The specific structure of existence is irrelevant to the fact that existence is.

It’s neither bleak or bright, happy or sad. Those concepts are in the realm of human thoughts, which are within the existence.

Thank you for clarifying your intent, and for bringing to me your position. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to connect with like minds. I would not reject the opportunity to make such connections. I was rejecting the suggestion (perhaps misperceived) that the content or creator of this website can fruitfully connect with a system of living.

Here is what I know (and ask not how I “know”): after an early point, withdrawal from knowledge contributes to, does not detract from, the experience of existence. I am not on a quest. I know my journey is over.

Less personally, I find that a crushing surfeit of words and rules is burying possibilities for people to come into contact with existence.

This, I believe, is true for movements, schools of thought, world views, philosophies, actions, organized systems, and ways of life. They are tools, just as thoughts are tools, just as images are tools, just as words are tools, to expose the eternal Riddle to those who miss it, which in the long run, is everyone.

Sometimes a lack of adoption in the face of all these categories is the more useful policy, but a lack of adoption of one thing is by nature the adoption of something else. There is no such thing as no perspective.

I don’t allow the Integral Institute to speak for me, nor I for it, but I do find its structure, and mainly the way it connects me to other people, to be useful. I think we will go a lot further by navigating this Mystery among fellow travelers than by attempting to go it alone. I’m not arguing for the adoption of any particular school of thought, mind you. I am simply saying that it may be useful for the purposes of exposing the immense implications of the idea that anything exists at all if we begin to examine where various schools of thought connect and come together on this matter.

Thank you for your reactions. It is always great to discover and connect with minds that share my state/stage; that was indeed partly the purpose of creating this website.

The implications of the mere act of “existing” are far more staggering and immense [...]

This phrase suggests to me that you feel exactly what I feel. You may be surprised to hear that another reader of this website said to me he was keenly aware of the experience I describe here and also had intentions of registering the domain isism.org before he discovered I’d already done it. I suspect the chain of thoughts leading from feeling what we feel to originating the term ‘isism’ has been repeated in at least a few other minds.

[...] you might be interested in some of the media integrallife.com has to offer, or in Ken Wilber’s AQAL philosophy, which inspired it.

I find this material interesting as a subject of examination. I don’t find it interesting as a candidate for adoption.

It has a similar bent as far as using philosophy as a life praxis, as something we experience and enact, rather than as something we simply talk about.

The words ‘philosophy’ and ‘enact’ are causing me to twitch in protest. Perhaps because they evoke an image of a world view, a prescription, a system. I propose none of these.

It is important to me that the material on this website be distinguished from larger bodies of knowledge, from organized systems of thought, from ways of life. It is important that none of these terms be legitimate descriptions of what I have presented here.

I initially came across this website in my search for a new “ism” word that could define a new avant-garde movement in art (including literature). It occurred to me that every conceivable word with any sort of broad connotation already had an “ism” attached to it in some form, and I also thought of the Rastafari philosophy being against “isms and schisms,” so I thought, why not turn the power of the “ism” back on itself, using the absurd nature of such a division to highlight the absurdity of the way words work within the human mind/brain to create a limited, binary construction of reality. The implications of the mere act of “existing” are far more staggering and immense than that; than everything words as divisions and definitions can describe. So I thought, “Isism,” and typed into Google, finding your website, and it seems your ideas on this are very much in line, in many important ways, with my own (and correct me if I’m wrong, there). This appears somewhat fortuitous.

wouldn’t it be more suitable to say stop existing and start living?

Truth is, everyone exists,

Everyone is conscious of their lives. Hardly anyone is conscious of existence. There is much to be felt here. But nobody can talk you into experiencing it. Take another read over everything I’ve written. Start here.

Stop living and start existing…….. This statement has been the source of my mental conflict for many days now. Am I just being simple? Or wouldn’t it be more suitable to say stop existing and start living?

Truth is, everyone exists, physically and mentally. Each person is present in this existence. Rotting in a nursing home, dying in a 9 to 5 job or sleeping your days away is not living, it is existing. Can someone offer justification for “Stop living and start existing.”???