This is why my Buddhist ass isn’t a very good Buddhist lol. I appreciate the parts that help get through life, but the whole thing falls apart at the random cruelty of the universe and the non-random cruelty of humanity.
Ascribing any purpose to all of the suffering/stress of living is, frankly, bullshit in any religion. I don’t blame people for clinging to karma as an idea to explain such things, any more than I blame the whole “God’s plan” principle when things are theistic more directly. People sometimes need a pretty lie to get through the next horrible thing.
But I don’t, and can’t buy into it. To believe that any structure or entity would do the things that happen just as natural phenomena would drive me insane trying to find a way to destroy it. That’s not covering the fact that humans do even worse things, regularly, and that’s an even bigger sign of any intelligence of the universe being a cruel and hopeless monster.
Arguably Siddharth’s concept of karma was more of a physics thing than a moral thing. He made friends with the low of society and talked smack about the priestly caste. Believing in rebirth and at the same time not accepting that punishment here is for sins of the last lifetime.
Karma is deed done. If I break your farm you don’t have food. That’s karma. That doesn’t mean I get punished for what I did that doesn’t mean you get a reward to make up for it.
Frankly I came to dislike the very idea of karma as i realised it’s basically just an excuse to keep people in their place, like “you deserve this because you were shitty in your previous life”. No i wasn’t.
Can you explain deeper about the Buddhism thing? Like I didn’t think it ascribed anything to anything. I thought enlightenment was realizing that things generally suck, but you can only enjoy the things that don’t suck, because the rest of it sucks. So live in the moment now, and enjoy what doesn’t suck while you can.
The principal comes down to the idea of impermanence.
Nothing is forever. Not the good, not the bad, not the meh. Change is impossible to prevent as well. At most, you delay change.
As you learn to stop holding on to any given moment, instead living it, the edges get worn away. This doesn’t mean that you don’t experience pain, stress, dissonance; you do. But you learn to accept them as temporary and abide as they flow away.
But, part of that is accepting that anything else will also flow away with time. That’s the part of it all that is hard, but makes it work as a way of getting through life. You start appreciating the good more when it’s there, it becomes more real, more memorable because instead of clinging to it, or dreading its loss, it becomes a sort of timeless experience.
The only truly eternal thing is change, so you accept change.
Believe it or not, once you internalize all of that, the bad things in life start to have their own beauty. I’m not saying they become pleasant; being stuck in traffic or having a limb amputated still suck hard. What happens is that such things become just a minor part of life. The threshold for where things go from unpleasant to traumatic shifts.
You learn to accept grief, in particular, and doing so helps reduce the suffering of it. You’ve lost something, probably something very important. But because you aren’t clinging to it, and let yourself really grieve fully, without trying to escape it or numb it, it becomes a form of grace.
Enlightenment is a different thing, tbh. That’s more about the spiritual side of things, and I don’t really hold on to that part. It’s window dressing for me.
This isn’t to say that you reach some magic place, btw. As long as you’re connected to life, there will be the reality that we are products of hormones and that’s all processed by a few pounds of electrified cells in our skulls. Traumas can happen, no matter how you look at them. You’re going to have “suffering” in the sense that the concept is used in Buddhism, no matter what. It’s a process, a way of moving through life, not a transformation into an internally isolated being that never feels.
Also, “suffering” within the Buddhist concept isn’t exactly the best word. It implies that the problems of life have to be major for it to relate. This isn’t the case; it really can be about the minor stresses too. Being stuck in traffic is stressful, it causes dissonance and pain. But, when viewed as impermanent, and lived, that stress is reduced and smoothed out. You accept it and just keep going without eating a hole in your gut.
Not OC, but an important tenet of Buddhism as you probably know is known as the “First Noble Truth,” which states that “life is suffering.” The second through fourth noble truths basically tell us to cease attachment and desire and to live a life based on “right living” to avoid the problems caused by attachment and suffering.
I think this is where OC has an issue and I agree because sometimes being a human sucks and you need some escapes from that suffering. I consider myself a Buddhist as well, and while many Buddhists will talk of the “middle way” between living a conventional life and living a life that tries to get rid of all attachments, I find myself mostly leaning toward the conventional ways of alleviating suffering like playing video games and smoking weed.
Tldr: living like a monk isn’t easy (or something I want) but the Buddhist worldview helps me make sense of the world so I use it.
The book of sixes (A.N. on the pali language English society) is a pretty painful read but it goes through it pretty well. Or you could start with the heart and diamond sutra
This is why my Buddhist ass isn’t a very good Buddhist lol. I appreciate the parts that help get through life, but the whole thing falls apart at the random cruelty of the universe and the non-random cruelty of humanity.
