Lacewing wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 2:23 pm
Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 8:21 am
If one's judgement leads to experiencing X as not miserable/misery, then that word won't come up.
Yes, I did get that you were saying this. But your additional clarification below (perhaps) helps me to respond. Thanks.
Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 8:21 am
You wouldn't say when my wife died it was misery, but I judged it as not misery so I didn't experience misery. If so, then you wouldn't say the first part of the sentence.
Misery is a subjective (what one experiences term). It can make sense to say the death of a loved one can be experienced not as misery because our judgments co-create the experience.
It does not make sense to say, If you experience misery it can be experienced not as misery because our judgments co-create the experience. That makes no sense.
I cannot comment directly on what you say because it seems to me that your statements strive to create an absolute condition/situation of some sort, which does not make sense to me. Maybe the best way I can respond is to show how I think of it differently. A person can experience misery, recognize that it's happening, and then shift to non-misery.
Sure, yes, no problem with that.
Further, we can change the way we evaluate things. A miserable trauma can be understood differently afterward as a benefit/gift of some sort.
Yes, that's also fine.
That doesn't change the misery we felt in the moment, but it can change our ongoing experience of it.
Yes, fine.
I think this is how our judgments and awareness can be used to create/co-create our experience -- perpetuating, amplifying, or reframing, shifting, etc.
And I will even go further and say that one's attitude/philosophy whatever in the moment can lead to us experiencing something in the moment that otherwise might have been miserable if we had a different take/attitude in the moment. And then it wasn't misery.
Does that explanation make sense to you?
Yes.
The reason my position was absolute, and it was and is, is because he word misery entails that it is a terrible experience when experienced. We can deduce this from the word. Much as other subjective evaluations of what an experience is like are well how they were experienced.
I was terrified when our car shot off the bridge into the air but what I felt was only joy, just doesn't make sense. I suppose one might also feel joy, though unless you are a stunt person or something or suicidal, I'd probably worry about you even then.
It seemed like some people in the thread seemed to think that misery can be ok if you have the right attitude. Now they may simply think what often triggers misery need not make us feel miserable. Or like you mean that how we look back on that moment once it has passed may change.
And I appreciated that you said something about your not blaming people or something on that order. Because apart from the issue I am raising about what we can deduce from the use of the word misery, I also think people take these things too far and it does have an implicit or explicit blaming to it.
And then systems like stoicism (which I have some agreement with) and Buddhism, can become total systems that I think are actually anti-life while the latter may not at all seem that way. Also some portions of HInduism. And whatever religion or mix the OP writer is selling here, starting right with the title of the thread.