OK lets deal with it or or you go hide in your shadows?!

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Why is it unbreakable? Maybe that stuff is just covering up the real you, your awareness.


This sounds like a lot of fundamentalist christian propoganda I used to hear.



The whole concept of nirvana is not to attain some super-high state.
It is to understand that the highs will always equal the lows, and thereby lose interest in the whole up and down merrygoround game.

Maybe. I highly doubt it, because I've formed my sense of identity through introspection - observing my own mind in action. But that's an arbitrary definition. Certainly if I was blinded (or had my senses messed up in some other way), I'd still be myself. If my brain was partially damaged (ruining my impulse control, etc.), it would still be the same consciousness looking out through my eyes. But with each removal of a layer of identity, I'd move further and further from my current definition of self, and I'm already fairly happy with it. A constant, unexplained and unquestioned emotional state like people describe nirvana, doesn't seem worth the effort it would take to attain it.



That part about the super-high state was a response to techstepgener8tion's comments about nirvana....

...but even if nirvana is a state of complete neutrality, peace or emptiness, that's still got no appeal. I don't see why becoming aware of the merrygoround game ought to lead to losing interest in it. I quite enjoy the ride. It's like the myth that an artist is overtaken by some divine subconscious muse during the creation of art, and if they try to rationally explain it, it "loses the magic" - when in fact, both perspectives can be grasped simultaneously without invalidating each other.

Oh, cool P
now things are picking up and getting interesting.
One of the the things I see most of all is that people seem to want to get closer to God to the point of losing them selves in (it?), as in wanting to be enveloped in this godly light/feelings of love, this would eventually lead to loss of individuality wishing to exist only for this one purpose, this seems to be a kind of wanting to become one with all things becoming no longer existent in/for ones self. to me this is not a good thing for part of the purpose I see for our existence is to exist as individuals becoming all that we can be within our selves.

Next I see the wish not to cease to exist, I have never seen any real solid proof that life after death actually exists passed our own fevered desires not to come to an eternal end.
I have done drugs before that made me see some really realistic illusions of the mind, so I know the power of the mind to an interesting degree, like if you believe hard/strong enough that you are being burned by a feather then you will develop a burn in that place.

No, I do not beleave in life after death my self.

So often people seem to just assume that our lives must have some sort of "purpose." Why is this necessary. Everything we have learned about evolution tells us that this is all just a cosmic accident. I tend to think that this is just what the universe does.

In the book "Rational Mysticism," John Horgan makes an interesting point about God being lonely/bored.(this is of course just an analogy)
He says that if you were stuck in a room all alone for long enough with a chess set, then you might begin to play against yourself. To do this you would need to sort of "hide from yourself" by playing from two different perspectives just to keep things interesting. Imagine if you were in the middle of such a game, and you became stumped. You might focus for a very long time on what move to make next in order to outwit your opponent.
In this analogy nirvana would equate to suddenly remembering that you are really not competing with anyone, that you are in fact both sides. This does not mean that you need to stop playing the game, after all what else is there to do?

As Pyraxis said,

I have played my self chess many times thank you.
but still, even as a fluke of nature that we exist still does not negate the importance of individuality and our existence. true the universe can and would exist without us, but if it was not for our perceptions of our selves and the universe then it would be an empty place indeed.

Last edited by galatea on 28 Sep 2005, 10:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't believe in Heaven and Hell in a literal sense, I think they are metaphors for different states of mind.

Hell, as far as I'm concerned, is the state we fall into after having to change our nature and accept aspects of humanity (cruelty, hate, etc) that we'd rather not both from others and then eventually we start to see it come from within ourselves. I have had some issues with OCD over the past 8 months or so, if that isn't hell I don't know what is.

Heaven is the state we try to achieve after we've had that fall from innocence: After learning to appease our new, somewhat frightening emotions and urges we are left with a pining for the state of mind of a child, wanting to bring back as much of the earlier feelings of cleanliness, carefreeness and kindness as possible. When a man has made peace withh his regrets toward his wrongdoings, is no longer haunted by the feelings of cruelty, etc. (from both within and from outside) and thinks he has done more good than bad in his life, he thinks he is going to Heaven (but from this metaphorical theory he really already is in 'Heaven')

Okay, I'm sorry if that was not expressed very well To summarize I'm just saying that Heaven and hell are just how close or far you feel from the innocence you had as a child.

PS: If you want a more literal answer: Back when I was still wondering about the idea of a literal Heaven (14yo) I imagined you would experience an infinte amount of new emotions that are inconcievable to human beings.

:lol:



This is the same as what John Horgan was saying about God being bored. If emptiness is so great then why all of this?
I don't think anyone can really answer this question.

Back on the topic of heaven, people often want to equate it with nirvana, but the buddhist cosmology also includes many heavens.
These are seen merely as the blessings that come as you do good instead of evil. These are often spoken of as though they are in fact part of an afterlife, but I believe in our current day it is more fruitful merely to think of them as states of mind. The appeal of heaven is mainly that of a clear conscience.

The way you have posed these questions initially indicates to me many common western ideas about religion that I have come to see as erroneous.

If you forget about eternal punishment, (which is fundamentally a scare tactic) then things make a lot more sense.
It is also helpful to see heaven as only something temporary or rather something that is dependent on causes.

Heaven is the group of "positive" effects (pleasure)which come as one is freed from the ego-self.
Hell is the negative effect (pain) experienced when one who is attached to the ego-self must watch it collapse.
Nirvana is the transcendence of both pleasure and pain.