Ascribing any purpose to all of the suffering/stress of living is, frankly, bullshit in any religion. I don’t blame people for clinging to karma as an idea to explain such things, any more than I blame the whole “God’s plan” principle when things are theistic more directly. People sometimes need a pretty lie to get through the next horrible thing.
But I don’t, and can’t buy into it. To believe that any structure or entity would do the things that happen just as natural phenomena would drive me insane trying to find a way to destroy it. That’s not covering the fact that humans do even worse things, regularly, and that’s an even bigger sign of any intelligence of the universe being a cruel and hopeless monster.
Arguably Siddharth’s concept of karma was more of a physics thing than a moral thing. He made friends with the low of society and talked smack about the priestly caste. Believing in rebirth and at the same time not accepting that punishment here is for sins of the last lifetime.
Karma is deed done. If I break your farm you don’t have food. That’s karma. That doesn’t mean I get punished for what I did that doesn’t mean you get a reward to make up for it.
Frankly I came to dislike the very idea of karma as i realised it’s basically just an excuse to keep people in their place, like “you deserve this because you were shitty in your previous life”. No i wasn’t.
Can you explain deeper about the Buddhism thing? Like I didn’t think it ascribed anything to anything. I thought enlightenment was realizing that things generally suck, but you can only enjoy the things that don’t suck, because the rest of it sucks. So live in the moment now, and enjoy what doesn’t suck while you can.
I’m probably the wrong guy to ask, but I’ll try.
The principal comes down to the idea of impermanence.
Nothing is forever. Not the good, not the bad, not the meh. Change is impossible to prevent as well. At most, you delay change.
As you learn to stop holding on to any given moment, instead living it, the edges get worn away. This doesn’t mean that you don’t experience pain, stress, dissonance; you do. But you learn to accept them as temporary and abide as they flow away.
But, part of that is accepting that anything else will also flow away with time. That’s the part of it all that is hard, but makes it work as a way of getting through life. You start appreciating the good more when it’s there, it becomes more real, more memorable because instead of clinging to it, or dreading its loss, it becomes a sort of timeless experience.
The only truly eternal thing is change, so you accept change.
Believe it or not, once you internalize all of that, the bad things in life start to have their own beauty. I’m not saying they become pleasant; being stuck in traffic or having a limb amputated still suck hard. What happens is that such things become just a minor part of life. The threshold for where things go from unpleasant to traumatic shifts.
You learn to accept grief, in particular, and doing so helps reduce the suffering of it. You’ve lost something, probably something very important. But because you aren’t clinging to it, and let yourself really grieve fully, without trying to escape it or numb it, it becomes a form of grace.
Enlightenment is a different thing, tbh. That’s more about the spiritual side of things, and I don’t really hold on to that part. It’s window dressing for me.
This isn’t to say that you reach some magic place, btw. As long as you’re connected to life, there will be the reality that we are products of hormones and that’s all processed by a few pounds of electrified cells in our skulls. Traumas can happen, no matter how you look at them. You’re going to have “suffering” in the sense that the concept is used in Buddhism, no matter what. It’s a process, a way of moving through life, not a transformation into an internally isolated being that never feels.
Also, “suffering” within the Buddhist concept isn’t exactly the best word. It implies that the problems of life have to be major for it to relate. This isn’t the case; it really can be about the minor stresses too. Being stuck in traffic is stressful, it causes dissonance and pain. But, when viewed as impermanent, and lived, that stress is reduced and smoothed out. You accept it and just keep going without eating a hole in your gut.
Not OC, but an important tenet of Buddhism as you probably know is known as the “First Noble Truth,” which states that “life is suffering.” The second through fourth noble truths basically tell us to cease attachment and desire and to live a life based on “right living” to avoid the problems caused by attachment and suffering.
I think this is where OC has an issue and I agree because sometimes being a human sucks and you need some escapes from that suffering. I consider myself a Buddhist as well, and while many Buddhists will talk of the “middle way” between living a conventional life and living a life that tries to get rid of all attachments, I find myself mostly leaning toward the conventional ways of alleviating suffering like playing video games and smoking weed.
Tldr: living like a monk isn’t easy (or something I want) but the Buddhist worldview helps me make sense of the world so I use it.
Aw man, that sucks.
The book of sixes (A.N. on the pali language English society) is a pretty painful read but it goes through it pretty well. Or you could start with the heart and diamond sutra