Stop seeking control

someone who seeks control for the sake of control is like a man who builds a tall spindly tower with a weak base just to reach the heavens first.
the man who keeps to the ground and builds a strong foundation will overcome him inevitably.

yeah, fuck those guys who care about ritual propriety, I'll show everyone how in charge I am by retreating to my garden estate in the countryside and eat bland food and listen to bland music for the rest of my life.

>I'm in charge here!

>proceeds to have teachings turned into religious buddhistic poppycock and have the only worthwhile stuff syncretized into a state ideology that justifies the prevailing rulership

why are you tripfagging again, dude?

this guy gets it

human nature doesn't like those seeking control tho

A man who seeks control will lie, cheat, steal, even kill to maintain it.
Not that these are not effective strategies in order to gain power, but they make you increasingly fragile as a human being.
The man who takes things in stride, neither seeking power nor rejecting it when given, is the man who becomes master as a consequence of his everyday actions, not as the end goal of them.

My bad, user. When I was looking at bestiality pornography I forgot to turn it off.

>Don't do the one thing your mind is hardwired to do.
Emptiness is not "no." But do not get caught up in your attachments.

He didn't say "don't control." He said "don't SEEK control." There's a key difference there, young padawan.

>>Oh...so then uh....whats the point?
>>I dunno, killed some time tho, huh?

>blames buddhism for its subversion by/alliance with authoritarian regimes
>mfw such blatant broad strokes

>repeats uninteresting non sequitur mumbling instead of looking into seeking.
>mfw our education system has nearly eradicated critical thinking

yup.

suck it. fag.

...

I don't seek control but it would be ignorant to presume one doesn't have a significant degree of control over their own lives and actions and even if one were to remain inactive that is still exercising control over oneself.

Stop making these threads.

wow, you get a fucking star for the day. you're going to do much better than everyone else as a dead person.

yeh :3

what does Epicurus have to do with this thread?

Cunt-roll deez nutz bauss.

Doing nothing is still action
That's not what it means to stop seeking control

These stoic / zen threads you're making are all the same. Admit it, you wish you were a Korean robot. With a brain injury. On a ventilator.

>do nothing
>nothing
>

"wuwei" is not "do nothing." emptiness is not nihilism. these are very basic misunderstandings, my friend, which can easily be solved by reading

Where does Lao Tzu actually say this?

You misreading my greentext of an imperative progressing to the ineffable as "nihilism" is your problem. L 2 zen, faggot, and stop shitposting on Veeky Forums.

where did i say that you said anything about nihilism? i merely suggested that you're taking peculiarly east asian views too negatively!

i would suggest you read things a second time before embarrassing yourself with childish, vulgar, and unbecoming behavior like that in the future

good day sir

>where did I say
>"emptiness is not nihilism"
Right there, pard.

Emptiness is fullness, son. Your shitty reading of a zen self help book impresses no one. Stop seeking control. Start by stopping. Reply to me again, slave.

Is the "key difference" worth a shit for literally anyone or anything?

No?

Thats what i thought.

can you even fucking read? i didn't just say "where did i say", i said "where did i say that YOU said.."

pull your head out of your ass kid, it's unbecoming (and embarrassing).

you sound like a very intelligent and thoughtful person

in Tao Te Ching
It's like a major theme

...

This is the only one I've made since I saw people spamming others and realized Lao Tzu looks like Varg

you must be a very fulfilled person

>t. Veeky Forums zen master mad he got beat at his own game.

You have a lot to learn about submission and control.

...

>it would be ignorant to presume one doesn't have a significant degree of control over their own lives and actions
only if you don't understand physics and biology

free will is a folk psychology peasant meme

not true
any sufficiently complet system will have elements of randomness and order
when we identify with the "random" side that's where our free will comes into play.

however assuming things are completely random or orderly is wrong.

Chinese philosophy is the absolute gutter of philosophy.

Nobody cares about it apart from nationalistic PRC business mangers

I have mixed feelings about it
it is definitely worthwhile and thought provoking, but the fact remains that it was also exploited heavily by the state to maintain the status quo

Chinese philosophy was greatly improved by the introduction of Indian ideas.

uwu daddy lao tzu is gonna give me the cummies

How do I know if I'm doing it right? How do I not try hard enough but still succeed, without trying too hard or not trying hard enough and reducing then philosophy to meaninglessness, all without really trying? Empty cups are the most easily filled.

if you need to ask "am I trying too hard" you're trying too hard.
just chillax dude

Yeah that helped when you got BTFO by the commies ROFLMAO

The communists are the ultimate Dao masters

you're a fucking idiot dogmatist taking the law of mechanism as first principle and in doing so you've barred yourself from talking philosophy by exposing yourself as an automaton who cannot understand what it means to self-determine

sorry, no time for your bullshit in the west

But then you'll ask yourself "am I trying hard enough"

Randomness has nothing to do with free will.

