Instinctual Treadmill

RICHARD: Incidentally, the ‘being’ who possessed this flesh and blood body all those years ago found it quite disturbing when he realised, one fine afternoon after the birth of ‘his’ fourth and last child, that to be born, to learn to walk, talk, and so on, to go to school, to get a job/obtain a career, to get married/be in a relationship, to acquire a home, to have children, to teach them to walk, talk, and so on, to send them to school, to have them get a job/obtain a career, to ensure they get married/have a relationship, to have them acquire a home, to encourage them have children, to see them teach their children to walk, talk, and so on – and so on and so on almost ad infinitum – was nothing other than an instinctual treadmill, an inborn/inherent conveyor belt which carried generation after generation inexorably from birth to death, stretching all the way back from an indeterminate inception and heading towards an open-ended conclusion … and all for what?

If it were not for that ‘being’ having that realisation then the actual purpose/meaning of life may quite possibly not be apparent today.

See also

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  • Your own best friend

    VINEETO: Just to clarify – when I said that ‘I genuinely enjoy the company of anybody with whom I interact’ I did not mean to indicate that my day is filled with social interactions (editor’s note: see also Instinctual Treadmill). I have far less interactions than I used to have in my days of needing to belong to social groups. I take pleasure in being at home where I enjoy my own company as well as Peter’s.

  • Grace’s scale of different ways of being
    Sweetness (‘great’) is when closeness entrées a joyous delighting in the pervasive proximity, or immanence, of the other (it is at the onset of this stage that a bifurcation manifests whereby the instinctual tendency/ temptation is to veer off in the direction of love and its affectuous intimacy due to the ‘self’-centric attractiveness of feeling affectionate).
  • Delight

    Richard: To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all … and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life … the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening. But refrain from possessing it and making it your own … or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared.