What if we think structurally (as in structuralism)? So joy has no intrinsic meaning, it's only significant as part of a system of differences and oppositions that is the material world? And Buddhism is about transcending that system of differences entirely. Have I got that right?
And if I have...what happens if you try to transcend the very system of concepts and methods of transcendence that is Buddhism???
I'll track down the link if anyone is interested, but I've seen a plausible idea that bliss experiences are a matter of contrast with previous pain, and clearing away bad habits defaults to neutral.
Hyperthymic individuals exist. They feel great in general, every day, from waking up to going to bed, minus rare events. Depressed individuals also exist, for which most things & situations are bad. Depression seems to also lower the threshold for pain & more general states of body discomfort. The existence of these kinds of individuals & their lives goes against the theory you mention. Also there are people who had pretty bad lives until they started practicing various things (various types of meditation mostly) and then their lives changed for the better, and robustly so. They don’t need to take a bat and break their foot every once in a while to be able to experience elated pleasurable states. Contrast DOES matter (getting a reward while expecting punishment based on your past experience will heighten the valence) but it doesn’t sit at the fundamental explanatory level of pleasurable experience. Beings that only live happy blissful lives (without ever knowing what we would call pain or suffering) are possible.
My wife has remarked to me more than once on my regularly being cheerful and happy (note that these aren't the same thing); I experience occasional distress, usually from external causes, but day in and day out I'm in a good mood, or so it seems to her. From my own experience I think I have to confess that that's true. I can remember that in my teens I was frustrated much of the time and often angry, but those days are long past. And I could imagine that this is partly a reflection of my avoiding doing things that make life more difficult for me, or to my systematic egoism (as Bernard Shaw said, "You had better take care to get what you like, or you shall have to like what you get"), but really I think those are secondary to a fortunate basic temperament that I can't take credit for, or only a fraction of the credit. I respect Buddhism as being more like a science than a religion, but I think its view of essential reality just has to be mistaken.
About hyperthymic individuals, it doesn’t matter that much what other people say about you, and it doesn’t matter what ideas you have about what’s a good life, what matters is how you actually feel subjectively, how much mental energy, clarity & positivity you have. I’ve had brief drug-induced states in which i was able to confront all sorts of nasty aspects of life (personal & general) without feeling miserable. In fact i was feeling great. A hyperthymic psyche is closer to this rather than having good life circumstances, but as a robust trait, not a passing exogenously induced state.
About Buddhism being mistaken in its view of Reality. There are ways of exploring Reality that are revelatory, that keep disclosing new subjective ways of seeing & relating to things. And there are ways of exploring that aspire to objectivity, ways which collapse reality to abstraction.
The former has produced a flurry of bullshit. The latter has proved immensely successful in augmenting our agency at the cost of reducing the agent to a mechanical skeleton, dissolving its warm passionate flesh into diagram.
The former is empirical & systematic but it’s more akin to an art form that directly concerns the 1st person subjective medium. One of the things we’ve ended up by taking this route is Buddhism. There are hundreds of branches on the tree that’s Buddhism, many of them in conflict about what’s real (or if we can ever say what’s real, or even if it matters what’s real), about what’s the goal (or if there’s even such a thing) & about what would be the right pedagogical means. So i don’t think "Buddhism" can be said to be wrong.
I firmly believe that Reality comprises two aspects (like Yin & Yang), an *objective/factual* aspect & a *subjective/poetic/disclosing/revelatory* aspect. I see them as *one* thing manifesting two different entangled sides that are feeding into each other. And yet, all meaning & value are aspects of/ residing in the subjective/poetic. The objective/factual truths are inherently valueless; they worth anything only indirectly, to the degree they’re feeding into & maintaining the subjective/poetic truths. Even quantum physicists get home to their *wives* & *kids.* Only an insane individual who’s lost touch with Reality would see quantum field equations/joules of energy/kilograms of mass/neurons running predictive coding algorithms/… (aka objective/factual truths) instead of their wife (aka subjective/poetic truth). So we have ways of exploring Reality that are *revelatory,* that keep disclosing new ways of being, seeing & relating to things, carving out dreams & magic out of an infinitely affording (aka sacred) Reality. And there are ways of exploring that collapse Reality to dead abstraction ("The poetic outline of the hills has been replaced by geologic theories of hill formation", Oliver Saks quoting some other guy). Some people today see "dolar prices" when they look at art, "meters altitude" when they climb a mountain, and "predictive construct in the service of control" when they refer to their self, totally missing the point. So from this perspective I believe my self is real. In fact, there’s a sense in which my self (illusory as it is) is more concrete than any abstract objective facts you might invoke about me. But according to some Buddhist schools there’s a more subtle, refined, wonderful & seemingly more real subjective experience to be discovered beyond the experience of self. And i tend to believe their anecdotal accounts. And i believe them even more given the fact that those who took the objective route seem to be in accord with some key Buddhist beliefs (ex: there is no enduring substantial self; nothing is permanent, maybe not even the laws of physics). I’m not certain on anything but i empathize with the Buddhist branches saying smth like, there’s no way to prove what’s the nature of fundamental Reality, but we can work within/ with our own subjectivity to reach empirically validated insights into our own minds, insights which lessen pain & prevent suffering while opening up bliss, and pursuing this seems subjectively good (just like taking your hand out of the fire seems good).
If someone hands me the ultimate objective truth in the form of some abstract diagram i'd have to ask if i'm allowed to share it with scientists & engineers, because unless it’s capitalized in some form (as subjective reality) it’s perfectly valueless. But if a Buddhist teacher exposes me to beliefs & practices that open my subjective reality to a new dimension that’s more subtle, refined, wonderful & seemingly more real then i’d be thrilled.
I cannot respond adequately to this discussion of Buddhism. My original intent was to reject the idea of ataraxia or utility, the idea that what we call "pleasure" is ultimately the relief of pain, frustration, or lack. It's hard to address most other questions of Buddhist views of reality, because Buddhism seems to be agnostic on a lot of philosophical arguments about the Nature of Reality; Nietzsche called it the first positivistic religion, and he had a point.
I do want to say that what you say has a very Humean flavor to me. But I'm not at all a Humean. In particular, I don't agree with his dichotomy of Is and Ought; I think we can know objectively what has value for a living organism, up to a certain degree of precision. A view of objectivity that limits it to tables of statistics and mathematical equations strikes me as impoverished.
One of C.S. Lewis's literary ventures that I'm fond of it his Evolutionary Hymn. But I find it ironic that that I mostly agree with the position he's satirizing:
It seems hard to make a better case for the "Bloomers" of the previous post than retranslating "dukkha" from "sorrow/grief/suffering" to "unease/dissatisfaction".
I always thought the "life is suffering" bit refers to the endless chasing of the dopamine high by the human brain. It will never be satisfied, because there will always be a new desire. But to me, this is fine. I like chasing desires.
Also, something that people always forget when talking about Buddhism, is that it was a reaction to Hinduism. Buddhism didn't arise in a vacuum and didn't look at the human condition from a blank slate. Rather, Buddhism looked at the human condition through a Hinduism lens, and tried to overcome the limitations of that lens.
Feel free to like chasing desires, but are you young and healthy? The Buddha specifically talked about old age, sickness and death.
To copy from my other comment:
"I have seen my grandparents go demented, their prized garden, the pride of their lives going to weed, then so demented they did not recognize their kids, and then die. I saw my parents die of cancer, one of them in considerable pain, the other could not even feed herself and was nursed like a baby and felt it was humiliating. And now at 47 when I stand up my lower back hurts, and it will only get worse, not better. How could I be perfectly happy? Clearly I see and feel how our bodies are fragile now. And I miss my family.
So at a certain age of life, the youthful happy invicible feeling evaporates, and we all get an understanding of the fundamentally tragic aspects of life."
Joseph Goldstein described dukha as "reactivity" once. And the way he did it, made sense to me and the overcoming thereof, aspirational. Mostly I just stick with Seneca's description of the Sage as the aspirational ideal and the Buddhists to have a lot of relevant tech to implement it.
A less faithful but still interesting translation, imo, might be something like “life is jangly”? Or even “life is spicy,” if sound isn’t your preferred metaphor. Sapience has an inherent quality of glaring-ness or blaring-ness to it, like we’ve constructed our experience of the world from a series of carefully modulated Metal Gear Solid alert noises.
Yeah, my thought too. The canonical claim about dukkha is around the hedonic treadmill; nothing external is “enough”, everything external is unsatisfactory at the level of the base cravings.
The craving for more, the inability to be satisfied, itself causes suffering in addition to any pain or physical discomfort that you experience. So suffering-as-opposed-to-bliss does play a part here, but I think dukkha is more existential suffering rather than strictly the opposite of bliss/pleasure.
The way to sate your craving is not to strive for things or attainments, but to reshape your perceptions to enable what you already have to be enough.
Also, I’m fairly certain the Buddha though of the samadhi Jhanas as in some sense a distraction; it’s a useful payoff for your concentration practice but the bliss states are very much not the point of Buddhism, and can apparently hold you back from perceiving no-self etc. if you get too attached to the pleasurable states of the early J1/J2.
As the story goes the Buddha mastered the samadhi jhanas prior to enlightenment, and declared them to be a false path; Buddhism is the “middle way” between asceticism and bliss states.
Anyway I’m firmly in what I understand to be Scott’s camp of understanding Buddhism intellectually rather than having direct experience of the deep vipassana states, so take this all with the appropriate dose of salt.
With the two different views on temperature, one is tracking our subjective experience, and the other models the physical world, so it makes sense they would differ.
But joy and suffering are only subjective experiences, so what does it even mean for a Buddhist to claim that in actuality, life is suffering and all you can do is minimise that suffering? What truth claim are they making about the world?
I think they mean that if you track what's happening clearly enough, you'll find that there is only one thing at different levels, not two different things (joy and suffering). One way this could be true is what I described at the end, where the joy/suffering continuum is how we describe the simplicity/symmetry of mental states. In this case, the "objectivity" would be at the brain wave level or something.
That clearly doesn't track my subjective experiences very well. For example I prefer the experience of eating to the experience of being full, to the extent that I won't eat if I know I have a good meal ahead, so that I can enjoy the meal more.
It feels like you would have to twist yourself in circles to claim this more naturally fits in a single dimensional mentality.
I don't see how this contradicts the premise. Eating while full actually worsens your physical state. So you'd increase your suffering by doing it.
How does anticipating a great meal and thus minimal suffering by not eating too early contradict the premise in your mind. I really couldn't follow why this is even complicated to model for you in that framework?
No circles are required. Pain and pleasure are characteristics of suffering, not the thing itself.
In the heat metaphor, pain and pleasure might be thought of as a person without knowledge of thermodynamics noticing that conduction and convection are different things. In one sense this person is correct but, in a deeper and more fundamental way they are missing an understanding of the underlying physics.
Your cookie eating example is similar. We are hard-wired to notice that pain is suffering, but our delusion causes us to miss that pleasure is suffering as well. This is why, in my opinion, I prefer thinking of “suffering” (dukkha) as “unsatisfactory” rather than suffering. Unsatisfactory is also an imperfect match, but has the virtue of at least being closer to the truth.
Or indeed, that you are entrapped by desire: you wish to enjoy the meal more, that is, to get more out of it than the natural satisfaction of hunger. So you purposefully deprive yourself now (which may involve a small amount of suffering if you are hungry now) for the pleasure later, a pleasure which is fleeting since it will end when you finish eating and can be disrupted by "I feel full, that takes away from my enjoyment".
There is a certain kind of person who gets really into backpacking / ultrarunning / mountaineering for what they call “Type 2 fun”; that is, you are chasing something that is unequivocally experienced as suffering in the moment, but in retrospective is enormously rewarding (even pleasurable). You can draw some symmetries here.
I have personally experienced this plenty of times — upon returning from one winter mountaineering trip, I distinctly remember how incredibly pleasurable the visceral experience of everyday normal life was to me in the aftermath. It’s as if you experience every facet of an otherwise pedestrian day through the lens of all the suffering you aren’t subject to, and that’s a surprisingly good feeling.
I find that having to scratch an itch but not being able to for a while works this way. One you finally scratch the itch you feel practically euphoric for a little while. Same thing goes for having to hold it for a long time. So this effect certainly extends beyond just physical pain to other unpleasant physical sensations.
Every exercise is like that. But this has nothing to do with dukkha, mistranslated as "suffering", which simply means we do not experience perfect happiness all the time.
Buddhism is clearly not about "pain is bad" or "discomfort is bad", not by a long shot. Try sitting in a lotus, it will likely hurt your knees. Try not eating anything solid after noon. Try begging for food and never handling money, and making your clothes of discarded clothes in a graveyard as the Buddhas first disciples allegedly did. They were not against discomfort.
"Type 2 fun" sounds rather like the experience of playing extremely difficult video games: you fail over and over, experiencing lots of frustration and negative feelings, and then you eventually succeed and you're glad you persisted. Why would I want to play a game on Super Ultra Impossible Mode? *Because it's there.*
Doesn't matter. The claim is simply the lack of perfect happiness all the time, a self-evident claim, nothing more. "Dukkha" just means unsatisfactory or not perfect bliss, not all the time. Even when you prefer the slight discomfort of working up an appetite before a meal (or say like the often intense discomfort of exercise), it still does not disprove that you do not experience perfect bliss all the time.
yeah, the one thing is correct imo. It’s all expansion and contraction, all contractions are seen to be the same type of stuff, and max expansion (nirvana) is when there’s no contractions. People disagree a little on this, possibly a semantics issue, but most teachers I respect the most end up converging on something like this. Though few take it to “and it’s important to valence-max!” they’re like this is how it works but whatever there’s other things than raw valence that matter
You're probably more learned on this than I am, but at least at the level of neurotransmitters / signaling hormones, don't we already know the objectivity is (at least) two things? From a baseline or set point, bad things happen to you and your brain floods with stressor signalers but good things happen or you take heroin and your brain floods with reward signalers and these are literally different things?
Are Jhana people saying they are making their brain resemble the Reward signaled state by taking away the stressor chemicals or are they saying they're sorta hacking their brain to feel reward in the absence of reward signaler?
(And if the latter - I wonder if they'd keep their belief if you discreetly dosed someone with heroin or some opiod without their knowledge in the middle of a Jhana...)
Important to distinguish between what experiments have shown and interpretations of what experiments have shown.
Pleasurable experiences have correlating neurotransmitters, yes. Painful experiences have a different set of correlating neurotransmitters.
Where we go into interpretation is the idea that the “set point” lies in between pleasure and pain. The clear experiments show acute stimuli producing defined responses. But it’s absurd to imagine an intense neutral stimulus that produces an intense neutral response. The data here is not as clear.
One might think the set point can be observed by just depriving a test subject of all stimuli. The issue with that (not merely an ethical one) is that it’s considered a form of torture. As a rule, the reaction of conscious things to sensory deprivation is intensely negative.
The idea of a “reward signaled state” which can be used to model a mouse in a Skinner box doesn’t generalize all the way to the entire brain, which integrates many conflicting stimuli constantly. In fact, to translate from another language into the language of experimental psychology, one of the key points of Buddhism is that simple pleasures do *not* put the whole mind into a “reward signaled state”. Suffering appears in all the imperfections of pleasure: it is too brief, it is too mild, it is obscured by anticipations of the future and distracting thoughts.
Opioids get close to producing a pure “reward signaled state” but they do it by numbing the valence of sensory stimuli—revealing that this should be perceived as pleasure! At any rate, shutting out the outside world is something quite different, qualitatively, from how practitioners achieve the Jhanas.
I don’t think practitioners would disagree that there are pleasurable and painful experiences and that they feel noticeably different. They’re more concerned with how stimuli add up to states of mind. And, more importantly, *whether* stimuli add up to states of mind. The idea of Buddhist meditative practice is to recognize that the suffering a person continuously experiences in their “default mode” is not actually the product of external stimuli but rather internal delusion. Accordingly, freeing oneself from that delusion leads to a more pleasurable state of mind regardless of external stimuli.
With all that said, I still don’t think it’s true that perfect freedom, in this sense, makes a person totally indifferent to sensory pleasure. Thich Nhat Hanh, no slouch at meditation, spoke at length about the immense enjoyment he would gain from eating an apple. I think his enjoyment of the apple was unburdened by the delusion that he needed it in order not to suffer, and for that, his pleasure was more intense.
And from a psychological perspective, set points aren't objectively absolute anyway, they change depending upon context. The brain doesn't detect absolute pleasure, or pain, or temperature, or even something as simple as light. The brain detects sensation as a deviation from a baseline, and the baseline is a standard of comparison that changes as we get used to things.
To take just one example, Weber's law states that the minimum change in stimulus the brain can detect is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus (the louder the sound, the more it must change before we can detect that change).
In a longer term sense, a lifetime of experiences condition us to expect a certain level of satisfaction/frustration, and deviations from that are what we notice. But this baseline is entirely a function of experience, you can change voluntarily, by a variety of means.
Huh, a physicalist speculation about something that was originally presented clearly in a non-physicalist way is not too useful I think. The way physicalist "techno-Buddhists" avoid this issue is that they simply say they do not know what is the physicalist explanation.
But if you want to look at it that way... me and most people who ever got interested in Buddhism, started with LSD and wanted to replicate that ego-loss experience with meditation... it was LSD first that made me feel one with the universe... look into explanations how LSD works if you want a physicalist explanation. That is your best bet at something truly scientific. Chemical hits brain.
