Paradise

[Wayne Goodwin]

What Does Paradise Mean Too You ?

Is It Here On Earth ?

Is It A Place In Your Mind That You Think Of ?

Is It In Heaven ?

Could It Be In A Different Dimension Of Time ?

Your Thoughts Please .....

[flippr 2.0]

different dimension of time.my future could never come close to how cool my past was.i know ya can't live in the past,but,since you asked.

[Lifesighs]

There is so much beauty all around us, it's here on earth.

[crestofwaves]

 I really think it is a state of mind.  A moment can be paradise.  And it's those little encounters with paradise that keep us wading through the s**t!

 

[uno,dos,3]

Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night
      I can see paradise by the dashboard light
      Paradise by the dashboard light
      You got to do what you can
      And let Mother Nature do the rest
      Ain't no doubt about it
      We were doubly blessed
      'Cause we were barely seventeen
      And we were barely-dressed. (Meatloaf)

only I was barely 19 years old.

 

[Wayne Goodwin]

I like that ...

[Snagg]

"Paradise" is an unattainable ideal...By definition it cannot exist, because everybody has a different definition of it - And like all man-made concepts, it contains unavoidable contradictions. One person's paradise would be another person's hell.

I remember a passage from a book I read a long time ago, called "Another Roadside Attraction" - It involved a fantasy sequence where Tarzan met Jesus. Jesus is being his usual earnest, well-meaning self, trying to bring peace and order and harmony to the world - And then Tarzan (the easy-going, open-minded nature boy) comes riding up on a goat, munching a mango or something. The two have a friendly debate, in which Jesus explains his desire to bring heaven to earth by "changing the world", which makes Tarzan slap his side and point out the larger principle already at work: The world does nothing BUT change; Nothing stays static or permanent. People are born, they live and then they die. There is happiness AND suffering. Countries rise and fall. Prosperity and poverty ebb and flow on vast scales. What was once a vexing problem is solved by a clever plan or formula, only for new problems to arise. EVERYTHING CHANGES, ALWAYS,  and the idea of just one person freezing everything in the form of their personal concept of eternal bliss is the exact opposite of "paradise".

The idea of paradise illustrates both the human mind's capacity for hope and desire for happiness, and it's ability to think 100% unrealistically. For me, leaving behind the idea of forever-happy-time perfection wasn't "letting go" of anything, because that particular anything didn't actually exist and never would. Living the life I had by trying to be a good person and accepting the occasional major-suckage times are simply the cards I'd been dealt, just like every other person on the planet.

[crestofwaves]

Sounds like Vonnegut.  YOU sound like Vonnegut.  And so it goes...

[Snagg]

I like to tell my DEEPLY religious mom, who just absolutely "knows" that only people are in heaven, that if every single one of my now-deceased dogs aren't waiting there for me, then I ain't going.

It drives her completely bonkers. She is so convinced that she knows exactly what's going to happen to everybody after they die, and that she knows all of the precise details of what that after life is going to include, that the very idea of refusing her beloved fantasy world, let alone the introduction of the slightest sliver of logical thinking regarding that imaginary destination, sets her off on a weeping, histrionic fit. She can not imagine how any sane, logical person could reject such a wonderful iron-clad guarantee of an eternity of harps and choirs and sleeping on clouds even though it's never night time and people who hated you while they were alive suddenly becoming your best friends and never-ending Sunday church and eating nothing but cake and ice cream for a billion, trillion kajillion years. If anybody in my life ever drove home to me the utter, abject ridiculousness of "religious thinking", it's her.

[crestofwaves]

It could be scientific thinking. All that electrical energy in the brain has to go somewhere.  It doesn't just vanish.  Your mom might be a physicist!

[Snagg]

Or maybe she just short-circuited about 86 years ago.

[Shadowman]

I suspect it goes back where it came from before you were you. It really is not that much electrically. There used to be a discussion exercise similar to this in regards to Cartesian Dualism and the mind/body problem. If the mind is different than the brain and body, then how does it interact? Can one measure some difference in electrical input or output? Humans are very similar to other animals and appear to meet the same recycling fate that other creatures do. As the body cools down after demise the energy, heat, etc. dissipates much the way it does when you shut off and open the oven after making a casserole. It lives on in a sense but not the one many afterlife supporters might hope for. Now I am hungry for a casserole.

[ProblemAgain]

another roadside attraction by tom robbins..

Plot summary

The novel follows the adventures of John Paul Ziller and his wife Amanda—lovable prophetess and promiscuous earth mother, inarguably the central protagonist—who open "Captain Kendrick's Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve," a combination hot dog stand and zoo along a highway in Skagit County, Washington. Other characters in this rather oddball novel include Mon Cul the baboon; Marx Marvelous, an educated man from the east coast; and L. Westminster "Plucky" Purcell, a former college football star and sometime dope dealer who accidentally infiltrates a group of Catholic monks working as assassins for the Vatican. In so doing Plucky discovers a secret of monumental proportions dating to the very beginning of Christianity.