Self-determination makes no sense, sweetie. You can't magically place humans outside of causality.

>You can't magically place humans outside of causality.
Says who?

Anyone not willing to embrace an incoherent worldview.

If you do want to do that I guess that's an option, but then there's nothing to talk about. You've entered the domain of nonsense.

>Anyone not willing to embrace an incoherent worldview.
Lol. What exactly is incoherent about it? Also, professional tip: "things I don't understand" and "nonsense" are not synonyms.

If people would have free will they would have to be unmoved movers. But humans are not unmoved, they respond to external things, they are formed by external things, everything they do is in reaction to external things. Their genes, their brains, they are all formed by circumstance just like anything else.

You'd have to reconcile this fact of being embedded in the world and causality with being free. I don't think there is a way of doing this, unless you redefine freedom to such a degree that it's not freedom at all, playing compatibility semantic games designed merely because people just don't want to let go of their intuition of freedom because it upsets them.

Randomness has everything to do with free will as free will is inherently chaotic.
Perhaps chaos is a better word than randomness

You realize that it doesn't have to be a one or the other scenario.
You can have degrees of both freedom and determinism

What makes you think the human brain is one of the things that acts randomly? Especially given that its so called choices have been proven to be predictable before the chooser experiences the phenomenon of choosing.

Absolutely everything has degrees of randomness to it, humans are no exception
We may react to the environment but we are not utterly dominated by it in the way you assume. We ride the waves but we make our own as well.
The only difference is that humans are concioua of the chaos they create while something like a storm cloud is not.

That's the kind of Dennett tier semantics I was referencing. The degrees of freedom idea a pragmatic applicability from a subjective perspective (I can choose to stretch out my arm but not for six meters etc) but have nothing to do with the objective observation of a human organism and its place in the environment.

A person can choose to stretch out his arm to a degree, but the question for me would be 'could he under the same circumstances have also not stretched out his arm?' which I would answer with no. That's the freedom I'm talking about, and in that case there is either libertarian free will or determinism.

I don't see any reason to conflate chaos and self-determination and responsibility other than an attempt to salvage pre-scientific intuitions about what it means to be a person.

Using free will in this sense seems like a 'god of the gaps' approach to me.

On that case how is hard determinism not a "god of the gaps" theory as well considering it originated with the likes of Calvinists and other religions groups prior
If anything there isn't much scientific evidence for determinism unless it's a "soft" determinism where we are generally influenced (but not utterly controlled) by local events

you haven't said anything dipshit, you've presupposed that humans are not free and then used that to "prove" that humans are not free.

but okay, sure, of course we posit reality as mechanistic, that's fine. mechanistic determination still doesn't preclude any concept of freedom or self-determination. we have SELF CONSCIOUSNESS. we can examine and produce representations of our own thoughts. as soon as we self-reflect we can no longer ascribe "nature" (i.e. external nature) as the cause of our will because our subjective intellect acts as its internal determining ground.

The illusion of conscious self-determining is mere a side/after-effect of processes in the brain, lad.

ok

I'm too busy winning.

you're not actually saying anything other than "I'm correct"

you can't watch a being determine its own output (it produces unpredictable/indeterminate but non-random output given particular inputs) AND THEN give an account of the self-determining process that lead to said output and then say LOL IT'S ILLUSORY without a very, very convincing explanation of the nature and genesis of this illusion

There are empirical grounds for what I'm saying.

With multiple choice tests you can predict a person's answers before he feels like he is deciding them when you hook him up to brain monitoring. The technology is primitive, but if one can correctly predict a person's choices on a multiple choice test before heknows the answers he will give, before the choice even enters his own consciousness, where is this freedom of the will then? The process determining the outcome has already taken place before the agent subjectively has any notion of it.

That's why 'conciousness self-determining' looks to be a side/after-effect of the 'choosing' process, which is not a choosing at all, but merely an involuntary reaction to stimuli. The idea that the conscious being could have directed the process in another direction is an illusion. Consciousness is merely the wake of the ship.

this guy don't

ok