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I don't know how to answer this question. They are surely linked together (I think this is obvious enough). Yet they are not mutually exclusive either.

I don't know if by "reason" you mean a pre-planned purpose or intelligent design. It seems like there is no such thing. But there is certainly "cause" to everything (apparently). So there is cause and effect.

@martins name Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective.. Located ‘in the eye of the beholder’.. or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things.which is the primary question I'm asking here. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible.. for many reasons. and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone's particular experiences. Nevertheless.. that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. My take is that Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.. and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity.. where another is sensible of beauty etc. The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition.. and is consequently not logical but aesthetical.. by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective. Every reference of representations.. even that of sensations.. may be objective (and then it signifies the real elementof an empirical representation).. save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain.. by which nothing in the object is signified.. but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation

Title.. Becoming God - insights from 20 awakening experiences Leo becoming absolutely infinite

Interesting. Still the essence of what makes a beautiful object beautiful missing. What gives it the capacity to dissolve the duality between the witness and the witnessed. Philosophers who have given influential objectivist accounts include Plato. and in particular his Theory of the Forms... Where he believes that there is Abstraction realm of perfection and beauty and our world contains unperfect copies of these perfect images.

@zeroISinfinity ❤️

@Gesundheit you had to like cut few millimeters so that you don't get banned right ?

Yeah I guess Aesthetic relativism is part of the relativity of every objective concept. This comes from casting doubt on the possibility of direct epistemic access to the "external world".. and which therefore rejects the positive claim that statements made about the external world can be known to be objectively true. Beauty falls into the same category imo. Meaning it's relative and mind-assigned.

@Javfly33 sure about what?

@Javfly33 yes It is!

All the Money in the world will not make you healthy. And how is that done? To survive there sure must be ego. These things happen automatically. What about it? I get you. But then again I guess you can't have zero self-bias and continue to exist. As self to survive you need to have certain aversions against some stuff in order to survive (death and sickness for example).

Not discrediting whataver insights you might have.. But they just can't be objective due to the simple fact that two people can easily disagree about the level of beauty that a certain object have. Nope. I don't have any paradigms. Because all paradigms are limited and therefore only partially true. Not sure I understand what you mean.

"Desire is the root of suffering". -gautama siddhartha

What is 'unconditional pleasure'? Pleasure is a condition. Pleasure is not pain. And pain is not boredom. And boredom is not grief etc. Well perhaps if you followed my recent threads.. I discovered that there is no transcendental aspects of reality. So called material world is all there is. All that we are certain of at least. This gets tricky. I have to ask what do you mean by God? And what does 'true' mean? Is there a false nature? The true nature is already the case (since true) which is what you are directly experiencing all that time.

Well that can work up to a certain point and then you can't do it right? You just have to eat or otherwise you will starve and suffer until death. So My point you actually NEED stuff to be happy. And as soon as it lacks you will suffer.(namely food in this case). That goes against the idea of unconditional happiness. It seems happiness IS dependent upon certain things. Certain conditions. There is no way you will be happy while starving. You will feel like shit.

The point is that pain is inevitable. It's an intrinsic part of life. However.. Obviously if you could minimize your pain you would do it. It's not a realistic expectation to expect that you will never again in your life going to have a bad day... The hedonist works on minimizing pain not completely eliminating as that is not possible (there is no pleasure without some sort of pain or price).

Well if I were to choose between winning a million dollars in the lottery or working /putting effort /positivity for 10 years and then earning a million dollars.. I would choose the first ?.

I get that. But still just because this endless desire of the ego and the inability to be fully fulfilled no matter what doesn't mean that living a painful life is better or even equal to living an exciting life. I don't agree with this concept. As far as I know there is no holy book somewhere that says what happiness is. It's subjective. Some people are happy by being religious. Others are happy with torture as I mentioned. Others are happy with watching TV shows etc. And there is no way I'm going to agree that happiness=sadness. That just makes the whole discussion superfluous. I think it's biological programming. Even a cave man from 3000 years ago will naturally gravitate towards finding food and shelter and a partner and will averse against suffering and pain. Tried it. Didn't work. I felt nothing. Saying yes to no means saying no.

And just to not beat around the bush.. This utopian Buddhist unconditional happiness is a myth. The reality of the matter is that you are a biological robot.. Play with the levels of Serotonin in your brain and it will become impossible for you to be happy. And you will need 3 pills of Prozac every day just to feel just fine. It's all programed into you from the beginning.. Stuff like a good meal.. Sexual orgasm.. Socializing.. Entertainment.. Etc pull the switch of dopamine in your brain and that basically makes you happy... That's all that there is to it. There is no such thing as "unconditional happiness". Or happiness via no means whatsoever. Just doesn't make sense. And of course on the other side as I mentioned in OP.. Even chasing those material means will not ever be good enough due to the fact of impermanence and hedonistic adaption and so Forth. So basically there is no such thing as actual happiness. Because it will always be a transitioning and a temporary phase.

@Surfingthewave no I'm just good at hypnosis. That post was pretty dark. Well the world is a fucked up place and this isn't pessimism from my part. Just stating some fact. When I speak the default state of any living organism is basically tension. You are naturally dying and decaying. That's the path of least resistance. Inertia. So you have to put on constant effort to go against this decaying process and survive. This expresses itself for example in the constant ever renewable biological needs (water...food... Rest). It kinda when you put it into perspective.. It shows you that life is indeed a worthless piece of shit. But it's not an option to quit the game. To be or to be. Is the choice.

Beautiful. What is beauty is a good question to start. Because it seems like a subjective thing. Not universal.

@zeroISinfinity you didn't read between the lines.

No one is enlightened. Except me. How do I know? God told me.

@Ensho sorry to hear man. I hope that post didn't trigger bad emotions for ya. Stick around and keep fighting for yourself. There is light at the end of the tunnel. @Surfingthewave thank you. Well I'm not suffering actually. In that post .. I wasn't expressing my own state .. I was speaking about the state of depressed people. Which I don't need to go through it to be able to relate to their suffering. Heard of Wu Wei? Lol I'm from the Wu Wei culture

Let's take a look at direct experience... Everything boils down to sensations. All you have is basically the five senses. A visual field compromised of colors and objects. And audio emerging out of these different objects. And physical signals in the body. Different sensations. And thoughts. Which are nothing but sensations as well. And that's basically all there is. This might seem like a naive reductionist philosophy. Where I'm denying everything that is not contacted with directly. But it is what it is. I'm stripping away all that's not certain. All that's not present. Because even the idea of cause and effect.. Of the need for explanations to this existence...are not present in direct experience. No where on the universe is it written that this universe has a cause. Or a start. Or a creator. Or even an explanation. No where is logic written. What is logic? Words and language. Which boil down to shapes and symbols and colors. Again just sensation.