Not all appearance is harmful illusion (art, mannerism, grooming), and not everything maps to the “true/false” duality. Money is real because we believe in it, reality itself partly depends on beliefs, making beliefs have actual effects on reality. this makes beliefs similar to placebo, and doubt a kind of nocebo. Social programming is one source of errors, but the brains prioritization of survival over well-being is another. You’re more likely to survive if you overestimate everything dangerous, negative and bad. But most actual malice and evil in the world is a result of weakness and misdirected, insatiable drives.
We think illusions are bad because the examples which come to mind are bad. We think lust and greed are bad for the same reason. We think the ego is bad for the same reason. This is just one of humanities many misunderstandings. Not even suffering is bad, not even power is bad. People like the Buddha just focused on the negative side of things, and decided to destroy them. But destroying Yin destroys Yang, the two are one. Did it not occur to him than anything which can be a minus can also be a plus? Caring deeply about morality or suffering is a symptom of bad health, they’re only at the forefront of naive worldviews.
I’ll warn you about deconstruction, it will result in nihilism. Spirituality should be construction. You need to consider the world to be big enough that you cannot wrap your mind around it. Like this, it regains its mystery, and you regain your faith that there’s more to life than just atoms. If you’re lucky, things can even be “sacred” again. For most zoo animals to be psychologically healthy, they need an enclosure which is bigger than what they can perceive all at once. I believe it’s the same for humans and their worldview.
I think it’s totally wrong to think that truth = virtue = spirituality = clear-sightedness. If your mental health has gotten worse as a result of rationalism, then more rationalism won’t get you out of it. You likely need immersion, and how can you have immersion without losing yourself? I can’t immerse myself much in videogames anymore because I know how they’re made, and because I look at them with a programmers eyes. Knowledge took my immersion away from me, and I had to take it back. Maturity, high standards, objectivity—these all come at a cost. As long as all your virtues point away from the subjective and towards the scientific, how can you give yourself what you need?
If you do train yourself to have higher self-awareness, then I recommend making it as automatic as possible (using system 1). Healthy spiritual people always seem to use system 1 the most, while rational people tend to use system 2. I think the story of the forbidden fruit is about the side-effects of humanity having evolved system 2.
Humanity created a tragic, dark and painful world. A negative delusion made real. You will feel better if you destroy it, but what then? Why not build a beautiful world instead? A positive delusion which manifest itself as real? This is possible as your mind isn’t zero-sum.
I don’t quite understand your comment. It sounds like you’re saying that spirituality is too scientific and not subjective enough? That’s not the kind of criticism I would have expected!
We think lust and greed are bad for the same reason. We think the ego is bad for the same reason.
I don’t! Nor do I think that power is bad. I do think that suffering is bad, though. (Or at least it’s bad in a conventional, if not ultimate sense.)
I’ll warn you about deconstruction, it will result in nihilism. Spirituality should be construction
I think you need both. If you can deconstruct yourself to some extent, then you can also reconstruct yourself more flexibly. Like a structure of Lego that you first break down back into individual Legos, and then put together in a new way.
I think spirituality and science (also rationality) go in different directions, but that the post seems to take a scientific or rational approach to spirituality.
I think “suffering is bad” is a naive belief, and that it gets in the way of understanding things. It’s like saying that hunger is bad, but you evolved hunger in order to search for food. Hunger is not bad—a lack of food is! But suffering is the same. We evolved the ability to suffer to help our survivability. It’s not inherent to life in any sense, it’s not even required. As far as I know, positive reinforcement achieves the same as negative reinforcement. Suffering is a motivator. If you move without suffering, you don’t need suffering. If you don’t do what you should, then life, or your own body, will force you. If you always get enough sleep then you won’t be tired, and the ability to get tired exist for your sake, not as an inhernt bad quality about existence, but suffering is the same.
The best way to solve a problem is sometimes to cease thinking that it’s a problem. You can also just accept that you think it’s a problem because you choose to do so, or because your nature demands it of you. If you think something is wrong with reality, then you create a world which you cannot love. It’s also silly to claim that reality is bad for logical, rational or objective reasons. You can only find human reasons—but this is merely opinion and whatever evolution did to you.