Meditation simply seems more... sustainable... many people got their minds whacked open by the first few hits of LSD, but how many people could keep up a weekly LSD habit for ten years, not get any physical and mental health problems and still get that WHOAH experience all the time? This is why Buddhists ultimately don't recommend LSD shortcuts. That feels like short-tern body building with a huge assload of steroids, as opposed to a lifelong custom of healthy exercise.
Scott, you are ignoring a very important thing when you make this analogy to temperature. When it comes to subjective experiences, fundamentally how they *seem* is how they *are*, because subjective perception is the realm of seeming. Something can't feel good and yet "secretly" be bad, unlike how something can feel cold and yet "secretly" (or in external reality) contain heat. If an instance of qualia is subjectively apprehended as positive, it is positive as a brute fact, it cannot in any meaningful way "actually" be suffering. This is where your friend's modernized form of Buddhist philosophy of mind breaks down. I don't know if actual classical Buddhism claims the same thing, but if it does, it's wrong. Pleasure is not merely a lower level of suffering, it is a positive qualia that stands in direct opposition to negative qualia, rather than both being points on a scale of the same thing. All it takes to know this is to feel pleasure and directly know from this feeling that it is good.
Actually, not exactly. Because what stimulus your mind associates with the qualia of pleasure or pain (or warm or cold, for that matter) is subjective, it isn't a fixed measurable quantity like what a thermometer measures, it changes depending on context. Since we can control the context of our own experiences (by manipulating our internal and external experiences in various ways) we can exercise control, to a certain extent, over what sensations we associate with the qualia of pleasure, pain, hot, cold, or even bliss. Our control over the qualia we experience isn't absolute, but it isn't zero either.
I think the Buddhist answer to that is not that the pleasure you're experiencing is "secretly" bad, but that if you look closely enough you will see that it has some subjectively bad qualities to it as well (despite being on net good) - qualities that you normally *do* experience subjectively but may choose to ignore when thinking about that pleasurable activity. And they have also empirically discovered that the maximally pleasurable state can be achieved not by adding more pleasurable things, but by removing (or rather, not creating) unpleasant things in the mind - similarly to how absolute zero is not achieved by adding "more cold" but by removing heat.
>When it comes to subjective experiences, fundamentally how they *seem* is how they *are*, because subjective perception is the realm of seeming
Sorry, but wrong. When do I have a correct subjective experience, when I have eyeglasses on or without? It turns out, I see when driving better with eyeglasses and when reading a book better without.
Buddhist meditation, not just philosophy, adds or removes eyeglasses to the mind. It can lead to a re-evaluation of qualia.
For what it is worth, I mostly see pleasure as a *distraction* from things like anxiety and worry, negative qualia. It just temporarily takes my attention away from them.
This... generally worked like that in my circles. I did not quite understand why father enjoys travel, he explained to me he can only stop worrying about business stuff if he changes the environment. Thus his enjoyment of a beach was interpreted as "not office". And it was so common in my circles.
So it dawned on my really quick if I could talk my dad into meditation - never could, but never really could talk myself into it in the long run either - all this need for vacations and other luxury stuff, restaurants, films, entertainment would stop. They are distractions for negative qualia, like worry. So suppose one could meditate worry away, we would not need all these. We could live real simple like Zen monks, because happiness is just the lack of worrying.
Suffering and joy are two different levels of phenomena, not two ends of a scale. Joy is an emotion, suffering is a disposition towards that emotion.
As a musician and a Buddhist, when I write music, I experience joy and euphoria. But if I'm mindful, I can see that this joy is actually quite tense, and that the intentional act of delighting in it is suffering. Releasing this tension and letting it go is more "pleasant" on a deeper level even though the surface level experience may become more boring and unpleasant. In the same way, being on heroin may be extremely pleasant while being suffering-laden, while withdrawing from heroin may be extremely unpleasant while in some sense being more "pleasant", as the recovering addict feels they are regaining control over their life, which is in itself a cause for joy.
This sounds too complicated to me. I think joy is just distraction from happiness. Beach holidays, restaurants, movies - they are all about just not thinking about our worries for a while. From my perspective, dukkha = worrying, that is not, being in the present but in the past or the future. Joy is not thinking about that for a while, being in the present, as a distraction from that.
I don't think this is in conflict with what I'm saying. What you've described broadly lines up with what the Buddha calls "householder's joy" or "householder's equanimity", which is joy on the mundane level, not the supramundane level. Nirvana is the supramundane cessation of suffering, and I think it's easy to see why collapsing that into merely being present can't provide that: what happens if the present moment includes horrific torture?
If by being in the present, you mean completely abandoning all underlying dispositions towards changing experience, then I can agree with that, as it's still retaining the disposition-object or orientation-object divide.
Subjective (first-person, direct) experience can be approached and explored with a scientific attitude. The result of repeated investigations is that that you see more clearly the phenomena which you encounter as "joy" and "suffering."
I don't recognize the name but thank you for the pointer! My influences have been a mix. As it has been presented to me from many angles, the Buddha himself is said to have urged his followers not to take his word for anything, but to test and see for themselves how their own direct experience is.
I read this as saying that there's an upper limit to subjective joy. Bold claim, feels intuitively false, but hard to rule out, having not attained nirvana myself.
(On the "modeling the physical world" side, you could ask if anything about the material workings of the brain supports this hypothesis. This also seems likely to be false - see Sovereigness' reply to Scott below on neurotransmitters - but I'm not sure this quite refutes the subjective claim. e.g. setting the logit inputs of an artificial neuron to +20 usually produces the same outward behavior as +20000; perhaps it's also basically the same qualia!)
