm saying is stop lying to yourself. It's perfectly fine to admit defeat and bury your head in a book if you want, but there's no sense lying about how nothing else is important when you clearly feel like it is. Either keep trying to succeed or just give up. Lying to yourself will only damage your own intellectual integrity and cause you to make a mess of that side of your interests too. It'll be pretty hard for such a blighted intellect to be taken seriously in intellectual circles.

Hyperlexian will probably b***h about this post but eh, I'm not insulting you. If anything I'm trying to show that this "prison of flesh" you want to escape isn't supposed to be escaped. Struggling against it only makes it more restrictive.

Dude, I'm not placing blame on others for anything. Yah, we have basic urges to eat and pro-create, but we seem to put more value on eating and pro-creating more than anything else. Its out of balance. We as a culture (that includes me and you) have collectively valued pleasure over intellect. We were programmed to seek out sweet, salty, and fatty foods, In the old days, it was harder to get, but in these days of abundance, we eat eat all of that to excess in the form of processed and fast food. We have enough food, but we eat and consume much more than what we need. We've basically taken up the traits of a virus on this planet.

The same goes for pornographic culture. In the old days, they didn't have internet porn. It was harder to get sexual stimulation, but now we get over-stimulated. There's pleasure in it, but it lacks the emotional and spiritual bonding of a genuine relationship. Like I said, I don't think I'm cut out for a romantic relationship, However, I'm not going to indulge in pornography, prostitution, or strip clubs, because its all phony. Its like the fast food equivalent to sexuality. I'm not disparaging against real, genuine romantic partnerships. I want to be clear about that.

I always get "friend zoned", and I'm tired of worrying about that. I'll just gracefully value my platonic relationships, because I see how a lot of men really get angry and even misogynistic over this issue. That end of it really is exacerbated by the media, because you always see some comedian dumping on virgins or some movie poking fun.. My thoughts are, if it happens, it happens. If I find someone, awesome! I'm not going to worry about how others perceive me for being a 24 year old, make virgin and get all bent out of shape about it in the meantime though. I'm not going to allow myself to turn into some creepy, old single guy with 30 years worth of old penthouse magazines and a harem of silicone love dolls stacked up in his basement either. I'm not going to bare the shame of having paid hookers for sex either.

The reason why I value knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and not just using it to maximize rates of child obesity and diabetes, is were a direct manifestation of the cosmos. If we can feed ourselves easily, which we certainly can at this point, we should be uncovering the knowledge of the universe to know ourselves more directly. Yah, we'll forget it all when we die, but to me its like a game of peekaboo that the universe is playing with us. You come into the world not knowing what's behind the veil or the hands, and then the secret gets revealed to you if you pay attention. That's what makes it fun. Then, of course, the secret gets buried and obscured again for others to discover in the future.