Deconstruction is easy, you can do it by searching, comparing, or analyzing. I think creation is harder, you have to create something from nothing but yourself. The page you linked says that “all phenomena are empty”, but that’s not a good belief to to stay at. It’s a belief you arrive at by error in the first place. If you subtract humanity from phenomena and then looking for human substance in them, you’ll find that there isn’t any. But why would there be? Substance and meaning has always been human things. “Meaning” exists as a concept in the first place because it’s a part of us, to say that the concept is false because we can’t find it outside of us is to forget that we created it in the first place. It would be silly to say that numbers don’t exist because we can’t find them outside of mathematics, right? Nothing exists inherently, that is, “universally”, outside of itself. Why would it? Doesn’t that contradict the very definition of existence? Even matter and energy doesn’t exist if you look for it outside of matter and energy. And yet, these people who claim that meaning doesn’t exist wants to convince me that suffering is real? The very concepts of “inherent” and “universal” are what’s wrong, they’re nonsense, just like “everlasting” was found to be nonsense. And if life looks like nonsense through them, you should say “the concepts are nonsense” and not “life is nonsense”. I have the same beef with absurdism. How can reality be absurd? If our model of the world is wrong, it’s not because the world made a mistake somewhere, that’s silly. It’s nonsense to claim that things which actually exist are “illusion” and that what doesn’t exist are “real”.
You can avoid all of these problems in the first place by making humanity the center of everything, which means regarding yourself as an axiom (I also recommend not reducing all of humanity itself to the word ‘convention’, lol). This makes suffering real again, but only because you choose to suffer, and only in situations which we, or our bodies, consider worthy of suffering (and only to motivate us to change the state that we find outselves to be in). Do you know of “spiritual” things outside of Buddhism by the way? These texts seem rather negative to me, I recommend finding something better
But suffering is the same. We evolved the ability to suffer to help our survivability. It’s not inherent to life in any sense, it’s not even required. As far as I know, positive reinforcement achieves the same as negative reinforcement. Suffering is a motivator.
It sounds to me like you’re talking about pain rather than suffering. In my experience, pain acts as a motivating factor even if it’s not associated with suffering. Indeed, suffering indicates that pain is being resisted, so the full signal is not being properly heard.
You can also just accept that you think it’s a problem because you choose to do so, or because your nature demands it of you. If you think something is wrong with reality, then you create a world which you cannot love.
I actually agree with this: it’s as you say, that it’s good to have signals for hunger, physical pain, etc.. Or even if it wasn’t good, those signals are still describing an aspect of reality whether one thinks that’s good or not.
Suffering, in my experience, is created when a part of the mind says that this is a sign of something being wrong with reality. It says: “it should not be so that I am hungry right now”. Or it says: “I reject the world in which I am in pain”. The conflict between a part of the mind that tries to reject the presence of the signal, and the part of the mind that is accurately perceiving reality and creating the signal, is what creates suffering. (I discussed a version of this in more detail here.)
Once you accept that the presence of the signal, once you accept that reality is the way it is, then suffering ceases and you are better able to do something about the signal. Part of the reason why I think suffering is bad, is that it involves a rejection of reality.
Meaning” exists as a concept in the first place because it’s a part of us, to say that the concept is false because we can’t find it outside of us is to forget that we created it in the first place. It would be silly to say that numbers don’t exist because we can’t find them outside of mathematics, right? Nothing exists inherently, that is, “universally”, outside of itself. Why would it?
I would phrase this as: meaning and numbers do not exist ultimately, but they do exist conventionally.
Do you know of “spiritual” things outside of Buddhism by the way?
See the list in my first message in the dialogue. Of the items on that list, only meditation was strongly associated with Buddhism in particular (and there seems to be a lot of convergent evolution around meditation, e.g. some Christian meditation seems to be basically doing the same thing, just conceptualized differently).
Lengthy reply—my bad. I won’t blame you if you just skim its parts.
Suffering is motivating too (a signal), it exists for a reason, not outside ourselves and not just to tease us. But in humans, there’s usually competing motivations. So suffering has to get worse until it reaches the threshold of the competing thing. Just like hunger has to get stronger than your laziness and desire not to cook before you eat. But if you ate before you got hungry, then you’d not have to feel hunger. It’s the same with suffering. But suffering is harder to resolve. Hunger points at food, you know what you need. But suffering points at something rather vague and abstract, maybe you even fall into the trap of thinking that money, fame, pretty things or a sixpack is what you need, and we know how that goes.
Suffering is created when we feel that something is wrong and ought to change. Sometimes we judge wrongly, and attempt to change something that we can’t or shouldn’t change. Other times we suffer because we aren’t doing what we should be doing. So while the solution is acceptance, you should accept the right thing. You shouldn’t accept that you’re hungry, you should accept that you’re a human and that humans need to eat.
I think suffering exist for the same reason that intelligence does. It’s premature adaptation/alignment. If you can image what will happen if you fall off a cliff, then you can die in this mental simulation without dying in real life. If you feel hunger before you die of starvation, then you can adapt to reality in time. If you suffer from anxiety, then either your anxiety is wrong, or you’re in actual danger in which case it’s a valuable signal. So you either solve what makes you anxious, or learn to accept that life is unpredictable. Either the signal is wrong or it’s right, in either case, it’s only a signal, and it only hurts because we could/would ignore it otherwise. We agree on a lot, but in my view, suffering isn’t the error, even though humans often suffer when there’s no reason to do so.
