[Buddha-l] Confused

[Lidewij Niezink]

Luke, may I say something you could take wrongly? I'll try. this list
is discussing several buddhist and non-buddhist topics for years and
years already. (Not me, I'm here for about two years only.) Not only
are many people very learned here, they also have a high tolerance for
those of us who are not and help explain very complicated matters in
'conceivable' words. You come in, ask your questions, and many people
have jumped, read, wrote and asked to get things clear for you. One
has to find some common ground in order to find a way to communicate.

Now the ball is back at you. Formulate what you really want to know
and what you yourself think is what Mitchell asked you. If you want to
'know', as you say, put in the effort. You've retreated to short open
answers and a lot of boo-ing and bah-ing in it. You've also announced
that you're leaving for a few times already in more or less dramatic
ways. Let's cut all that and get the discussion back with some effort
or stop it altogether.

I'm sorry to be so personal, I'm not sure what my motivation is
because I can also just ignore the whole discussion and get on with
life. But hey, I did it anyway.

As far as death is concerned, the closest peak I had at it was when
one of my sisters got brutally murdered and I had to get to terms with
that afterward. After the section on her body we took her home with
us, washed her body and put her on a (cooled) bed. The next morning I
was the first to wake up. I went down into the room where she was and
immediately panicked. There was fear and anger all over the place (or
was it just me?). So I went upstairs to tell my mother that my sister
was not dead, that we could not bury her this way, and that something
had to be done. Many people have stayed with the body for the next
three days and three nights, many things have happened and during the
last morning before her funeral, her facial muscles had relaxed and we
could bury her in peace. Why all this? Because from that moment onward
I 'knew' that death is a process, not a moment in time.

cheers,
Lidewij




n 7 June 2010 11:21, lemmett at talk21.com <lemmett at talk21.com> wrote:
>>you draw a smokescreen with all kinds of half understood words, concepts
> and half read books.
> hey, I'm fairly sure I understand what I read. i *can* read, after-all.
>>Zygmunt Bauman is a sociologist who analyzes the present state of our
> society, which he calls Liquid Modernity and which others have called
> hypermodernity. The specific thing about this is that nothing is stable
> and sure and everybody has to invent him/herself. He is close to
> Baudrilaard, but less exuberant.
> what relevance is this? nice enough fact that I didn't know but hey, who am I?
>>Time is according to Husserl a movement of consciousness that remembers
> and anticipates continuously. So that's why we can evaluate and
> recognize a song without having heard all, even while hearing only one
> tone at the time. In death there is no awareness, how can we anticipate
> death? Well we can anticipate the end of the song while singing. The end
> is an apotheosis, it gives meaning and beauty to the whole song. The
> same with our life, that is the song we are all singing continuously.
> half remembered words concepts and books. again what relevance is this to quoting Merleau-Ponty or making a lame attempt at humorously caricaturing Husserl on something else entirely?
>>Death is the apotheosis, it's not a phenomenon, but it is part of our
> life as the supreme anticipation. That is why Heidegger said that being
> aware of your own death as a conscious anticipation takes you away from
> the inauthentic life of everyday gossip into an awareness of being. The
> media try to prevent this by turning death into a media event.
> A confusing element is that I anticipate death not as the end of
> consciousness, but as the end of me. It could be that after losing a
> beloved one, I feel I'm not me anymore. The song of my life has ended,
> the stream of anticipation and memories has ended. I even can have an
> accident or an illness and lose my memory. At that time people see that
> I am alive, but I will be gone. I will not be aware of being gone,
> because this new me is just getting itself through the day as before. A
> person can die without knowing it.
>
> it seems obvious to me that it can be anticipated as the end of consciousness. i'm sure there's plenty of people that even think it's significant as such [Derrida?] though I've not admitted that.
> it's almost like the list comes home from work and uses the list to send unhelpful and borderline irrelevant emails to the rest of the list. what really has any of this got to do with anything I've said about Mahayana [which incidentally I don't think I've said *anything* about] or dying or the avyakata-samyutta sutta? it's a diversion from worst boredom mind so no need to stop.
>
>
>
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-- 
Milton said: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

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