Is it a bold claim? Shouldn't we expect there to be an upper limit to subjective joy, assuming we accept the claim that subjective experiences arise entirely from neural activity? Neurons saturate beyond a certain threshold. A rewarding neuron can only fire so fast! Given the intensity of a signal is usually a function of firing rate, any rewarding pattern of activity of sufficient strength should saturate in short timeframes, and the brain tends to attenuate signals that are too far outside the critical zone of the sigmoid activation function, so over time sensitivity to that stimulus should decrease.
It's almost certainly not possible to model something as high level as joy through the lense of a single neuron. Perhaps dopamine levels have some maximum but I definitely view joy/happiness as distinct from pleasure/dopamine, so while one may max out the other may not.
I think it's probably possible to concieve of some pattern based model of joy that has no upper bound as the patterns can explore an infinite configuration space. Although that might still have some upper limit due to a combination of finite max firing rate/finite total life time/finite total number of neurons. But I feel this limit would be so many orders of magnitude above the working level that it would be completely reasonable to model it as unbounded.
Definitely could be wrong and the buddhist claim might be objectively verifiable, but I'd certainly be disappointed because a universe with a maximum upper limit on goodness/beauty/joy seems much less interesting and wonderful than one where it can continue to go up indefinitely. Although if you consider both heat death and Big bang to be zero/some finite level and set a limit on the derivative I guess the universe achieves a maximum regardless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply there was a 'joy neuron' in the brain. 'Joy' isn't a well defined concept in neuroscience, but we do know a lot about reward circuits in the basal ganglia, and can measure the magnitude of those signals, and from them derive the algorithms used in reward prediction. These are not 'single neuron' circuits, but the clusters of neurons involved in computing these signal are not so complex as distributed cortical representations, and we do know that they have physiological maximums in their intensity. There is a ceiling/floor on the degree to which a reward signal can be stronger than expected, or weaker than expected.
These signals are highly predictive of joy, but might not be quite the same as joy. There's some evidence for cortical involvement in representing joy, but even cortex has a finite capacity for representation, and the cortical algorithm appears to operate on discrete sparse representations. We know the state of 'all neurons firing at their maximum rate' isn't maximum joy. That's a terrible seizure. The brain has a certain number of states it can distinguish between, and most of the bits of that representation are not assigned to tracking 'joyfulness'. A decent number are, because reward is really important to learning, but most of them are responsible for tracking our model of the state of the world outside.
There is a maximum intensity to the brightness we perceive before our photoreceptors saturate. That's acute saturation, but we can also chronically saturate and downregulate patterns of activity that are consistently getting outside the ideal gradient range for learning, as in hedonic adaptation. Even if we assume joy is primarily cortical, which is a strong assumption not well supported by the evidence, joy is only useful as a learning signal - something that encourages you to repeat that behaviour under those circumstances - inside a certain bounded range where the gradients of the signal transmitted back to the basal ganglia are meaningful. Beyond that range representing it has no evolutionary benefit. Even if you plunge from the depths of sorrow to the heights of rapturous joy in an unexpected instant, absent compelling evidence otherwise we should assume there's an upper bound just based on the elements doing the computation.
The joy of the early human who discovered making fire and cooking food is not qualitatively different from the first human to make and ride a flying machine. Joy is the upper end of a bounded measure of deviation from expectation. The difference is the human in the flying machine had much higher expectations, so it took lot more to deviate that far!
I don't think this makes the universe any less wonderful, or any cause for disappointment. Our expectations can continue to climb, and we can continue to find new joys in exceeding them, for a very long time to come.
Supposing for the moment that the saying really does refer to reward circuitry, than I think the "life is suffering just refers to an upper bound logic" breaks down, because presumably there's a lower bound as well. In which case it makes perfect sense to refer to a neutral between the two. The "upper bound implies natural framing where zero is the upper bound" only works if there's only an upper bound (I think? Maybe this is faulty logic). A bit complicated to compare to temperature because you can have negative temperature and upper bounded temperature in certain finite systems.
But I'd also put forward that the reward circuitry is not all we should be considering. So maybe joy isn't the right word, but goodness or life happiness which is distinct and would seem to me to be unbounded. Harder to map onto neuroscience ideas, though, and definitely depends on your moral framework.
What the Buddhists are arguing is likely that Enlightenment is neurologically equivalent to permanently setting reward expectations in the basal ganglia very low, such that simple pleasures again spark joy. You can suffer greatly even while in conditions another would consider joyous depending on your reward expectations. You would need a way to sidestep hedonic adaptation, but if you could permanently lower your expected reward such that everyday life were continually a pleasant surprise, you could be in a near constant state of euphoria or joy, at the cost of really messing with the learning algorithm.
Reward circuitry is certainly not the only thing we should consider, though wireheading is surprisingly philosophically tricky to argue against from a utilitarian perspective.
Goodness as in virtue? I'd agree that's a worthwhile thing to pursue, but it does depend on your culture's virtues. Happiness could be 'satisfaction', 'satiation', or 'contentedness', and Buddhism claims you get those in abundance from following the path. Without attachment it's supposed to be much easier to be satisfied and content.
No matter the upper limit of a joyful experience as we understand it conventionally, it's still bound by the three characteristics--
1) dukkha/stress (when the experience ends, we won't like it. We may even be dissatisfied by some aspect of the experience itself, despite its joy.)
2) anatta/non-self (the experience isn't actually under our possession or control. We can't intensify it or lengthen it without limit through our will.)
3) anicca/impermanence (no matter how good it is, it won't last forever)
Buddhism doesn't attempt to make a truth claim about the world. The world isn't real. It's making a claim about the nature of the experience of truth: i.e., what it is like to feel true and how to go about doing that.
Their way of dealing with those things is to claim that they are illusions, i.e., not truth. And then Buddhism didn't stop with just those things--everything that relates to the material world is an illusion.
It is the opposite: the claim is not suffering, but the lack of perfect happiness, the lack of unsatisified desires, even in the face of old age, suffering and death. The truth claim is here self-evident.
