Nibbana-as-absence-of-experience is a radical idea to Western ears. It's much more intuitive for us to define nibbana as a kind of blissful experience that is outside of time and somehow doesn't include me, although some essence of my consciousness persists to experience it. 4/
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For me, though, there is unimaginable beauty in even the idea of letting go of experience. In fact, I find the idea of absolute peace so comforting that I am often at a loss to express my love affair to those who see it differently. 5/
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My goal here is not to convert, but to introduce this very traditional Buddhist understanding to those who may have grown up in a cultural milieux that fears nonexperience and demonizes traditional Buddhists as nihilists or life-haters, which is to miss the point entirely. 6/6
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Replying to @KennethFolk
For most people this would sound like some form of psychopathology. There is a moral dimension to death, and especially suicide, that's ingrained in our culture. From that view, an okay-ness with or outright embrace of non-experience necessarily implies that something is wrong.
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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist @KennethFolk
So the response to this will always be "what's wrong with your experience that you wouldn't mind not having it? Let's fix that!". Problem is, of course, that experience can't be "fixed".
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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
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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Replying to @KennethFolk
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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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
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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Replying to @KennethFolk @Failed_Buddhist
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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Replying to @fabianacecin @Failed_Buddhist
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.
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