Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Unless there's an afterlife, the last thing you learn in life will also be the most useless thing you learn.

It is a pernicious lie---a kind of schizoid state foisted upon us by the System--that the universe doesn't involve us personally.. That it is a mere molecular wasteland empty of any meaning and in which you could've just as well not existed at all. The fact of the matter is your time here--YOUR life--IS all about you. However momentary and ephemeral your stint here in this world, it cannot be denied that it is entirely yours and all about you. Everything around you appears and disappears only to you in your own special way, full of secrets and promises interweaving themselves into your very soul. This is it. Your one cosmic debut. Embrace it, own it, and savor it as this one impossible miracle of anything momentous and special ever happening at all. And all just for you!

"Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

(Sep 16, 2026 07:58 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Unless there's an afterlife, the last thing you learn in life will also be the most useless thing you learn.

Every change in time is kind of an "afterlife". Especially in the context of presentism, where the individual we were a moment before no longer exists and it's purely due to the new iteration carrying the same memories that we feel it's the same entity yet continuing (similar identity persisting, anyway).

---

---

---

---

(Sep 16, 2026 10:33 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]It is a pernicious lie---a kind of schizoid state foisted upon us by the System--that the universe doesn't involve us personally.. [...]

Certainly our own particular conception of and sensation-based experience of the world or cosmos involves us. Pretty sure an insect isn't conceiving and depicting it the same way. And rocks are just blank (neither themselves nor a cosmos manifesting and being interpreted).

There is an infinitely iterative interreflectivity between what happens to us and what we are thinking about. A sort of feedback looping back on itself that assumes a dialectical structure in time itself. This is because consciousness is the same stuff as time is. The part always manifesting the whole and the whole always incorporating the part---back and forth in one reciprocal motion of ever deepening intersubjectivity..

Man, climb out of your own navel. Need someone to drop you a rope?
LOL! 9_9

Cue whining.

(Sep 22, 2026 08:29 PM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]Man, climb out of your own navel. Need someone to drop you a rope?
LOL! 9_9

Cue whining.

Troll shitting on my thread again..

Right on cue. Don't like it? Start a blog for navel-gazing.

"Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of [someone’s] refusal to bow to Authority."— Robert Anton Wilson

I know my life is mine--that my world is meant for me--by its continuous power to keep me fascinated in even the most subtle and minute ways. Everything that happens to me implicates me and touches a chord in me in a way that is always surprising and yet oddly familiar. Indeed, as the etymological dictionary defines it:

fascinate(v.)
"1590s, "bewitch, enchant," from French fasciner (14c.), from Latin fascinatus, past participle of fascinare "bewitch, enchant, fascinate," said in Watkins to be from fascinum, fascinus "a charm, enchantment, spell, witchcraft," which is of uncertain origin.

The word was earliest used of witches and of serpents who were said to be able to cast a spell by a look that rendered one unable to move or resist. The sense of "delight, attract and hold the attention of" is recorded by 1815. Related: Fascinated; fascinating."