This entire system doesn’t always work very well. I think it may be because we’re not not suited for the modern society. But if you get rid of it, I think you should know what purpose it served so that you can achieve that purpose manually (live a good life without cravings to motivate you). We tend to hold on to suffering because we fear that we won’t achieve our goals if we relax, become content with things, and live in the moment. But I agree that this isn’t necessarily true. Perhaps “letting go” and “doing without doing” is correct. Maybe the whole concept of “trying” is a form of wireheading or goodharting, “do or do not, there is no try”.
>meaning and numbers do not exist ultimately
But nothing does? This concept of “Ultimately” contradicts the concept of “Exist”. If I hold a rock in my hand, then it exists because it’s right there. It doesn’t exist outside of itself. These buddhist criteria for something being real/being true/existing are a contradiction, but I think that such criteria are wrong (a contradiction can’t exactly be correct). It’s not that nothing exists, but that this definition of “exists” is nothing. It’s like if I said “This water isn’t water, it’s just hydrogen and oxygen, where is the real water?”. Said in another way, we discover that the map is wrong, but then then criticize the territory for not following our map.
>See the list in my first message in the dialogue
While these does point to something spiritual, I think they’re more religious than spiritual. And religion is about coherence in larger groups at the cost of the individual, while the spiritual is about the individual at the cost of coherence and conformity. So I think that most of the spirtual things you’re familiar with are too strongly colored by religious and moral thinking. If I start suggesting spiritual paths which are “beyond good and evil”, I also expect you to dismiss them as amoral/immoral, which you may think means “wrong” or “irrational”. Of all of the list, I think that “sacredness” is the most fitting, given that it’s not a concept with excessive gravity/graveness, like the fear of god as a form of sacredness. Spirituality is for free spirits, it’s a kind dancing. Religion feels like excessive, oppressive weight. Reading your post on sacredness, I don’t see any definitions of it that I’m familiar with. I think sacredness is something like the agreement that something has value. You treat sacred things with respect, as they’re not inherently sacred. If you start having rave parties in churches, the churches lose their air of sacredness. If you stop treating the king with respect, he loses his kingly aura. If we lose faith in money, it becomes worthless. So when you profane the sacred, you’re harming value itself. I think this is why old people hate it when the young generation doesn’t take things seriously, and isn’t the young generation much more nihilistic? The rate of mental illness is also much higher in the young, but the correlation might not be causation.
What I connect with spirituality is books like The Alchemist. This quote for instance “The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.” flips the meaning hiarchy from “what’s rare is valuable” to “what’s common is valuable”, a flip in perception which is like turning your environment into solid gold. It flips scarcity into abundance, the mundane into the special. I think spirituality is the music in the quote “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”. The gradient from [nihilism] to [the fear of god] looks like the gradient from [lightheartedness] to [seriousness], but I think they’re different. Caring does not necessitate suffering, and “not giving a fuck” is not a solution to suffering (and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a healthy one). You can be lighthearted in a reality which is thick with substance and meaning, I know because I’ve achieved this perception of the world before.
This seems like claims about reality? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it. I also think nihilistic readings of Buddhism are probably mistaken.
I think it’s claims about the human perception of reality. We tend to aim for understanding, but it’s the lack of understanding which makes understanding so seductive. Understanding something tends to kill it of its magic, and what’s understood feels much smaller. I think that a complete understanding the world in a reductionist and mechanical sense would make you too sober not just for magic, religion and philosophy, but also for scientism and spirituality as well. You can even disillusion yourself to social reality if you deconstruct that (not recommended)
I also make claims about the nature of truth in relation to humans. I don’t think our perceptions actually aim for truth, I don’t think that truth is comfortable like spirituality is comfortable, and I don’t think truth is all that useful to us personally (but it’s great for scientific advancement)
Those who philosophize and meditate on things tend to be high in neuroticism. You don’t meditate so hard on the nature of things if you’re thriving in life, you only start questioning things when they don’t work, so I think all philosophy has a negative bias, that philosophers tend to have bad mental health, and that higher states of awareness may be psychologically unhealthy. For instance, oversocialization makes us self-censor by keeping track of what other people would think of us. Freddie Boer writes this in one of his posts: “Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet”.
I don’t think he’s correct blaming the internet, I think it’s the WEIRD society, political correctness, population density, and increasing simulacra levels (and most of the internet is this sort of environment now). Materialism and science are partly to blame too. I see many, many people who take a turn for the worse when they turn around 20 years old, and stop being able to truly be themselves. The exaggerated inhibition turns permanent, sometimes remaining even when that person is truly alone.
The relation between the socialization process, subjectivity, objectivity, social reality and meta-perspectives is too complex to contemplate here and this reply is already rather long
Aduashanti/Jed McKenna/Chongyam Trungpa would all agree that real deal spirituality is highly uncomfortable. Waking up out of the shared dream state can be highly alienating, especially at first as you learn new ways to relate to others who are mostly paying attention to their own projections and not what is happening moment by moment. Projections that lead us in a circle back towards comfortable, familiar thoughts. Fortunately, it also gives us the tools for working effectively with those feelings of alienation and loneliness.
This alienation puts you out of calibration with other people. Why avoid overfitting to specific, local beliefs, in favor of more ‘general truths’, when all your time is spent doing specific, local things?
That said—I recommend doing this to the extent that other peoples beliefs are poisonous and negative. You should not calibrate yourself to sickness. But calibration towards psychological health puts you in tune with yourself, the moment, and lived experience. If it’s uncomfortable, then I don’t think you’re approaching a natural state nor eliminating internal conflicts, and I wouldn’t call this “spirituality” at all. Spirituality to me, is to let go, and realize that you weren’t holding on to anything to begin wtih, it kept itself in place all along. It’s also a frame of mind in which everything has depth and hidden meaning and wealth, which I think is advantageous even if it’s only “true” to the extent that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wouldn’t focus too much on Buddhism. What about tarot, yoga, magick, visualization, and “fun” worldviews like the hermetic principles? “Everything is mind” is like stoicism on steroids, it helps you take back the ability to create your own interpretations (an ability that many of us lose thanks to science) instead of searching for it in other peoples theories and opinions. Spirituality is about rooting yourself in yourself, and expanding your own inner world. Science is about approximating something else at the cost of yourself, and reducing your inner world to rules and sterile/inert/objective models. Doubt leads to bad mental health, which is why belief, faith and confidence are so important. Whether these beliefs are actually true seems less important to me.
By the way, are you sure this alienation is necessary? Even if you can’t connect with somebody as you don’t share words, beliefs or ideas, I find that body language and more fundamental things still get through. If you have a pet, I bet you have made some sort of connection with it
Me, I’ve found that I connect much more readily with animals than I do with humans. I went into a local shop the other day, and one of the owner’s dogs approached me, so I let her sniff my hand. A few minutes later I was petting her head. He was utterly beside himself, said she was a rescue from an abusive owner, and NOBODY other than himself could touch her like that.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in. I’ve also found that my energies put people off, incl. women I’ve tried to date; one, a coworker who developed a weird kind of crush on me, couldn’t work with me anymore because the energies were feeding back on her and making her sick.
Tl;dr trying to engage on that level with others usually proves futile. Animals don’t have all that egotistical crap blocking their spiritual arteries I guess. It’s more fundamental than just a mere difference in beliefs or a desire to socialize, or not.
That’s good to hear! But it’s a shame that it puts you out of sync with people. If it’s all people, maybe your environment is not very good? Maybe the rat race dominates? I can ‘vibe’ with people, which I think is a form of synchronization or communication on a deeper level than the verbal.
Getting close to people like this requires that both of us have some sort of inner peace, calm or firmness. Too much noise, anxiety, alertness, doubt and mistrust kills it. The cognitive overhead of internal conflict and noise is enough to distract us. Even a headache (which also hijacks your attention) can prevent ‘immersion’ in the moment / the situation / the people around you.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in
Excellent put! This “drawing in” is a form of theft/greed anyway. It puts a burden on others. It tries to control things rather than letting them flow naturally.
It might be “trying” which is interfering with “doing”, or “the ego” which is interfering with “letting go”, but my favorite perspective here is that it’s system 2 interfering with system 1. Things which come naturally are graceful, and when we try too hard to control everything ourselves, things become stiff and awkward. Let me show you what I mean: you’re now breathing manually.
I am retired more or less, but aside from a bunch of financial loose ends that my late mother bequeated myself and my sister, no racing rats here. [Sunsets maybe, in my car] I have connected successfully with fellow wildlife volunteers and plan to start doing that again later in the spring (the key for me was birds and nature—a close encounter with a peregrine falcon got my all turned around, had 3 more subsequently, one where I could have reached out and touched it as it flew past me on a highrise balcony).
I like the “theft” angle, because in my case I know that is exactly what it was, when I was severely depressed. “Oh pity poor little old woe is me!”
That looks like a moral statement? Like you consider knowledge a virtue. I feel like this association has been dominant in the western world since Plato, but despite this generation being the least scientifically ignorant generation so far, hasn’t our conscience gotten worse? We only feel more ignorant, more imperfect.
I recommend a naturalistic approach to life. If even the best of us is ignorant, and humanity has flourished like this anyway, then from where do we draw the conclusion that ignorance is harmful? Or that we should feel bad about it? Perhaps holding ourselves to unreachable ideals might cause more harm than good instead? I think the judgement “knowledge = good” comes from an anxious state of mind wishing for more certainty and control, rather than being a logical conclusion to anything. And of course, it’s a popular belief that being humble is good, but I think this is mostly just a “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” conformity thing. Identifying too much with ones knowledge is bad, though, as it makes one afraid of being wrong and asking questions.
? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it.
This seems like quite a western modern take on buddhism
it feels hard to read the original buddha this way
i just don’t see the buddha making any reference to nervous systems or mammalians when he talks about suffering(not even some sort of pali equivalent that points to the materialist understanding at the time)
Not all appearance is harmful illusion (art, mannerism, grooming), and not everything maps to the “true/false” duality. Money is real because we believe in it, reality itself partly depends on beliefs, making beliefs have actual effects on reality. this makes beliefs similar to placebo, and doubt a kind of nocebo.
Social programming is one source of errors, but the brains prioritization of survival over well-being is another. You’re more likely to survive if you overestimate everything dangerous, negative and bad.
But most actual malice and evil in the world is a result of weakness and misdirected, insatiable drives.
We think illusions are bad because the examples which come to mind are bad. We think lust and greed are bad for the same reason. We think the ego is bad for the same reason. This is just one of humanities many misunderstandings. Not even suffering is bad, not even power is bad. People like the Buddha just focused on the negative side of things, and decided to destroy them. But destroying Yin destroys Yang, the two are one. Did it not occur to him than anything which can be a minus can also be a plus? Caring deeply about morality or suffering is a symptom of bad health, they’re only at the forefront of naive worldviews.
I’ll warn you about deconstruction, it will result in nihilism. Spirituality should be construction. You need to consider the world to be big enough that you cannot wrap your mind around it. Like this, it regains its mystery, and you regain your faith that there’s more to life than just atoms. If you’re lucky, things can even be “sacred” again.
For most zoo animals to be psychologically healthy, they need an enclosure which is bigger than what they can perceive all at once. I believe it’s the same for humans and their worldview.
I think it’s totally wrong to think that truth = virtue = spirituality = clear-sightedness. If your mental health has gotten worse as a result of rationalism, then more rationalism won’t get you out of it. You likely need immersion, and how can you have immersion without losing yourself? I can’t immerse myself much in videogames anymore because I know how they’re made, and because I look at them with a programmers eyes. Knowledge took my immersion away from me, and I had to take it back. Maturity, high standards, objectivity—these all come at a cost. As long as all your virtues point away from the subjective and towards the scientific, how can you give yourself what you need?
If you do train yourself to have higher self-awareness, then I recommend making it as automatic as possible (using system 1). Healthy spiritual people always seem to use system 1 the most, while rational people tend to use system 2. I think the story of the forbidden fruit is about the side-effects of humanity having evolved system 2.
Humanity created a tragic, dark and painful world. A negative delusion made real. You will feel better if you destroy it, but what then? Why not build a beautiful world instead? A positive delusion which manifest itself as real? This is possible as your mind isn’t zero-sum.
I don’t quite understand your comment. It sounds like you’re saying that spirituality is too scientific and not subjective enough? That’s not the kind of criticism I would have expected!
I don’t! Nor do I think that power is bad. I do think that suffering is bad, though. (Or at least it’s bad in a conventional, if not ultimate sense.)
I think you need both. If you can deconstruct yourself to some extent, then you can also reconstruct yourself more flexibly. Like a structure of Lego that you first break down back into individual Legos, and then put together in a new way.
I think spirituality and science (also rationality) go in different directions, but that the post seems to take a scientific or rational approach to spirituality.
I think “suffering is bad” is a naive belief, and that it gets in the way of understanding things. It’s like saying that hunger is bad, but you evolved hunger in order to search for food. Hunger is not bad—a lack of food is! But suffering is the same. We evolved the ability to suffer to help our survivability. It’s not inherent to life in any sense, it’s not even required. As far as I know, positive reinforcement achieves the same as negative reinforcement. Suffering is a motivator. If you move without suffering, you don’t need suffering. If you don’t do what you should, then life, or your own body, will force you. If you always get enough sleep then you won’t be tired, and the ability to get tired exist for your sake, not as an inhernt bad quality about existence, but suffering is the same.
The best way to solve a problem is sometimes to cease thinking that it’s a problem. You can also just accept that you think it’s a problem because you choose to do so, or because your nature demands it of you. If you think something is wrong with reality, then you create a world which you cannot love. It’s also silly to claim that reality is bad for logical, rational or objective reasons. You can only find human reasons—but this is merely opinion and whatever evolution did to you.
