CONGRATS!

Next time I'm in your area we're celebrating!

Congrats KT.
Dont let Gabe corrupt it.

A. Pendragon wrote:Congrats KT.
Dont let Gabe corrupt it.

Josh is doing a fine enough job corrupting the one he already has all on his own.

What he said. ^^;

Is that corrupting or spoiling? Congrats Josh.

KonThaak wrote:Lex is pregnant again...so my Christmas was significantly better than my Solstice was.

The due date is August 1. She's currently about 8 weeks in.

It looks like a shrimp.

Congratulations . . . again, Josh.

(smiles)
Small babies are always an adventure.

Shadowstalker wrote:Is that corrupting or spoiling? :D Congrats Josh. :)

Corrupting... For a while, whenever I played a minor prank on Lex, she'd turn to the baby and say, "Did you see what that shithead just did?" So I started calling myself "Daddy Shithead" for a while. ^^; Granted, I stopped, but still...

concrete_Angel wrote:I know that's a bad way of starting, but I'm sure the question has been thought about with our line of work:

Is it wrong to being a new life into this world when we're already dealing with the suffering of humanity? If every child starts out being innocent, then are we inherently condemning them to a life of pain and tragedy by allowing them to enter the world that's inevitably going to end up killing them in the long term? And why do people have kids at all, if it turns out they're only going to regret the decision and get rid of them?

The issue here is the suffering of humanity, right? Not so much the "should we procreate?" The only reason you see life as suffering is because you desire for your life to be different than it is. The only reason there is suffering in the world is because too many people want at the expense of others. Stop using others to make your life into the kind of life you don't want and start working with others to find the life you do. Then have children and teach them the same lesson.

If you already have children, seek your life while making sure not to pass your fears and desires on to them as much as that is possible anyway. If you die before you find your own peace you will pass those demaons on to your children and your children's children.

First, the problem was originally asked about people who had children they never wanted or intended to take care of. Technically, why procreate when you're not even going to bother with trying to make that kid's life even as bearable as yours?

Second, if you die before your children, then they're going to end up with their own demons, even without the ones added on by the deceased.

Is it not true, however, that it is our sorrow that teaches us to cherish the joyfull things? How does one understand how happy one is, without a contrast with which to compare? Our pains and sorrows form us as much, if not more than our hopes and joys.

Sorrow and Joy depend on each other; they are but two aspects of Tao. Pain and hope as well. The duality is only found in the perception of the student. It does not exist. Like a coin, how can the images of heads teach us of the images of the tails? Sorrow does not teach joy; pain does not teach hope. They merely point out the descriptive qualities of the subject. To say that the duality is fact diminishes both qualities.

Look, and it can't be seen.
Listen, and it can't be heard.
Reach, and it can't be grasped.

Above, it isn't bright.
Below, it isn't dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

The continuous flow of experience within which life is lived teases our sensual and cultural sensoria by seeming to allow for disrimination only to defy any prediction we might propose to assign it. Unlike things we think we know, the Tao will not yield up to our most basic categories of location and determination: bright and dark, inside and outside, subject and object, joy and sorrow, one and many. And when we know the Tao better, we come to understand that we don't really know "things" at all.

Distinctions produce their opposites. Dividing up the world descriptively generates correlative categories that invariably entail themselves and their antinomies. The field of experience does not resolve itself into ontological distinctions. In fact, on the contrary, there is an ontological parity among the many events that constitute this process, with none of them more real than any other.

Duality appears over and over in metaphysical vocabularies of reality/appearance. With the absence of a putative ontological disparity between reality and appearance, the interdependent bianaries require each other for explanation. This is like trying to tell a blindman what "tall" is by saying that it is "not small," when "not tall" is equally defined as "small." And yet, is "hot" really "not cold?" These are, rather, conventional distinctions that have explanatory force in giving an account of how things hang together.

When you are experiencing joy, be joyful; when it is sorrow that you feel, be sorrowful. Do not assume that joy and sorrow always circulate from one to the other; joy is always joy and sorrow is always sorrow. You will never find a mid-point between joy and sorrow (a joy-like sorrow, or vice versa).

It is the categories tht matter when talking about these things. Joy is not sorrow; there is no word for joy-sorrow. As you said, you have had times when you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, but you have never called them anything but the two at once; never thought of them as the same thing. There is no phrase for the feeling of both at once because there is no both at once -- only the Tao.

Since we cannot perceive theTao we must discuss our perceptions, which are our categories of duality. The categories are made up of opposites never middle points. We have no means of conveying the middle points to others beyond the idea of "emptiness."