Alas, this illusory and feeble aggregate of form, Created from compounded past actions and conditions, Like a butter lamp blowing in the wind, cannot last forever. Nothing exists which is not subject to the conditioning of death
--The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Let us begin again with definitions, shall we?
DEFINTIONS
Recall from 02 SEE THROUGH that:
- Sanity is alignment with the status quo. Insanity is any degree of deviation from the status quo. Stray off the line even a little a bit and you’re insane. Thus, how far you stray from the line is the degree to which you are insane.
That is all that will be necessary for this post. Continue at your leisure.
DEATH AND LIFE
Death is inevitable. it follows that Life is inevitable. You must Live to Die. You cannot Die without first having Lived. You know what it means to Die. But do you know what it means to Live?
I’ll give you a moment to answer that. Go ahead, press play while you mull this over.
https://youtube.com/shorts/t9-mKKotWZo?feature=share
Need more time?
I asked several people about their thoughts on what it means to Live. And then I asked several more. The first reply simply said, “I am still finding out.”
Aren’t we all?
Here are the rest of the responses:
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To live means moving “towards personal truth regardless of outside influences and embodying that truth in all of your actions.”
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“Life is awareness. To live is to experience awareness. To do things, go places, feel emotions. It could also be movement, change. To stop moving is to stop living.”
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“Living is experiencing our emotions and also deriving pleasure from our 5 or 6 or 7 senses and expanding our awareness through movement or mental stimulation. The opposite of living is existence.”
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“Expression, feeling your senses and heart.”
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“To be fully present to be able to experience whatever it is in the moment I should in order to fully appreciate any true experience/emotion/response. And to take the leap instead of always hesitating. Sometimes amazing experiences are through living through those moments of fear.”
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“To live means to be free of what you want to be and do without having money or society hold you back.”
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“… it’s about the experiences you have. The world is so beautiful and it’s easy to miss when you are focused on the end rather than the journey.”
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“Working to be happy and do the best for yourself without hurting anyone else.”
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“Having goals and having ambitions and having a family and being good, and being a good human, and going camping and drinking good beer and smoking weed and having fun along the way.”
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“In the broadest sense, Living is to be part of an ecological system, to be among other living things. To be part of a system of exchange.”
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“Happiness.”
The pattern here is while some share elements and themes, they’re all different. There are almost eight billion people on this planet. That amounts to almost eight billion ways of defining what it means to Live at any single moment. And for some fucked up reason, we’ve all agreed in some way that the status quo should exist, that there are particular ways of Living, and that we should all abide by those particular ways.
It’s fucking ridiculous that the status quo should hold the answer to how one should Live. Listen, you lose a luster for Life if you insist on remaining sane.
Sanity, my friend, is a prison.
Sanity is the DOWNBAD defect.
But we’ll have plenty of time to delve into this further. And we will. In the meantime, in my estimation, what does it mean to Live?
I think you define what Living means for yourself. And you are most happy when you are in practice of that meaning, or working to fulfill it.
ABOUT THE ART
Layers on layers on layers. The underlying work used to shape this collage:
