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Good&Bad

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KannaRas

KannaRas

Rising Star
Had some tought's recently about the idea that in order for us to realise good we must experience bad

Now i think that this idea is not 100% true ,,
ofc that by having some bad experience in a subject(ill call it ) would later lead to a greater feeling of good when that subject has changed ,,

yet is it true to say that one could not experience good as good without bad to counter how good it really is ?

i have not dug to deep into toughts about this but i will try as i write this to think of better points to throw in here

lets say in a perfect scenerio place world where one would experience no bad at all would he not be able to enjoy things in life ?

firstly what is bad ?


ill think about food
let assume that all dishes are kind of the same (( i mean if theres fish on the plate ,, its not less or more good taste by the cooking it went trough ))

so someone has not been with access to food for a while ,
has he became more appreciative of food ? yes ofc

thou id imagine all the rest would still pretty much enjoy their meal of the day ,,

i geuss food is not the right thing to disscuss this ill try to build up a better argument


another perfect sceneario , for this

someone who live in a place where its all good great scenes to see and all

would he not enjoy travelling to a diffrent place and seeing new scene's eating diffrent food?


and if he would enjoy the new scenery around and the new food

would that have to entail that staying a long time in the same scenery and same food and what else was bad for him ?

why did he go to seek a new place of scenery and discovery's ?
does it have to be out of bad experience in current ones ?
maybe a sense of adventure or ?


lets say a place has a field of mary weed's growing & always has
a person there he had not bad experience of not having access to sweet smoke
could he not enjoy then having it ?
i can understand he will take it for granted and not appreciate having so much mary weed's around
but still ,, would he not enjoy hes walks to the fields to pick up some fresh weed for hes smoking jar
would he not enjoy lighting a smoke when ever he chooses ?

could joy not exist without first suffering of lack of it ?

i can understand the variables that would make the joy of it

yet not all of them would be considered as Bad i think

what im trying to say
is that for good to exist it dosent have to derail all the way to bad for it to be good

would be happy if you could add your toughts

it seem to be a complete truth that without bad theres no good
that they are dualities(?)
and i cant agree to that honestly


am i wrong ?
 
Contrast is a great thing. The silence in between notes of a beautiful piece of music. The dark hues and light hues in a painting create depth. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I once heard a story about a light that didn't know what it was. It asked god "What am I?. God replied "You are light!". The light persisted "But what is light?". Suddenly the light was in complete and utter darkness. The light called out for god and received no response. After some time the light yelled out "God, I ask you what I am and you throw me into this dark abyss, why have you done this to me? Why have you left me all alone?". God came back to the light and all was as it was before. The light in that instant knew what it was and said "Thank you!".

The above story I heard a very long time ago when I was a kid. I always remembered it. Although I do not believe in god now, I still think this story holds a certain truth. Sometimes you have to be what you are not enable to realize what you are.

I think we do this growing up. Lie and you know that it is better to tell the truth. Hit or be hit and you realize a hug is better. Hunger sucks and having a good meal is great. We could list many contrasts or dualities here.

I can say that some of my DMT journeys have shown me this truth as well. Ego taken away into oblivion and then returned always makes me feel grateful to be me. I would also flip the coin here and say that the bad is also something to appreciate. For me that is the lesson. Without the experience of contrast, the good would not feel as wonderful, it was the bad that made this possible I would argue. So both good and bad should be valued the same. Both accepted completely.

The silence between the notes of a beuatful piece of music now noticed. All the colors of a painting are gazed upon with full appreciation. Every bite of food is chewed with a new kind of awareness after the hunger. The loved one you have not seen for a time is now welcomed with a full on bear hug when they arrive at your home. Could you find this appreciation without contrast or duality? I don't think so. That's my opinion. Good and bad are just words. It is all experience. All experience should be looked at with a genuine gratitude to experience anything at all. It is a gift to even contemplate these things!

It's all good!
 
DmnStr8 said:
Contrast is a great thing. The silence in between notes of a beautiful piece of music. The dark hues and light hues in a painting create depth. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I once heard a story about a light that didn't know what it was. It asked god "What am I?. God replied "You are light!". The light persisted "But what is light?". Suddenly the light was in complete and utter darkness. The light called out for god and received no response. After some time the light yelled out "God, I ask you what I am and you throw me into this dark abyss, why have you done this to me? Why have you left me all alone?". God came back to the light and all was as it was before. The light in that instant knew what it was and said "Thank you!".

The above story I heard a very long time ago when I was a kid. I always remembered it. Although I do not believe in god now, I still think this story holds a certain truth. Sometimes you have to be what you are not enable to realize what you are.

I think we do this growing up. Lie and you know that it is better to tell the truth. Hit or be hit and you realize a hug is better. Hunger sucks and having a good meal is great. We could list many contrasts or dualities here.

I can say that some of my DMT journeys have shown me this truth as well. Ego taken away into oblivion and then returned always makes me feel grateful to be me. I would also flip the coin here and say that the bad is also something to appreciate. For me that is the lesson. Without the experience of contrast, the good would not feel as wonderful, it was the bad that made this possible I would argue. So both good and bad should be valued the same. Both accepted completely.

The silence between the notes of a beuatful piece of music now noticed. All the colors of a painting are gazed upon with full appreciation. Every bite of food is chewed with a new kind of awareness after the hunger. The loved one you have not seen for a time is now welcomed with a full on bear hug when they arrive at your home. Could you find this appreciation without contrast or duality? I don't think so. That's my opinion. Good and bad are just words. It is all experience. All experience should be looked at with a genuine gratitude to experience anything at all. It is a gift to even contemplate these things!

It's all good!
Click to expand...


thanks for the awesome post !

your words and toughts brought new directions thank you

like you say appreciation without contrast is non existent ,
but does that mean duality between good and bad ?

id think that contrast is diffrent then duality

ill take the light theme

there could be light from the moon witch is great
but then the sun comes and its amazing all the light
both are good both are great

but i geuss with this direction its easy to assume one would appreciate them because the contrast would send him realising that they could be not at all thus adding the bad in the picture and creating the appreciation for the good

i now think it would be impossible to find an example but that dosent mean its not out there

much we cant realise in R baboon mind

but maybe it still holds
that contrast is not duality ?

as if having good and gooder

its all situational i geuss the good aginst the gooderer would count as bad in ones view maybe

so another tought

do the extreme Bad,evil ,ect
do they influence what we would see as good ?

no idea how to further detail on this question right now
just had it aswell tought id throw it out there
 
When it's about ethic's it's rather the other way round: It's because we are a very social species, and because we are mostly benign, that the bad and evil behaviours stand out more.

-Firstly, our talent for cruelty is the direct result of our highly advanced social skills. There can be no sadism without empathy and what's often called'theory of mind'.
And i think it's obvious that our talent for sadism rather is the result of us having these social skills, that the other way round...us having some social skills as the result of our talent for cruelty.

The evolutionary benefits of cruelty alone, are also too small to justify the costs... It requires so much brainpower to be cruel. It's actually quite weird to believe that cruelty comes more natural to us than kindness, when you think about it.
That a creature could exist that has the brainpower that 1-enables it to deduce what matters most to others, 2-to figure out clever ways of spending precious time and resources on how to use this knowledge to inflict maximal pain on them, and then 3-to place themselves in their position and to know what pain they must be feeling...for the sole purpose only, of experiencing some brief moments of joy....Without any further evolutionary payoff.

-And secondly, it makes much more sense to see that being very social and kind has huge payoffs, evolutionarily. But that it couldn't be stable behaviour if we wouldn't have the skills as well, to avenge it when others would take advantage of this kindness.

Actually, it's quite easy to prove this with game theory. Any group of social animals that would adopt the mixed strategy of: A-treating others as they would like to be treated themselves, and B-revenge in case the first strategy is not being reciprocated, would have a social nash-equilibrium with the highest possible pareto efficiency. Economically speaking, there can be no better strategy.

So this group would be stronger than any competing group of animals. And this would be an accumulating effect. Any other group of animals would over time, either be assimilated, or annihilated depending on whether they would adopt this optimal social strategy as well.

evolutionary and behavioural biologists (OK this is from the back of my head, but i believe robert axelrod was one of them, but he may be a mathematician instead, i'm not 100% sure. But i believe that the groundbreaking "the evolution of cooperation" was written by him) have done computer simulations, and time and time again, the social/revenge strategy comes out as dominant.

In other words, WE must be the offspring of those apes that adopted the social/revenge strategy.
Mostly social, kind and gentle. But with a very highly developped talent for revenge.

So cruelty is the child of kindness.
 
interesting

i am thinking
if its one way
maybe then

should i go on and realise that without sadism we wouldn't have learned empathy

so saying that i will agree to think that one brought the other ,, yet if we would go on the line if evolution

one would simply not exist without the other

if truly one has to learn bad to realise what the good is
and evolve or not by it

then it has to say that it has to be

i think i am standing on a strange turtle while thinking about this

aye well

questioning i geuss without answer now

is it about appreciating more ?

or maybe about finally learning the hard way

like a savage animal being forced to experience the worst it self offers so it could finally learn to see another way

what would that mean about the teacher saying there is one other then time and surviving

feel id have to drop a few more turtles down to go on the tought line thats leading this
i aint brought my parachute with me gotta find where i lost it
 
yeah, the mind works a little bit like that.

I think it even applies to truth and falsehood: without the notion of falsehood, we couldn't have a notion of truth. The concept wouldn't make any sense.

The brain of an infant initially learns just by liking or not liking a certain sensation. Only good and bad. All the nuance comes later.
 
The whole thing seems extremely relative to me and I don't really want to goes in the pros and cons of this form of dualism. I'm mostly on par with what DmnStr8 said, and said very well (btw thank you for that wonderful little tale), and I want to bounce on this:

DmnStr8 said:
I still think this story holds a certain truth. Sometimes you have to be what you are not enable to realize what you are
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It seems to me we are discussing the emergence of knowledge. That beyond experiencing cold and warmth, you determine what cold is in its relationship to warmth, you observe the shift of one to the next, and you so do for the rest of creation because everything is shifting opposites allowing the creation of balance. This way of thinking is like discovering a very simple formula, or geometrical pattern, that can serve as an accurate lens on the world as to built more complex understanding of it.

What interests me more, in our very human perspective, is how this relate to life and death.

If you are aware of what being alive is, if you have this form of self awareness, it means you know what not being alive is. You have experience and can remember a very different state from what your normal experience of reality is - a state that you cannot define as being alive in the sens you are right now, a state that is unreal to you.

A mind transforming experience obviously because if the body died you wouldn't remember, and even though if the memory of death were to be inside the body you would need a tool to tap in it. Whether that's or not the case, the mind is that tool that can die. It operates on a different scale from the body and is not conditioned by time and space as the body is, it can go much faster - you can think of a million things between the moment you sit and the one you put your shoes on. The mind can die over and over again while the body remains to an extent intact.

So indeed, if you experience something that is so un-you, it will shed a light on what you are. Endless deconstructions and reconstructions involves this emergence of awareness. It also shed a light on what a differentiated identity is, the reconstruction is the ego being birthed again. Even if the end results of the experience is Union, it goes on through Separation. Mind and body, man and nature, etc. Dualism is the natural state that follows unification, like exhaling follows inhaling. You can't keep something in forever.

Stanislas Grof's work is very enlightening I think on this relationship with the psychedelics, the death and rebirth pattern in them, and can come to support the Stoned Ape Theory: Endless experiences of the shift from "unlife" (associated/experienced as death) and "return to life" (experienced as rebirth) are getting associated with the core memories of birth (that is THE moment of separation and formation of the identity). Bringing awareness to birth means awareness to breathing (that same simple geometrical pattern), breathing is required for singing, speaking and lighting fires. It's the one thing that is your constant dialogue with the world, that is at the liminality of conscious and subconscious experience and is then obviously related to surreal states of consciousnesses. You can modify your states of consciousness by modifying your breath.

The matter then is not if that is what death is like. Any unusual state of consciousness could be understood as 'death' because of its unrealness to the perceptions of the self. The matter is what is the consequences of that experience, or of this way of understanding the world, not if it's real in and off itself.
 
it comes to say then
that we humans as it would seem if looking back
that we only learn by first experiencing the worst ?

adding a question of faith in this that im not sure would be a good one yet still
if we would look back at anything theres always the good that came from the bad
and it kinda is always was bad first for some reason


thinking about adapting and surviving would surely answer why that is

yet with the strangness that surrounds creation and many other things
accepting a truth and then coming to understand another one of this like
counter each other real hard

as the question differs from a how proggression was done

but why
its always a why question that is the hardest

because its a complete understanding now with your great posts of the natrue of duality

then comes a why
this came for that
and that came for this
then why one way and not the other ?

since duality would work both ways as its said

so one could only imagine the teaching would go both ways

is it harder to learn from a bad experience ?
im not sure thats the thing

but it sure seems to be the evidence
that would lead
to the answer that evolution is the answer to why
other then a learning journey
its simply evolving into a better state
with time and mind adapting into what we would wish better

maybe i had trouble agreeing to the concept that is because i belive theres more to it just then simple evolution of a life form

i thank you nexians for sharing your knowledge
)o(
 
This has come up many times in my exploration of consciousness. To me good and bad seem to be linguistic constructs which separate perceptions into perfect dualities, which don't take into account the nuances of experience which humans are capable of experiencing, which seems to limit the actual experience of being alive. Imagine bumans before the advent of language. Perhaps (or perhaps surely) the empathic experience of humans would have been much more all encompassing. People probably knew things about (and with) one another in ways that might seem supernatural now. This is what the collective awakening seems to about to me, remembering those ways of being, combined with what we,ve evolved into since then, then evolving further from the alchemy of both into something powered by love.

I think a lot of dualities in the mind are created by people telling other people what to believe about whats right or wrong. Or about what to believe. Or whats good and bad. And on a deeper level perhaps, when a child is told its bad. Perhaps part of the child believs that its bad, then a duality between the "good" child and "bad" child, which can result in repressed selves or personalities, which in my opinion is the same things that religious people belive are demons. The demons are the parts of people that those people belive are bad. The parts they deny are themselves. And all this created by people telling others what to belive about good and bad. And the belive that things are good and bad. In alchemy its said the darkness is the light. This can be literally true in this case if one becomes awesome with one's self.

For me a more wholistic way of looking at life is in the context of nurturing vs toxic, rather than good and bad.
 
BundleflowerPower said:
This has come up many times in my exploration of consciousness. To me good and bad seem to be linguistic constructs which separate perceptions into perfect dualities, which don't take into account the nuances of experience which humans are capable of experiencing, which seems to limit the actual experience of being alive. Imagine bumans before the advent of language. Perhaps (or perhaps surely) the empathic experience of humans would have been much more all encompassing. People probably knew things about (and with) one another in ways that might seem supernatural now. This is what the collective awakening seems to about to me, remembering those ways of being, combined with what we,ve evolved into since then, then evolving further from the alchemy of both into something powered by love.

I think a lot of dualities in the mind are created by people telling other people what to believe about whats right or wrong. Or about what to believe. Or whats good and bad. And on a deeper level perhaps, when a child is told its bad. Perhaps part of the child believs that its bad, then a duality between the "good" child and "bad" child, which can result in repressed selves or personalities, which in my opinion is the same things that religious people belive are demons. The demons are the parts of people that those people belive are bad. The parts they deny are themselves. And all this created by people telling others what to belive about good and bad. And the belive that things are good and bad. In alchemy its said the darkness is the light. This can be literally true in this case if one becomes awesome with one's self.

For me a more wholistic way of looking at life is in the context of nurturing vs toxic, rather than good and bad.
Click to expand...
Yes, i think this is very true. What we see as good and bad is often a reflection of how we like to think of ourselves. "Good" often represents what we would want to be ourselves, and "bad" the parts of ourselves we don't like that much.

The problem i have with denying that the terms "good and bad" refer to something real, is that this almost by definition results in a form of nihilism that is very toxic. It is being used by many people, to dodge the responsibilities they have towards other people or even this planet as a whole.

The bankers who almost blew up our economies in 2008 used it, the politicians and businesmen who refuse to do anything about climate change or pollution use it, the political spindoctors who feed us lies to make us hate eachother use it, the criminals who force women into prostitution use it.....they'll all say "hey, there is no right and wrong, it's all subjective, there's only winning and losing, profits and losses, money and debts".

But the thing is, that if we, as a species, allow all those things to happen, we'll hurt ourselves. Maybe we will even destroy ourselves.

So for everyone who doesn't want us to destroy ourselves, it makes perfect sense to say "maybe there actually ARE things that we realy should and shouldn't do".
And i believe that the evolution of most of the species with advanced social skills, has equipped these species with moral sentiments, exactly for this reason.

Because, as a social species, animals who need eachothers company to survive, it is realy no more than common sense to accept that we shouldn't hurt eachother. But to us it is more than just common sense, because we also have strong feelings about it when we see somebody hurting another person.
 
I agree dragonrider. I also think that we inhabit a shared reality, and ive experienced what you say about responsibility. My concern about the labels "good" and "bad" are the way that my parents for instance, is the way those words programmed my perceptions of a lot of things as I grew up. Those words had left a deep imprint on my mind.
 
I know what you mean. I think it's actually a form of parasitical behaviour.

As a social species we depend on one another. So we each have to contribute as well as take, in order to survive.

But wouldn't it be attractive to always take just a little more than what we contribute? So one way of doing that is by making people believe that we contribute more than we actually do, by presenting ourselves as very virtuous.
 
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