Is what we’re doing here useless, hopeless, and doomed to fail?

[BipolarGrowth]

On another thread, someone asked, “Are you the Big Bang?” 
 

My response further solidified my growing sense that spirituality, philosophy, personal development, and making a sandwich are absurd and preposterous. 
 

Absurdity defined by Albert Camus: 

“If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of [people armed with] machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by comparing the consequences of such a reasoning with the logical reality one wants to set up. In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it.” 
 

WARNING: Skip this paragraph if you value comedy whatsoever and desire to maintain sanity. 
Absurdity defined by me:
Here’s a side note and horrible joke I need to say before I can get on with my post that no one will laugh at: Camus said, “If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd.” I’d say that’s the most absurd thing I’ve heard of Mr. Camus. Why in the hell would a guy in the modern world wield an archaic weapon in an attempt to destroy a pile of modern weapons also made of similar metal as the archaic weapon? Is this some kind of tasteful artsy exhibition of the old ways being superior to the new performed in front of high-brow intellectuals with too much money and time meant to amuse them? 

Okay. Back to the post. 

This was my response to the Big Bang question:

“I’d argue that no, you aren’t the Big Bang in a certain sense at least. You are no more the Big Bang than you are Christian Heaven with pearly gates and an anthropomorphized caricature of God. Both of these things are 100% given to you by and based upon the speculation and beliefs of others. Do you really think any scientist has direct experience of the Big Bang? Do you really think any Christian has direct experience of the Heaven they believe in? Furthermore, both of these things are completely irrelevant to what you are in the most fundamental or real sense because you have not directly experienced either of the two even if others have. 
 

You ARE the Big Bang in the sense that the Big Bang exists within your imagination, thoughts, and beliefs. You are consciousness, of course, as has been explicated around here and the Actualized.org YouTube channel ad nauseam, but if we extend the word consciousness to follow the one hour+ long definition exhibited in Leo’s latest YouTube video about directly experiencing yourself as God, you are everything in your perceptual bubble. My extension of this that Leo does not cover is that beliefs, thoughts, your ego, and anything spiritual teachers or traditions tell you is illusion, Maya, not ultimately real, or false in some way is actually you just as much as any other “aspect“ of consciousness.
 

Your beliefs, thoughts, ego, etc. that everyone around here lately seems to be saying aren’t you are just as much you as anything you’ve ever experienced on the level of your hand in front of your face. Of course, you likely won’t come to truly grasp this if you do not first have that direct experience of your hand as consciousness, God, colors and shapes alone. After you have that experience, it’s necessary, if your goal is progress, to move to the conclusion that “mental” things like thoughts or the ego are merely phenomena all the same as your hand or a red ball on your floor is. The distinction between the grouping of ego, thoughts, and “purely mental” (not physical) imagination and the grouping of “physical” objects, your body, “purely physical” imagination (typically called reality) and other such things is 100% and absolutely arbitrary. It’s god damned infinitely arbitrary lol. 
 

On a mini but relevant side note, even the individual’s direct experience of something leads to only speculation and beliefs if the individual makes any attempt to extrapolate that direct experience into words, explanations, or intellectual understanding. Yes, this applies to our resident God-teacher Leo Gura and any other being making such an attempt including me and what I’m doing right now as I’m writing this. Pleasant sounding spiritual realizations such as “the fabric of the universe is love” or plausible seeming statements like “consciousness is the fabric of the universe” are ultimately useless in the final step of realization. This is because using the word love or consciousness immediately divorces you from what your awareness experiences by bringing that experience to the level of abstraction. The level of abstraction is precisely where that experience did not occur. Every single word in any language is an abstraction. As soon as a word is used, you get lost in infinite permutations of definition. To understand how lost you get with any word, I’ll use a simple word as an example that is very directly experienced to every non-colorblind person. Define to me the word red in your own words. You’ll quickly see when trying this that you are no closer to capturing the directly experienced “essence” of red in language. You might say “it’s not blue.” Then you have to define blue. Then you have to define color. Then you have to define perception. You can go on forever using different combinations of English words or even eventually all words from all other languages that have even been made or ever could be made to try to capture what red is, but you’ll never describe the experience adequately with words. This is why a colorblind person or blind person will never understand a color that they can’t experience for themselves. Language doesn’t do anything if people don’t have shared direct experience of the phenomenon in question. 
 

Luckily, we can finally come full circle by realizing that words are reality just as much as what is directly experienced by your senses as the intellectual mind is just another avenue for a different sense than the 5 ones typically thought of as perceptual. You also perceive thought, mental images, definitions, etc. 

 

Where did we get with all of this explanation? Pretty much nowhere. That’s where your Big Bang is as far as anyone can truly verify, not to mention it’s a past event and only the present moment exists according to Eckhart Tolle who people call enlightened. What a joke. Fin.”

So yeah, are we fucked or not? 

[LastThursday]

Yeah it's funny. The mantra of "direct experience" is repeated over and over again here as if we're not having direct experience at all. As for words, it's like this: after you read War and Peace what are you left with? Was it just words or actually the direct experience of imagination? Words and their stories serve to prime the imagination, that is their utility. Words themselves are just hot air and ink.

It's all absurd insofar that all acts are fundamentally meaningless. But that's ok. Relying on meaning as a crutch is also absurd.