Anyone here surf?

Nope, don’t live near the ocean but I snowboard.
So while the fear of drowning isn’t a part of the rush fear of broken parts is.
I totally get you about going with it despite “the odds” and the great and magnificent feeling doing that provides.

Yves, there’s no such thing as fleeing from experience. I mean, one can try but damn, that’s quite an experience!

Everything wants your attention, and wants to change you at some level. One is certainly free to resist, but it can be just as much fun to let it wash over you, carry you away. Suspend your disbelief. If you don’t like where the movie’s taking you, walk out of the theatre and go see something else. Or better yet, change the story yourself. Choose your own adventure.

Anyone here surf? If you go out on a big day it’s stupid and dangerous. But fear is useless. Resistance is futile and deadly. But if you go with it and really feel it, you can carve your expression all over the face of that 10 foot beast. Many times I’ve nearly drowned but man, the rush! When you mess with ideas (and people infected by them) it’s the same thing. Immerse yourself in the ocean, pick a wave, ride that motherfucker! What’s the worst that can happen?

I like this quote from an old Tool newsletter:

When you are up in 10=1 or thereabouts, and see that dog-faced demons are only illusions (with the rest of Maya), there is no sense in keeping them out. Once you realize the universe as infinite L.V.X., why, to hell with the circle, let it rush in!

A whole other thread could be extracted from Unthinkable’s remarks, on the theme of closing oneself off from new thinking & experience. But I’ll stop here.

In what sense? Maybe I’ll start that other thread!

The younger and more curious I am, the more I’ll be likely to open myself to the offer of new experience, regardless of the motivations of those who offer it. Armies always find recruits.

If I am already satisfied with my agenda, I’ll resist anyone’s attempt to deflect me.

. . . to live life without allowing the world and your experiences of it to change you is not to live life at all.

“World” is a bit too broad here.

If I chose the life of a hermit because it suited me, I might be living life with greater intensity than a party-loving city-dweller. I’m thinking of course of a hermit who chooses that life for spiritual transformation (letting his experience change him) rather than someone who flees experience.

Some children are brainwashed by adverts but most just want to be like their peers, so it’s great for those who wish to set agendas for the young, who come into this world to some extent tabula rasa.

On the other hand I believe each of us has an innate agenda - our “me-ness” if you like. It behoves us to discover that and honour it. My grandchildren are being brought up on the principles of Rudolf Steiner. In a Steiner kindergarten, no materials, techniques or lore are used which our Stone Age ancestors would not have recognised. On the other hand, many kids have the nimble fingers and brains to figure out any programmable gadget in minutes, without being brainwashed into it.

I don’t know if any race or tribe in the world is not going to indoctrinate children one way or another, and much as I admire the Steiner approach I see it, too, as a way to lay adult ideas on adaptable kids.

A whole other thread could be extracted from Unthinkable’s remarks, on the theme of closing oneself off from new thinking & experience. But I’ll stop here.