So, if this model of suffering/joy is true, then maybe the heavily depressed who feel that everything is suffering and joy doesn't exist, have touched upon a real insight about the world, albeit in a twisted way.
Not really. True happiness in Buddhism is having no passion for the world, being independent of it (like Stoics, but taken further).
Depression is an form of aversion to the sensual world. You don’t want it, you want it to go away, while it’s still there - so you’re still dependent on it.
I get this intellectually, but also correlate passion with subjective joy. Being passionate and acting on the passion tends to create a flow state in which work is pleasurable. Lack of passion correlates with a subjective dissatisfaction. Feeling blah. Nothing seems worth the effort.
Of course, this is the default, everyone’s existential starting point.
You’re thrown into the stream of passion and you look for things that will satisfy you. You don’t even question it.
When you’re itchy, you just want to scratch the itch, it feels more satisfying than for itchiness suddenly to stop. Moreover, as you say, it’s impossible to imagine from within how that would even feel. Because feeling blah is not passion stopping, it’s not being able to satisfy it.
But if you stop in the „blah” moment, you’ll eventually start noticing the pressure of that passion and will see that as the source of your suffering, right now. The hunger for experience richer than „this” is what makes „this” seen as
Scott actually gets pretty close in his description. Basically it wouldn’t be the emotion, it would be the clinging to it you’re discarding. So you feel the excitement/joy/etc, but you’re not feeling the lack if it goes away. In my personal experience, the clinging sullies the creative urge, so it’s possible to be considerably more joyous without.
Buddhism is more about a perpetual flow state - meditation is a lot like that. Work is not necessary.
I tend to see dukkha as worrying about the past or future instead of being in the present.
If flow-work is interpreted as being in the present, it is largely because it is hard enough to not worry about something else, but easy enough to not worry about itself.
Can you say more about where your idea of this comes from -- having no passion for the world?
Because my understanding of Buddhism includes things like the four Brahma Viharas: lovingkindness, appreciative joy, equanimity, and compassion, just as a start. There are other joyfully engaged states that come of taking refuge in the dharma and the sangha. All these come of being emotionally engaged with the world.
My sense of where Buddhism is pointing is full engagement with the world as it is, but without clinging, aversion, and delusion. I think they say interdependence with the world is the aim, not independence from it.
Your question is very symptomatic and it represents a deep misunderstanding of Buddhism that's prevalent in our culture.
In short, Buddha wasn't talking about interdependence, but independence from the World (also defined as the 6 senses). Attachment to the world is sensuality, assumption that the world is the source of pleasure and satisfaction.
The progression that he advised to all monks (often called Gradual Training) started with the practice of precepts and sense restraint - resulting in a gradual withdrawal from the world. Nekhamma - renunciation - is the absolutely basic step, long before anyone would even think about meditation and developing Metta.
Moreover Metta is not love - it's lack of aversion (hence better translation is friendliness). It's a very advanced state of mind that requires thorough renunciation. What we call love is Pema in Pali and is considered as a form of an attachment (here's a verse from Dhammapada talking about it: https://suttacentral.net/dhp209-220/en/anandajoti ).
If you want to understand how is it possible that the popular understanding of Buddhism is so contrary to the actual teachings, I would strongly advise to familiarise with either of the texts below, which get to the bottom of the issue and by doing so reveal in a fascinating way how entangled our perspective on Buddhism is with early Romanticism. Separately, there was Chinese Daoism that transformed Mahayana Buddhism plus and infusion of pseudo-scientific ideas in XIX century Burma. I included some relevant excerpts from both.
1) Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism. It's an article by a Western monk translated vast amounts of Pali suttas. Prior to his monastic training in Thailand he studied history of Western ideas, which was a perfect match. The article later grew into a whole book that's freely available here: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/BuddhistRomanticism200728.pdf )
"Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. But what they may not realize is that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha’s teachings but from … Western psychology, through which the Buddha’s words have been filtered. They draw less from the root sources of the Dharma than from their own hidden roots in Western culture…
For humanistic psychology … religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer divisions.
However, [according to] the Dharma … the ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling, but of knowledge: skillful mastery of the principles of causality underlying actions and their results, followed by direct knowledge of the dimension beyond causality where all suffering stops.
Humanistic psychology maintains that … the enlightened person is marked by an enlarged, fluid sense of self, unencumbered by moral rigidity. Guided primarily by what feels right in the context of interconnectedness, one negotiates with ease — like a dancer — the roles and rhythms of life.
Traditional Dharma calls for renunciation and sacrifice, on the grounds that all interconnectedness is essentially unstable, and any happiness based on this instability is an invitation to suffering. The Dharma teaches that … the awakened person … is incapable of transgressing the basic principles of morality. Such a person … knows from direct experience the total release from time and space [i.e. “the world”] that will happen at death."
2) David L. McMahan - The Making of Buddhist Modernism:
"The Pali suttas [the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism] arose out of an ascetic milieu that viewed family, reproduction, physical pleasures, material success, and worldly life as ultimately futile, disappointing, and binding… Far from being celebrated as a wondrous web of interconnected life, [the world] is repeatedly referred to as a “mass of suffering.” … Pali literature encourages the disengagement from all entanglements in this web. (p. 154; emphasis in original)"
This is the Theravada view, as evidenced by using Pali, not Sanskrit terms. Other schools, Mahayana, Vajrayana exist. Theravada, and also Mahayana, are very much for monks. For wordly people, outside a monastery, people who still want to have sex and drink beer, there is not much other room that subsets of Vajrayana or subsets of Zen.
Well, it's what the Buddha taught, Theravada came later.
If you want to come up with something completely different that's fine, but calling it Buddhism is confusing. You can still do it, but you should make it clear for you and others that it's completely contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Buddha's teaching.
Regarding finding something for those who want to drink beer - it's like wanting to practice for the Olympics sprint, but without having to run. If drinking beer is so important for you, just drop the pretence and be honest to admit what is really important for you.
