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.
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.