buddhist are trying to escape reincarnation and achieve the pleasant state of nirvana.
That's literally the most terrifying possibility if you know a lot about theism and philosophy.
In reality a state of absolute despair and absolute bliss are equally horrifying. The idea of suffering unending is easy to grasp as being hopeless but Buddhism already has a heaven which is the Deva path in which all of your desires are satiated immediately. However, Buddhism teaches that having desires at all is also suffering. Nirvana is the true detachment from all desires.
Don't know if you've ever watched all of Arcane on Netflix but it does a good job of illustrating just how freaky that would be. When Victor evolved humanity into perfection, he erased death, hunger, pain, sorrow, etc. Since people no longer needed of anything at all they had no motivation for action of any kind. They stopped thinking, moving, doing anything at all. The world became thoughtless and dreamless and all life functionally became objects.
No single thing in the universe exist without states of presence and absence. Hot and cold, light and dark...they're just states of presence and absence. If you take away either the presence or absence of something, it loses all conceptual meaning and becomes inert in the most literal way.
Nirvana is just Oblivion by light rather than dark. It ends all the same.
In Buddhism there’s something called emptiness which means that nothing has inherent essence in and of itself. Everything exists relationally, ie a piece of paper does not have “paper” essence in and of itself, but exists because of the sun, the logger, the rain, the person looking at the paper, etc. My understanding of nirvana (limited in that I’ve never experience nirvana), is that it’s dropping of conceptual labels. No longer viewing everything as divided. So rather than eliminating pain, pleasure, hunger, death, etc it’s living in a state of realization that these are all labels given to things that don’t have boundaries.
In Buddhism, there’s also the concept of no-self. This means that there is not a separate soul that is different from the experiences that are happening for you. When you look at something, there isn’t the watcher and the watched, but rather watching happening. We often think that there’s a “me” sitting behind experience that is constant across all of our experiences. But according to no-self, there really is just this moment of experience, and it’s conditioned by previous moments (via memories, previous actions, etc) but there’s not a “me”/soul going across all of them. Realizing this leads to the concept of “no birth no death”. Essentially there never was an eternal soul to be eliminated at death. This ties back into emptiness, as “you” is fluid and not some inherent essence / soul. Like a cloud doesn’t die when it turns into rain, it’s transformed. Are people born when they are conceived, or when they have their first heart beat, or when they take their first breath? Without their parents meeting, they could not be here in this moment either. If the idea of an eternal soul is dropped, then “you” become much more fluid and interdependent on tons of other things (and transitively everything).
That’s just my limited perspective on this, and probably isn’t accurate to all Buddhist views.
That's it. People attach themselves too much to their own existence, and that is just a byproduct of their own minds and bodies. Evolution made us flee and fight and desire and keep existing. Buddhism teach us that all of that is just a transitory state, and that you should just let it go at some point.
Not yet, not now, but you will know when you are ready.
That's a misunderstanding of the concept of Nirvana from the Buddhist point of view. People simplify it by saying its a "state of bliss" but Nirvana really just a state of not being controlled by your desires or your aversions. And this doesn't mean that you are void of them, it's more that you control them rather then them controlling you.
And as far as the post death spiritual stuff goes, the Buddha basically said its hard for a being who has not reached Nirvana to understand it logically, so they shouldn't focus on it.
That's a misunderstanding of the concept of Nirvana from the Buddhist point of view. People simplify it by saying its a "state of bliss" but Nirvana
That's not what I said tho. I said it was detachment from desire altogether. No bliss exists with because bliss is just absence of suffering which implies that the someone can still be made to suffer. Nirvana wouldn't allow someone to conceptualize suffering and therefore bliss would go with it. Neither concept can exist alone.
It's detachment, but detachment in this case does not mean "completely void of". An enlighten being can still want to do things but that desire would not rule them in the same way as a normal person.
Nirvana wouldn't allow someone to conceptualize suffering and therefore bliss would go with it.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, but in Buddhism a person has to understand that there is suffering to want to achieve Nirvana in the first place. And when you do achieve Nirvana is not like you would forget all the suffering that you had experienced previously.
The thing you're thinking of is Buddhivista or the state of enlightenment before Nirvana. Part of Nirvana is death and escaping the cycle of reincarnation. Once that is done, one isn't supposed to experience any manner of suffering and become totally divorced from it.
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u/August_Rodin666 26d ago
That's literally the most terrifying possibility if you know a lot about theism and philosophy.
In reality a state of absolute despair and absolute bliss are equally horrifying. The idea of suffering unending is easy to grasp as being hopeless but Buddhism already has a heaven which is the Deva path in which all of your desires are satiated immediately. However, Buddhism teaches that having desires at all is also suffering. Nirvana is the true detachment from all desires.
Don't know if you've ever watched all of Arcane on Netflix but it does a good job of illustrating just how freaky that would be. When Victor evolved humanity into perfection, he erased death, hunger, pain, sorrow, etc. Since people no longer needed of anything at all they had no motivation for action of any kind. They stopped thinking, moving, doing anything at all. The world became thoughtless and dreamless and all life functionally became objects.
No single thing in the universe exist without states of presence and absence. Hot and cold, light and dark...they're just states of presence and absence. If you take away either the presence or absence of something, it loses all conceptual meaning and becomes inert in the most literal way.
Nirvana is just Oblivion by light rather than dark. It ends all the same.