On the question of whether the practice is for monks or not - the Buddha was also teaching lay people (although only after couple of decades, initially he thought it didn't make sense), but to see the mind they absolutely had to go through a period of sensual restraint and de-valuing sense pleasures. Otherwise it would be impossible to start seeing push and pull of the mind.
Once they achieved stream entry (initial but irreversible level of understanding) they could go back to living lay life - and stop practicing - but not before that.
Depends. Theravada is no passion, no engagement. Mahayana is passion coming from compassion, passion and engagement, for others, not for one's own self.
I'm talking here about what the Buddha was teaching, which precedes even Theravada. We have pretty good idea about it now, with all the findings of XX and XXI century.
Some interesting takeaways - Western understanding of Mahayana (with its imports from Romanticism) vary widely even from Mahayana understanding in Asia.
Moreover, when you read the original suttas, you'll find all the ideas of Mahayana there, just without false dichotomies. Eg. contrasting caring for yourself vs others - as you did - was a non issue for the Buddha as can be seen eg here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn47/sn47.019.olen.html .
In a Buddhist frame I think depression could be seen as an ailment that brings intense self-aversion and intense clinging to fixed ideas of the badness of oneself and the world. And that the mindstates involved in depression are delusional. So that's all three of the "poisons" Buddhism names as the cause of suffering.
I get the impression from summaries of the Buddha's life that he began his search for enlightenment after his first encounters with illness, old age, and death. These encounters were very distressing, and the distress motivated the quest. So, in a sense, the traditional life of the Buddha starts with distressing=depressing discoveries or insights about life, though perhaps not with what we might call clinical depression, at least not of the sort that destroys agency or initiative (since he does launch himself on a quest).
That a state is called Nibbida - it's a skilfull turning away from something you were enamoured with, but now realised it's in fact very dangerous to you. It leads to dispassion - Viraga in Pali or Apatheia in Greek (such a nice Stoic concept).
In that sense similarity with depression is only superficial. That kind of realisation can happen to someone in perfect mental state and can be the most reasonable and rational state given the situation.
Imagine eg. learning that someone you thought was your friend was actually abusing you, taking advantage of you.
But in the story as I've encountered it--and I admit, I'm very much a beginning student--the Buddha's immediate reaction seems to be described as distress and flight leading to a highly motivated search for answers, rather than dispassion or apatheia. No?
Absolutely, the succession is not immediate. First you need to see the problem of suffering, which leads to revulsion / disillusionment (Nibbida) which motivates one to find a true solution, leading (at some point) to Viraga (dispassion) and finally Vimutti (liberation).
BTW don't want to be too pedantic with all these Pali terms, but since it's impossible to translate the meaning accurately, it's useful to have them as an anchor (also for a further lookup).
Ah, I see the stage-by-stage aspect more clearly now. Actually, I'm very interested in the Pali terms and getting as good an understanding as I can of their meaning, relationship to each other, etc. So thank you for the pointers and general guidance/intro!
>I get the impression from summaries of the Buddha's life that he began his search for enlightenment after his first encounters with illness, old age, and death.
Important to note that the account in these "summaries" is almost certainly a (much) later legend, and was probably not originally intended to be an actual description of the historical Buddha's life.
Based on what little is known about the actual historical Buddha, his father appears to have been a chieftain of a relatively poor tribe, where even the leaders lived in modest wood-and-mud accommodations. The idea of his father being a great king, living in such fabulous opulence that his son could have grown up never seeing illness or great suffering, does not appear in any account until LONG after the Buddha's death, and is not very historically plausible.
Of course. My point wasn't about the historical Buddha but about the place of concepts we *might* call depression in Buddhism. The ascription to the religion's founder of a psychological distress severe and abiding enough to motivate a search for a solution would be significant. (One could discuss whether that kind of distress should be called "depression.")
The first noble truth doesn’t say that life is suffering. It’s literally the first noble truth about suffering, which might be initially uncomfortable for people expecting it to be a statement that can have a logical value. It should be understood as suffering being a self evident base assumption. What is more, dukkha can be translated as dissatisfaction or stress, which has a slightly different color than suffering. Here’s an exemplary formulation of the 4 noble truths: https://suttacentral.net/sn56.11/en/sujato
What do you mean by the phrase, "suffering being a self evident base assumption"?
I take it that, in the translation you link to, the first noble truth is "Now this is the noble truth of suffering. Rebirth is suffering; old age is suffering; illness is suffering; death is suffering; being coupled with the disliked is suffering; separation from the liked is suffering; not getting what you wish for is suffering. In brief, the five grasping aggregates are suffering. "
I can see that this passage does not say, literally, "life is suffering." It seems to be saying that many more or less specific aspects of life are suffering. Am I reading this correctly , and if yes, how do you mean to relate this interpretation of the First Noble Truth to your phrase ("suffering being a self evident base assumption")?
(Or, since the "five grasping aggregates"--form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness--do seem to cover a lot of the ground at least of what we might think of as a person's interior life, could we say that the first noble truth means, in effect, "interior life is suffering"?)
The phrasing “idaṁ kho pana, bhikkhave, dukkhaṁ ariyasaccaṁ” – “Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering” – uses idaṁ kho as a presentative construction, similar to Polish “oto” or French “voici.” It’s the rhetorical equivalent of, while discussing the cat, pointing at the cat in question. That’s what I meant by “suffering being a self-evident base assumption”: it’s something presented for direct recognition, not argued for.
And yes, the five aggregates are meant to encompass all interior experience – everything that can be clung to as “I” or “mine.” In fact, one of the classic arguments against the existence of a soul works precisely by examining each of these aggregates and showing that none of them can be identified as the self.
Not to nitpick, but could you equally say that suffering as the desiring of things that ultimately we must lose is the premise upon which the way of liberation is based?
