Old 11-17-2011, 12:03 PM
  # 20 (permalink)  
davaidavai
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Bellingham
Posts: 513
This question relates to selfhood: what is genuine and what isn't? Who are we? A collection of chemicals variously reacting? An outer shell with an inner animal? Are we the same throughout our lives or do we change? It also relates to truth: what is true and what isn't?

I know that alcohol is poison for the brain and the kind of truthfulness it may produce is not reasoned truthfulness. It is not the kind produced from the intentions of a man or woman, but is an accumulation and comingling of random associations, dreams, urges, fears. These cluttered thoughts like vapors rising from a vat of toxic waste are not the things that define us as beings when we are sober and intact. They do not always walk with us, but rather are produced with outside chemical aid.

A simplistic view of human nature, perhaps the Puritan view -- the reasoning self as shell holding back all the inner chaos -- is not correct and is self-affirming. It is negative. Perhaps it factors into why people get addicted in the first place, embroiled as they may be within the resistance of self against self as opposed to the awareness of self as an abundant, beautiful, complex phenomenon.

So, my answer that yes, everything in a way containes a variety of truthfulness, but the things this guy is saying should not be seen to define him in a deep way.
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