And so it goes.

I'd completely forgotten about "The Secret". Some people did approach that like a religion -- one that says: Be nice, Acquire karma, Get rich.

I never read the book but I do remember hearing a lot about it. People were positively evangelical about it.

Hmmm...

It seems to me that resignation in the religious sense IS a kind of optimism in a keep calm and carry on sort of way.

The book I was reading just before this -- the one that led me to reread "Slaughterhouse Five" was "How Children Succeed". In that book they talk a lot about another book -- "Learned Optimism" -- and how educators are using some of the lessons in that book to overthrow the "cognitive hypothesis".

According to this view, optimism is something you can (and should) learn and that you can practice it.



I think that's a given -- at least to the religions adherents.

When I watch a small bird in flight or even picking around a garden patch in Spring/Summer, I truly feel my soul merging with this small creature and am reminded ( again ) that all life does indeed come from God.

Well Razz, seems us pantheists are in a very tiny minority

As apodictical existential pantheists my No. 2 Son and I share with you the idea of interconnectedness, that things are the way they are not because some supernatural power made them that way but because that's the way they have to be, recent studies broaching this idea, that all of the constants are interdependent

Creation being full of paradox and contradiction and besides being unnecessary if It All has forever existed in one form or another. That doesn't mean we have to reject the idea of God, only to recognize that Her existence or non- is a matter of semantics. Intuition says there's something more to The Megillah than meets the eye but doesn't clearly define what it is

Razzleg, my general orientation is similar to yours: I consider myself a pragmatist and perspectivist (in Nietzsche's sense) and consider Reality to be a unitarity process but not in the sense of Spinoza's notion that all things are simply logical entailments of other things. To me the interconnectedness/unity of phenomena is an empirically unsubstantiated but intuitively compelling reality, in no need of Spinozian "proofs." I confess to having this interpretation of experience as a form of "faith."

I think the word "interconnected" is a good one to describe what we observe as our reality.

reality is more its literal sense, present existence
u keep meanin ur wills so u dont perceive freely it stays relative as nothing then to see

what matter in existence is reality in all sense, bc existence is not what exist it is its fact that it exists so it stays, then it is forced to b real that is how reality is a kind of true connections with all things existence, which is more to one true reality of existence constancy in most objective identification of existence

i'm not trying to be a dick, but i'm getting confused by the complicated relationship between religion and optimism in this and your previous statements. Is optimism it's own religion, or is it an ur-religion that contributes to all?

i get how optimistic reflexes and view-points could be developed, and thus how "practice", or "teaching/learning", could be involved. Those habits can definitely be the subject of instruction and enforced in supervised practice.

Re: the "So it goes" theme, i agree, it's content is ambivalent, per the wonderful author's intent, so i don't want to argue about which one of us is right or wrong. But when I mentioned "resignation" i wasn't referencing that sort of "soldier on" mentality that takes as given that we live in the best of all possible worlds. I meant to reference the sort of resignation that surrenders to fatalism. Just as "So it goes" might imply: "and so we go on in the spirit of progress"; it might also imply: "history marches on, so keep up, if you want to survive." I do not regard the latter as optimistic. As a Tralfamadorian might say, "when eternity is a given, history is inevitable."