Deconstruction is easy, you can do it by searching, comparing, or analyzing. I think creation is harder, you have to create something from nothing but yourself. The page you linked says that “all phenomena are empty”, but that’s not a good belief to to stay at. It’s a belief you arrive at by error in the first place. If you subtract humanity from phenomena and then looking for human substance in them, you’ll find that there isn’t any. But why would there be? Substance and meaning has always been human things. “Meaning” exists as a concept in the first place because it’s a part of us, to say that the concept is false because we can’t find it outside of us is to forget that we created it in the first place. It would be silly to say that numbers don’t exist because we can’t find them outside of mathematics, right? Nothing exists inherently, that is, “universally”, outside of itself. Why would it? Doesn’t that contradict the very definition of existence? Even matter and energy doesn’t exist if you look for it outside of matter and energy. And yet, these people who claim that meaning doesn’t exist wants to convince me that suffering is real? The very concepts of “inherent” and “universal” are what’s wrong, they’re nonsense, just like “everlasting” was found to be nonsense. And if life looks like nonsense through them, you should say “the concepts are nonsense” and not “life is nonsense”. I have the same beef with absurdism. How can reality be absurd? If our model of the world is wrong, it’s not because the world made a mistake somewhere, that’s silly. It’s nonsense to claim that things which actually exist are “illusion” and that what doesn’t exist are “real”.
You can avoid all of these problems in the first place by making humanity the center of everything, which means regarding yourself as an axiom (I also recommend not reducing all of humanity itself to the word ‘convention’, lol). This makes suffering real again, but only because you choose to suffer, and only in situations which we, or our bodies, consider worthy of suffering (and only to motivate us to change the state that we find outselves to be in). Do you know of “spiritual” things outside of Buddhism by the way? These texts seem rather negative to me, I recommend finding something better
It sounds to me like you’re talking about pain rather than suffering. In my experience, pain acts as a motivating factor even if it’s not associated with suffering. Indeed, suffering indicates that pain is being resisted, so the full signal is not being properly heard.
I actually agree with this: it’s as you say, that it’s good to have signals for hunger, physical pain, etc.. Or even if it wasn’t good, those signals are still describing an aspect of reality whether one thinks that’s good or not.
Suffering, in my experience, is created when a part of the mind says that this is a sign of something being wrong with reality. It says: “it should not be so that I am hungry right now”. Or it says: “I reject the world in which I am in pain”. The conflict between a part of the mind that tries to reject the presence of the signal, and the part of the mind that is accurately perceiving reality and creating the signal, is what creates suffering. (I discussed a version of this in more detail here.)
Once you accept that the presence of the signal, once you accept that reality is the way it is, then suffering ceases and you are better able to do something about the signal. Part of the reason why I think suffering is bad, is that it involves a rejection of reality.
I would phrase this as: meaning and numbers do not exist ultimately, but they do exist conventionally.
See the list in my first message in the dialogue. Of the items on that list, only meditation was strongly associated with Buddhism in particular (and there seems to be a lot of convergent evolution around meditation, e.g. some Christian meditation seems to be basically doing the same thing, just conceptualized differently).
Lengthy reply—my bad. I won’t blame you if you just skim its parts.
Suffering is motivating too (a signal), it exists for a reason, not outside ourselves and not just to tease us. But in humans, there’s usually competing motivations. So suffering has to get worse until it reaches the threshold of the competing thing. Just like hunger has to get stronger than your laziness and desire not to cook before you eat. But if you ate before you got hungry, then you’d not have to feel hunger. It’s the same with suffering. But suffering is harder to resolve. Hunger points at food, you know what you need. But suffering points at something rather vague and abstract, maybe you even fall into the trap of thinking that money, fame, pretty things or a sixpack is what you need, and we know how that goes.
Suffering is created when we feel that something is wrong and ought to change. Sometimes we judge wrongly, and attempt to change something that we can’t or shouldn’t change. Other times we suffer because we aren’t doing what we should be doing. So while the solution is acceptance, you should accept the right thing. You shouldn’t accept that you’re hungry, you should accept that you’re a human and that humans need to eat.
I think suffering exist for the same reason that intelligence does. It’s premature adaptation/alignment. If you can image what will happen if you fall off a cliff, then you can die in this mental simulation without dying in real life. If you feel hunger before you die of starvation, then you can adapt to reality in time. If you suffer from anxiety, then either your anxiety is wrong, or you’re in actual danger in which case it’s a valuable signal. So you either solve what makes you anxious, or learn to accept that life is unpredictable. Either the signal is wrong or it’s right, in either case, it’s only a signal, and it only hurts because we could/would ignore it otherwise. We agree on a lot, but in my view, suffering isn’t the error, even though humans often suffer when there’s no reason to do so.
This entire system doesn’t always work very well. I think it may be because we’re not not suited for the modern society. But if you get rid of it, I think you should know what purpose it served so that you can achieve that purpose manually (live a good life without cravings to motivate you). We tend to hold on to suffering because we fear that we won’t achieve our goals if we relax, become content with things, and live in the moment. But I agree that this isn’t necessarily true. Perhaps “letting go” and “doing without doing” is correct. Maybe the whole concept of “trying” is a form of wireheading or goodharting, “do or do not, there is no try”.
