Impermanent Self


You are aware of a wall, for example, because you cannot see through it, because it resists the movement of your body through it and so on down the line. Without any of the other aggregates there is nothing to be aware of and therefore in no real sense can awareness exist in any intrinsic, meaningful or objective sense. In other words, a mover without something to move or a watcher with nothing to watch is incoherent. All six aggregates stand in a conjunctive relationship.

Of course, you and I exist in a concrete way but it is like picking up a clump of soil – this is life for us. Blow the clump off your hand and the soil scatters all over the ground carried by your breath (or the wind) – this is death. Each particle of soil will end up in other clumps, different clumps, never the same clump to repeat again. That is what persists after death. If God were to engage in such a task he would be awfully busy chasing down every particle of soil as sin multiply exponentially for all time. What then could he do to avoid this colossal waste of time? Turn his attention to a clump of soil? It’s impermanent. There is nothing to punish nor reward for failing a test of life.

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29 thoughts on “Impermanent Self”

  1. Gorgowocoa says:

    Lol dont even try to tell me about zen or spirituality dude, i don’t want to have to embarrass you but lets just say you’ve got a ways to go. So yeah i did another tranny thursday night. Fucked her rotten before punching her brains in then just screamed out like a mongoose before jumping back on my suzuki sped off into the night. Shit never felt so real. Archgoat and methamphetamine might have had something to do with that. Might have. Peace

    1. Lance Viggianno says:

      Mahatma Heruka is a tranny demon that you have to suck off and fuck before you reach nibana.

    2. LostInTheANUS says:

      What kind of faggot drives a Suzuki anyways?

      1. Morbideathscream says:

        One that likes to fuck trannys, apparently.

  2. national geographic nipples says:

    Gay. Another article that’s just a bunch of fancy words. I don’t understand any of this psychobabble

  3. Thewaters says:

    Life is war.

  4. Psychic Psych Toad says:

    So-crates, all we are is dust in the wind dude…

  5. desu metal says:

    Yeah you think you know everything Lance but get back to me after you die and tell me whether failing the test of life matters then.

    1. Lance Viggianno says:

      Whether or not failing a test matters is a different question (one of judgements of value) than whether or not the idea of life as a test is absurd.

  6. Rainer Weikusat says:

    If life’s a competition, who wins? The guy who dies first or the guy who dies last?

    1. Enda Miller says:

      It depends on the manner in which you die. If you die first but in glorious battle, you win. If you die last, an old man, alone, without a son to carry on your name…well….you fail.
      However, if you die last surrounded by your progeny having performed glorious deeds in the service of something greater than you….well that is a true crown indeed.

      1. life is like a game of choklit boxes says:

        The best thing you can wish someone is a quick and painless death, but if you want to feel life until your last breath then you must die slowly in agony.

    2. Lance Viggianno says:

      To say existence equals a test, a competition, suffering is incomplete and inaccurate. Whatever judgments you hold that allow you to say that existence equals spaghetti don’t matter to anything else in existence except you and only if you take yourself too seriously.

      1. Rainer Weikusat says:

        Why did you attach this generic statement to the (a little bit socratical) question?

        1. Lance Viggianno says:

          Felt like saying it and used you to say it.

  7. Less Socrates, More Heraclitus says:

    Too much dogma (God? The soul?) and not enough balanced assessment.

    Also be careful of turning eastern traditional practice (yes, practice, More than the belief) into American New Agish babbling widespread as American pop culture (e.g. the cheap versions of karma and zen).

  8. Lance Viggianno says:

    Why did you post this

  9. James Tooper says:

    strawman. who is to say that it is only the awareness that should persist after death? what if residual memory and emotion accumulated through life is encoded and preserved in some form unknown? who is to say such things require a physical* form? science still doesn’t provide an adequate answer (for me) as to how electrical impulses in a blob of spongy meat give rise to thinking, feeling, experience, consciousness. behavioral/mechanistic explanations don’t cut it; it is clear to me that there are unknown forces at work here.

    for example, one time i was blazed outta my fuckin mind, like way, WAY gone, like that chron was probs laced with some JWH or some shit. and it was like a wormhole opened up inside my mind, and my dog was there, and he was high too (i was bloing smoke at him), and me and him touched consciousnesses outside of the temporal plane… it was a beautiful, life-altering experience to be a dog… and then, just like that, i zoomed back through the numinous wormhole and found myself pants down, face down, in a ditch, surrounded by a group of negro men… shortly thereafter i blacked out and woke up in the hospital and i was like, DUDE! so worth it.

    *as in the current scientific understanding of physical, which could very well be upended or at least immensely expanded in the next 100, 500, 1,000 years, as has happened again and again throughout human history

    1. Lance Viggianno says:

      Muh informal logical fallacies. Get the fuck outta here nerd. Your emotions and memories could end up elsewhere and it wouldn’t change the point.

      1. crow says:

        Such is the way of the fool:
        To assume all must culminate in a ‘point’.
        Must a garden be justified in terms of an end?
        Or can a garden simply Be?
        Your spirit is soiled in the foul muck of Thought.
        Leave this behind and put much distance between you and it!

        I’ve bed many trannies in my time,
        And you may be even more hopelessly lost than them!

        1. Let it V says:

          10/10 crow posting

          1. schnookums says:

            awww still butthurt over the crow era, there-there sweetie…

            1. tranny sparrow says:

              Hey kid, wanna see my fursona?

    2. Rainer Weikusat says:

      »What we don’t know anything about could be anything!« doesn’t exactly make a great argument. It could be anything indeed, or maybe nothing. We don’t know. For as long as this state doesn’t change, there’s no use contemplating it.

  10. Flying Kites says:

    Less Feel Good more Gorillaz BRAH.

  11. Stuart steinman says:

    Change the word ‘test’ to the word ‘education’. Add the irrefutable platonic and Socratic observation that there is nothing of intrinsic value besides a life filled with truth beauty and goodness as the essential component of one’s living experience. Recognize that such a stance Leeds inevitably for the successful student into the realm of that other intrinsic value, Joy. Now, as Socrates was so clear about, it no longer really matters whether you’re Consciousness survives the dysfunction of the body or not.

    1. Let it V says:

      > Leeds

      Spotted the anglo.

  12. Kilgore says:

    Just..give me back the board Lance, it was a good board and I like it. You know how hard it is to find a board you like

  13. Syphilis says:

    Navel gazing about “lyf” is one of the most pointless ways to waste ones life.

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