I love this thread.
@Deathtofatties:
Interesting video. It looks like Mr. Vikernes has found a way to do his own thing, and good for him. He at least comes across as sincere. He's not going to be invited to the celebrity parties in Beverly Hills or hosting conferences in UCLA about Buddhism.
But personally for me, his choice of lifestyle is not what I would want. It would be step backward for me, not forward. Country living may be fine for short periods of time, or as a temporary retreat, but I would go bloody crazy with that life.
We can't go back. We can't go back in time. We can't go back to the primitive "state of nature." If that ever did exist, which I doubt.
There is no "idealism" for me in the soil, in the mud, in the backbreaking work of agriculture. The hoe and the plow will not be glorified. They cannot be. Cannot.
No.
You can try. And you can almost succeed, like Mr. Thailand. But Nature will consume and destroy all those who try to sentimentalize her. Who try to glorify here. She will have none of it. She will eat such men alive.
Because you can't really idealize brute labor. Nature, for all its wonder, carries the seeds of just as much Evil as it carries Good. There is no Noble Savage. Nothing noble about him, really. Only savage.
No brotherhood between man and wild beast, either. Look into the eyes of a wild animal. And then you will know.
And this is what Thoreau, Rousseau, and our snake Mr. Thailand can never really comprehend.
I don't want to go back to "Nature." Because "Nature" never really left me.
There is no idealism in Nature. There is, under that placid surface of chirping birds and worms oozing their way through the soil, only a relentless struggle for existence.
And the only redeeming sentiment in this struggle is the knowledge that we--all of us--are part of that eternal One, that all-embracing One-ness, that is the pantheistic whole of the Universe. Nature, Soul, Intellect, and finally the One: the fount of all life.
It is this knowledge--the idea of the unity of all things--is what we should strive for.
I refuse to idealize Nature and the soil because I can't turn my back on civilization. When I'm here, I wish I was there. And when I'm there, I wish I was here. But there you have it. This is the way men are.
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