>meaning and numbers do not exist ultimately
But nothing does? This concept of “Ultimately” contradicts the concept of “Exist”. If I hold a rock in my hand, then it exists because it’s right there. It doesn’t exist outside of itself. These buddhist criteria for something being real/being true/existing are a contradiction, but I think that such criteria are wrong (a contradiction can’t exactly be correct). It’s not that nothing exists, but that this definition of “exists” is nothing. It’s like if I said “This water isn’t water, it’s just hydrogen and oxygen, where is the real water?”. Said in another way, we discover that the map is wrong, but then then criticize the territory for not following our map.
>See the list in my first message in the dialogue
While these does point to something spiritual, I think they’re more religious than spiritual. And religion is about coherence in larger groups at the cost of the individual, while the spiritual is about the individual at the cost of coherence and conformity. So I think that most of the spirtual things you’re familiar with are too strongly colored by religious and moral thinking. If I start suggesting spiritual paths which are “beyond good and evil”, I also expect you to dismiss them as amoral/immoral, which you may think means “wrong” or “irrational”.
Of all of the list, I think that “sacredness” is the most fitting, given that it’s not a concept with excessive gravity/graveness, like the fear of god as a form of sacredness. Spirituality is for free spirits, it’s a kind dancing. Religion feels like excessive, oppressive weight.
Reading your post on sacredness, I don’t see any definitions of it that I’m familiar with. I think sacredness is something like the agreement that something has value. You treat sacred things with respect, as they’re not inherently sacred. If you start having rave parties in churches, the churches lose their air of sacredness. If you stop treating the king with respect, he loses his kingly aura. If we lose faith in money, it becomes worthless. So when you profane the sacred, you’re harming value itself. I think this is why old people hate it when the young generation doesn’t take things seriously, and isn’t the young generation much more nihilistic? The rate of mental illness is also much higher in the young, but the correlation might not be causation.
What I connect with spirituality is books like The Alchemist. This quote for instance “The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.” flips the meaning hiarchy from “what’s rare is valuable” to “what’s common is valuable”, a flip in perception which is like turning your environment into solid gold. It flips scarcity into abundance, the mundane into the special.
I think spirituality is the music in the quote “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”.
The gradient from [nihilism] to [the fear of god] looks like the gradient from [lightheartedness] to [seriousness], but I think they’re different. Caring does not necessitate suffering, and “not giving a fuck” is not a solution to suffering (and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a healthy one). You can be lighthearted in a reality which is thick with substance and meaning, I know because I’ve achieved this perception of the world before.
This seems like claims about reality? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it. I also think nihilistic readings of Buddhism are probably mistaken.
I think it’s claims about the human perception of reality. We tend to aim for understanding, but it’s the lack of understanding which makes understanding so seductive. Understanding something tends to kill it of its magic, and what’s understood feels much smaller. I think that a complete understanding the world in a reductionist and mechanical sense would make you too sober not just for magic, religion and philosophy, but also for scientism and spirituality as well. You can even disillusion yourself to social reality if you deconstruct that (not recommended)
I also make claims about the nature of truth in relation to humans. I don’t think our perceptions actually aim for truth, I don’t think that truth is comfortable like spirituality is comfortable, and I don’t think truth is all that useful to us personally (but it’s great for scientific advancement)
Those who philosophize and meditate on things tend to be high in neuroticism. You don’t meditate so hard on the nature of things if you’re thriving in life, you only start questioning things when they don’t work, so I think all philosophy has a negative bias, that philosophers tend to have bad mental health, and that higher states of awareness may be psychologically unhealthy. For instance, oversocialization makes us self-censor by keeping track of what other people would think of us. Freddie Boer writes this in one of his posts: “Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet”.
I don’t think he’s correct blaming the internet, I think it’s the WEIRD society, political correctness, population density, and increasing simulacra levels (and most of the internet is this sort of environment now). Materialism and science are partly to blame too. I see many, many people who take a turn for the worse when they turn around 20 years old, and stop being able to truly be themselves. The exaggerated inhibition turns permanent, sometimes remaining even when that person is truly alone.
The relation between the socialization process, subjectivity, objectivity, social reality and meta-perspectives is too complex to contemplate here and this reply is already rather long
Aduashanti/Jed McKenna/Chongyam Trungpa would all agree that real deal spirituality is highly uncomfortable. Waking up out of the shared dream state can be highly alienating, especially at first as you learn new ways to relate to others who are mostly paying attention to their own projections and not what is happening moment by moment. Projections that lead us in a circle back towards comfortable, familiar thoughts. Fortunately, it also gives us the tools for working effectively with those feelings of alienation and loneliness.
This alienation puts you out of calibration with other people. Why avoid overfitting to specific, local beliefs, in favor of more ‘general truths’, when all your time is spent doing specific, local things?
