"Supposing it were possible to have deep, sound sleep forever. Would you want it? If one does not like the kind of happiness that comes with sound sleep, it may be difficult to have a preference for nibbāna." 1/
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Well put. Probably not a coincidence that The First Noble Truth is The Truth of Dukkha. When experience is itself the cause of suffering, the end of suffering is necessarily the end of experience. Pretty straightforward, really. What a world, what a world!
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Maybe that's what the Buddha was saying, along with a bonus teaching - "while experience is still there, here are some ways to mitigate and deal skillfully with suffering".
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That's how I see it, yes. Big idea was "don't get born and you'll be fine." Bonus teaching was "here's how to mitigate the disaster you currently find yourself in."
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Maybe somewhere in the universal mind we are causing these "births" we see "here," in the same sense that you go to the psychologist to figure out that you're in fact the same person that's causing and suffering some sort of misery. And since it's you doing it, you can change it.
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I doubt we have any agency at all. We can pretend to change it, and we should.
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All we can really do is hope that causes and conditions come together in a configuration that nudges us toward awakening. There's no agency in the sense that we like to believe.
End of conversation
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