Comment by Avshalom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Avshalom | Hacker News Reader

>And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it.

Or you can embrace that inherent unsatisfactoriness and affect real change in the world.

>Examine each of these goals and you will find they are superficial. You want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry, so what? Well if I eat, I won't be hungry and then I'll feel good. Ah ha! Feel good! Now there is a real item.

I'm pretty sure happiness is the superficial goal when it comes to food. Food can be a want yeah sure, but it's also a NEED.

In general I just can't abide by this sort of nihilism couched as noble anti-materialism.

If the truest expression of your philosophy leads to you sitting in a cave waiting to starve, freeze, dehydrate, or get eaten by wolves, you can just fuck off.

Apparently, you didn't understand the essay or the meditation. Meditation is not nihilism or anti-materialism. I am not sure how i can explain it to you to make it clear to you. I remember from a Buddhist saying that if your glass is full, there is nothing one can do about it. You need to remove something in your glass first before you can pour anything else into it. I feel like you are full of ignorance and false assumptions about meditation. Unless you become openminded and really try to understand what meditation is, nothing is going to change your mind.

You're really going to call me close minded in defense of an essay that gets all of five paragraphs in before calling my experiences and emotions fake?

An essay that dismisses the idea that there exists people comfortable with feeling the full range of human emotions, that dismisses civilization as a whole as self deception?

And you're sure you want to defend a Buddhist by telling me he's not anti-materialistic?

Also in response to that Buddhist saying? I choose to get a bigger glass.

When he says they're 'faking' it, it's the wrong word. I would say more that in a meditative mindset, the cognitive dissonance and sheer mental noise most people are dealing with on a minute-by-minute basis becomes very apparent

Until you've been able to get your own mind to quiet down, to get rid of the nagging voices and tugging emotions and distorting filters in your head, it's very very difficult to notice this

If you've never experienced this sort of total perspective shift, I recommend that you read a bit more and reconsider your objections. Meditation is not about freezing to death in a cave

Theravada Buddhism, and The Buddha's teachings actually stress that Buddhism is not nihilism or asceticism[1], and it not about materialism. Instead, Buddhism takes the Middle Path and does not encourage either extreme. Buddhism at its core is about realizing the transience of life. It is about realizing how we are all interconnected and how our reality is formed through our interactions with the world. We suffer because we are overly attached to transient objects and ideas. To be free of this suffering, we must realize the ultimate reality and nature of our world. We must fully let go of our attachments, and instead immerse ourselves in the reality that is now. The transient reality that we and others have created. The reality that is constantly shifting and constantly evolving.

[1] Much has been written about emptiness and nothingness in Buddhism, with one prominent example being Nagarjuna, whose argument was in summary: if you cannot be empty of an individual self, then that means you have an individual self. If you have an individual self, you exist regardless of causes. If you exist regardless of causes, then you affect anything since everything changes you in some way. Therefore, you are empty of any individual self, and instead only have a causal self.

I can understand your conclusion and sentiment. It is also a trap one can easily fall into during meditation, and can lead to both the extremes of anti-materialism and pure hedonism, as can be seen also in Buddhist (and other) cultures.

This is exactly why the Buddha and later teachers emphasize on taking the middle road. In the end, meditation is observing things as they are, and theoretically you could do this while being an anti-materialist or a hedonist. However, people usually become anti-materialists because they want to block out a large collection of 'distractions', such as pleasanties. They would always be practicing half: such distractions are also part of reality. Hedonists on the other hand, easily become attached to their wealth, making progress in meditation hard as well. So teachers always advise to take a balanced approach to meditation: do not become an ascete, do not indulge too much in wealth, do not be lazy, also avoid zealotry. The mind, and world as it is in the moment provides all the necessary circumstances to learn to understand the mind.

Then there is a practical dimension as well: a starving person is probably not able to meditate, a very wealthy person is probably not very willing to meditate. My personal interpretation of Buddhist ethics is, that it is aimed to create the circumstances for as many people as possible to reach enlightenment, and is not an absolute ethic system.

The point (AFAIK) of meditation is simply to become aware of yourself, what you really are and how you react and relate to the world around you. You learn to see how and why you react to the situations in your life.

It might or might not help you, many of those who meditate feel that it does. But you don't get magic powers or instant success in your life. It also doesn't prevent you from affecting real change in the world, but you don't necessarily have to be angry or unsatisfied to do so.

The goal isn't to sit in a cave and starve. In fact, the first buddha tried following all these "noble paths" and they didn't help him, except to discover the middle way.

A buddhist friend once said that if I needed buddhism in my life, it would come to me some day. I still haven't started practicing meditation, but maybe one of these days I'll get around to it. :)

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