That said—I recommend doing this to the extent that other peoples beliefs are poisonous and negative. You should not calibrate yourself to sickness. But calibration towards psychological health puts you in tune with yourself, the moment, and lived experience. If it’s uncomfortable, then I don’t think you’re approaching a natural state nor eliminating internal conflicts, and I wouldn’t call this “spirituality” at all. Spirituality to me, is to let go, and realize that you weren’t holding on to anything to begin wtih, it kept itself in place all along. It’s also a frame of mind in which everything has depth and hidden meaning and wealth, which I think is advantageous even if it’s only “true” to the extent that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wouldn’t focus too much on Buddhism. What about tarot, yoga, magick, visualization, and “fun” worldviews like the hermetic principles? “Everything is mind” is like stoicism on steroids, it helps you take back the ability to create your own interpretations (an ability that many of us lose thanks to science) instead of searching for it in other peoples theories and opinions. Spirituality is about rooting yourself in yourself, and expanding your own inner world. Science is about approximating something else at the cost of yourself, and reducing your inner world to rules and sterile/inert/objective models. Doubt leads to bad mental health, which is why belief, faith and confidence are so important. Whether these beliefs are actually true seems less important to me.
By the way, are you sure this alienation is necessary? Even if you can’t connect with somebody as you don’t share words, beliefs or ideas, I find that body language and more fundamental things still get through. If you have a pet, I bet you have made some sort of connection with it
Me, I’ve found that I connect much more readily with animals than I do with humans. I went into a local shop the other day, and one of the owner’s dogs approached me, so I let her sniff my hand. A few minutes later I was petting her head. He was utterly beside himself, said she was a rescue from an abusive owner, and NOBODY other than himself could touch her like that.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in. I’ve also found that my energies put people off, incl. women I’ve tried to date; one, a coworker who developed a weird kind of crush on me, couldn’t work with me anymore because the energies were feeding back on her and making her sick.
Tl;dr trying to engage on that level with others usually proves futile. Animals don’t have all that egotistical crap blocking their spiritual arteries I guess. It’s more fundamental than just a mere difference in beliefs or a desire to socialize, or not.
That’s good to hear! But it’s a shame that it puts you out of sync with people. If it’s all people, maybe your environment is not very good? Maybe the rat race dominates? I can ‘vibe’ with people, which I think is a form of synchronization or communication on a deeper level than the verbal.
Getting close to people like this requires that both of us have some sort of inner peace, calm or firmness. Too much noise, anxiety, alertness, doubt and mistrust kills it. The cognitive overhead of internal conflict and noise is enough to distract us. Even a headache (which also hijacks your attention) can prevent ‘immersion’ in the moment / the situation / the people around you.
Excellent put! This “drawing in” is a form of theft/greed anyway. It puts a burden on others. It tries to control things rather than letting them flow naturally.
It might be “trying” which is interfering with “doing”, or “the ego” which is interfering with “letting go”, but my favorite perspective here is that it’s system 2 interfering with system 1. Things which come naturally are graceful, and when we try too hard to control everything ourselves, things become stiff and awkward. Let me show you what I mean: you’re now breathing manually.
I am retired more or less, but aside from a bunch of financial loose ends that my late mother bequeated myself and my sister, no racing rats here. [Sunsets maybe, in my car] I have connected successfully with fellow wildlife volunteers and plan to start doing that again later in the spring (the key for me was birds and nature—a close encounter with a peregrine falcon got my all turned around, had 3 more subsequently, one where I could have reached out and touched it as it flew past me on a highrise balcony).
I like the “theft” angle, because in my case I know that is exactly what it was, when I was severely depressed. “Oh pity poor little old woe is me!”
I find looking directly at my own ignorance often uncomfortable but worthwhile.
That looks like a moral statement? Like you consider knowledge a virtue. I feel like this association has been dominant in the western world since Plato, but despite this generation being the least scientifically ignorant generation so far, hasn’t our conscience gotten worse? We only feel more ignorant, more imperfect.
I recommend a naturalistic approach to life. If even the best of us is ignorant, and humanity has flourished like this anyway, then from where do we draw the conclusion that ignorance is harmful? Or that we should feel bad about it? Perhaps holding ourselves to unreachable ideals might cause more harm than good instead? I think the judgement “knowledge = good” comes from an anxious state of mind wishing for more certainty and control, rather than being a logical conclusion to anything. And of course, it’s a popular belief that being humble is good, but I think this is mostly just a “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” conformity thing. Identifying too much with ones knowledge is bad, though, as it makes one afraid of being wrong and asking questions.
This seems like quite a western modern take on buddhism
it feels hard to read the original buddha this way
Note I didn’t say ‘the claims of buddhism’ as a whole.
i just don’t see the buddha making any reference to nervous systems or mammalians when he talks about suffering(not even some sort of pali equivalent that points to the materialist understanding at the time)