"People come to the Buddha to argue about self vs no-self doctrines and he repeatedly says that if you hold a view of the self as existing then you are in error, and that if you hold a view of the self as not existing you are in error."
Conversation
"Like Anicca, Anatta is pointing to the inverse of a specific mental event, Atta.... If we see it more like a noun it might be translated as ‘essence’ and if we translate it like a verb it might be translated as ‘to take/have control/ownership of.’"
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"Together we have the notion that if something has a real immutable character or ‘essence’ to it that we understand, then we can really control it and that this control won’t be subject to change. Anatta is to point out the error in this way of seeing things."
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"The point is to notice the mental event that represents objects or concept as though they could or should be inherently or essentially controllable/ownable."
( feels related to PCT stuff around controlling-in-the-PCT-sense things you can't control?)
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"Self-making, identification, separating self from world, and insight into such are very important for decreasing suffering. But rather than the philosophy that many/most delve into we have something comparatively simple, just the mental act of Atta applied to ourselves!"
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"So we come to believe that we have an essential nature that our dissatisfactions are accruing to. We believe that we ‘obviously’ have ownership over ourselves and that we ‘should’ be in control of ourselves. It’s just that this isn’t how things are"
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"What the Buddha is saying is that by default our way of viewing the world is that things should or could have a stable, unchanging essence, by understanding that essence we can thus control things and thereby bring about conditions that leave us satiated and full."
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"And that this way of viewing things unavoidably leads back to the suffering of emptiness, worthlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, because it was never aligned with how things actually work."
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"In short, that Nicca, Atta, and Sukha (the opposite of Dukkha) are maladaptive strategies. Not only do they not get us what we want but they maintain the conditions that lead us to keep using them."
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"Instead of seeing that the whole strategy is broken we keep trying to do it more skillfully, making finer and finer carvings to try to only cut out the bits of things that are stable, controllable, satisfying."
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"The best translation of Nibbana... IMO is ‘cooling down.’ If we think of the above strategies as a sort of tensing, a sort of effortful exercise, a sort of heating up if you will, then we can contrast it with untensing, non-efforting, cooling down and relaxing."
Replying to
"The simplest way to think of this is that Nibanna is the opposite of Tanha. Often translated as the mind ‘inclining towards relinquishment’ (of that which was grasped)."
( nibbana ~ expanded awareness ~ non-doing???)
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"The nature of this experience is relief... relief from compulsive grasping, the relief from wanting things to be other than they are, relief from the belief seemingly pressing down on us that we need to act just for things to be okay."
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"You currently experience obstacles in the course of pursuing some goal as stressful. In order to generate the necessary energy to overcome the stressor you generate a mental construct that causes you to suffer even more if you don’t overcome the stressor."
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"So when people imagine a decrease in mind created stress, they imagine only the secondary motivation-hack stress going away after which they will become useless in the face of any mild obstacles in life (just go with the flow, man!)."
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"We do have informal interviews with people in very high functioning roles such as doctors and engineers, who experienced major meditative milestones and had some concerns along these lines, only to go into work on Monday and be surprised that their performance was... fine."
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"In general the conflation of process with final result of a process rears its head all over the discourses. I think there's something going on with Pali grammar and intonation that was deeply lost on this front."
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"Upadana is a mental event that immediately follows Tanha. It can be thought of as the opposite of Equanimity. We instinctively pull or push away aspects of mental objects/representations that we do or don’t like."
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"We try to ascertain the aspects of objects that are stable, controllable, satisfying so that we can own, or associate with those aspects. We ignore or try to push away aspects of the objects that make us feel hopeless, helpless, worthless, empty."
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"If Upadana is a seed, then Sankharas are the warped houses we build out of the twisted lumber that grows.... To speak less metaphorically, a Sankhara can be thought of as a collection of mental events put into a story about how the world is."
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"An example would be thinking of things in terms of victims and oppressors. Thinking like this tends to make people angry, it tends to make them feel helpless, and it doesn’t tend to point them to causal levers they can pull to improve their situation."
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"Observing that they don’t seem to be able to help themselves, turning any resources offered into louder amplified shouts of how miserable everything is rather than improving things, other people tend to turn away from helping them. This further fuels the world view."
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"In Buddhist psychology, the victim-oppressor mindset is called the Hell Realm because it is considered a particularly nasty maladaptive strategy. Not only because it is miserable for people caught in it, but because it reinterprets signs explaining how to get out as tricks"
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"It is said that the most tragic aspect of the hell realm is that none of the gates are barred."
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"By default, the mind becomes stuck to mental representations that have more to do with our desires than how things really are. This leads to aversive experiences of emptiness, hopelessness, worthlessness, helplessness when we bump into evidence about how confused we are."
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"We come up with plans for avoiding these experiences, but these plans don’t really work, leading us to repeatedly encounter flashes of the undesired experiences. Our response is to try to push on the plans even harder, which doesn’t work."
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"But once we get wise to this process we can incline in the opposite direction, pushing less hard on experience. The relief from doing this wakes us up to the idea that we’ve been fueling the above vicious cycle and live in a house built from these sorts of knots of confusion."
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"Instead of trying to hold the house together with constant maintenance while simultaneously trying to find the exact right decorations, we start tearing down the house."
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"We discover that the very idea that we needed an unchanging, beautiful house that definitely belongs to us was just another of the confused knots. House building, maintenance, and dwelling becomes just another human activity that can be engaged with or not as is convenient."
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"As these activities were previously taking up huge amounts of our attention and resources, we find ourselves much more relaxed and able to enjoy things."
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"So when we engage with Anicca, we might think that in the long run of course things can’t stay stable. No, not in the long run! Right now in your direct experience images of words and mental sensations of meaning are flickering by. This is the Anicca to investigate!"
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"...we might think that there’s a certain sense in which of course things aren’t satisfying. No, not in a certain sense! Right now in your direct experience there are sensations related to aversive feeling tones that are being papered over. This is the Dukkha to investigate!"
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"...of course our sense of what we control isn’t always aligned with what we can actually control. No, not better calibrated models! Right now in your direct experience there is a sense of some sensations controlling other sensations. This is the Anatta to investigate!"
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i don't have a clear sense of what's going on in this last paragraph so i'll just screenshot the whole thing without highlighting or quoting any of it
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