I'm making a comparison between Buddhism and a logical argument. In logic, you start with a premise, which isn't proven, it's just given. If you can accept the idea that life consists of wanting things that you can't keep, like happiness, then the rest follows. Probably doesn't really work.
I think intellectually accepting that you’ll eventually lose everything you desire isn’t very hard. But that alone doesn’t stop you from desiring those things or from being unhappy when those desires aren’t fulfilled. The Buddhist claim is that, through various practices, you can get to a point where you GET this in a much deeper, emotional way. It’s like the difference between knowing that alcohol is bad for you and actually internalizing it to the point where you don’t feel like drinking anymore.
Would you be willing to do what you just did with the next three noble truths? This was very helpful. I wasn't aware of the "voici" or "ecco" grammar in the first one.
Doing that properly is a… significant time commitment :) I didn’t explain the first noble truth, just clarified one phrase. A very readable book about that is Ajahn Sumedho’s: https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/464-the-four-noble-truths. Like most Buddhist books, it’s free.
The self is the thing doing the examining, obviously. How can it be the thing examined? You can not see your eyes, only reflection or pictures of them.
Thank you for offering this nuance about grammar and intent behind it in the construction of the first noble truth.
I think there's so much misunderstanding that stems from a cursory translation into English of these basic Buddhist tenets.
When I translate this first noble truth into a vernacular in my head, I say things like:
It's the nature of the human mind to be dissatisfied in the face of life's vagaries.
Mental suffering is a default orientation of the human mind, if not otherwise trained.
It's not that all of life is suffering; it's that mental suffering is a kind of default mindstate for humans and the whole point of the other three noble truths is that this mental suffering can be gotten free of despite the facts of old age, sickness, and death (as well as uncertainty and constant change), despite the mind's tendency to cling, push away, and not see things clearly. We can train the mind not to do these things and then we can get free.
I haven't dug into all the ways nirvana can be translated, but in my mind it's not bliss, it's not just an extension across time of jhanas. It's freedom.
But this doesn't allow for the fact that you become accustomed to your situation, good or bad, and your perception of it rapidly becomes neutral. Apparently there's good experimental evidence for this. So even if you attain nirvana, before long it'll just seem ordinary.
This hugely overgeneralizes the hedonic treadmill: If it was that simple then plenty of things like social connection wouldn't have the impact on QOL they empirically do, since people would just adjust back to neutrality anyway.
That's not true for all experiences, for example love and friendship don't become not-pleasant after a while. In Buddhism, jhana states don't become neutral after a while (also they're non-reinforcing, which is a super weird and cool feature). Awakening/nirvana is also not something that effects or is effected by the hedonic treadmill, as it's not really a hedonic experience (what in pali is called vedana).
"love and friendship don't become not-pleasant after a while"
You're making assumptions about the personality here - generalising from best case. Love can fade, friendships can can grow boring. People divorce. Seven year itch. "We're not the same people as we were 10 years ago" (which I heard in a movie just last night.)
For me socialising gets old pretty fast and I soon feel I'd rather be on my own, doing my own thing.
It is true in the sense that the mind with time starts to accept the new baseline. The Buddha in some suttas said that only when experiencing situations which originally would make him suffer he was realising how different his state is now, that he was unmoved (and that realisation caused bliss and happiness).
It is not true in the sense that normal habituation of hedonic values ends up with basically the same neutral (or negative) value. Nibbana however is not just vedana, one can experience all vedanas in a state of Nibbana. The freedom comes from knowing that they cannot touch you anymore. So the solution is not on the same level that hedonic habituation operates.
Solution to suffering lays only on the most general level of the system, so there's no choice there.
Additionally, I don't think 'hacking' metaphor is helpful. I get it that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but in this case it's about changing the view. And when you stick to the same, utilitarian notion of 'hacking' you're leaving out your perspective - the one thing that you're supposed to work on - intact.
If this were as generally true as your statement makes it, nobody should make any effort to change their life circumstances as they'd just feel neutral about it eventually anyway. When in reality studies have shown that e.g. increases in income dramatically change quality of life/satisfaction up to a certain threshold (after which it flattens out). Clearly becoming accustomed to your situation does not mean you feel the same way about any two situations even given significant time - only that humans can cope.
I understand the research does show that happiness tends to the same level, even after limb amputation. The classic study is “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, 1978.
But it's not 100% and it's very difficult to measure objectively.
I do think happiness responds more to delta X than X.
It's actually quite pleasant and fluid. It's not jhana-level levels pleasure, though. If I had to guess why, my answer would be: Symmetry Theory of Valence is true, and prediction error minimisation is implemented “using it”. Most of the time the brain minimises prediction error, and that's why Do Nothing is quite pleasant — you let prediction error minimisation do its thing. But to get truly high levels of valence you have to jailbreak the brain out of the “prediction error minimisation mode” via hacks such as jhanas or psychedelics — and turn your cortex into a symmetry engine.
Nice way of putting it. Indeed - think of psychedelic visuals, like the beautiful symmetries you get with high-dose DMT visual-touch synesthesia. The symmetry groups instantiated in those patterns are completely unprecedented for the organism, don't correspond to anything in the external world, and yet have extreme levels of valence (good or bad, depending on the details - phase alignment, consonance vs. dissonance, eigenmode splitting, etc.). It's in those states where it becomes quite obvious the brain can be turned into a symmetry engine, which leads to steep valence gradients.
We've been exploring this computationally at QRI - see our "cessation simulations" (https://qri.org/blog/cessation-simulations) where we model standing wave patterns across fields of different dimensionality (visual 2.5D, somatic 3D). The main insight here is that cessations may occur when waves traveling through these different sensory fields become indistinguishable - when the resonant modes look identical whether you measure distance in the 3D tactile field or its 2D visual projection. The precise moment of "lights out" happens when the pattern is the same in both spaces at once; there is nothing off to report. "Do Nothing" meditation might be letting the system naturally drift toward these configurations, whereas, say J1 or LSD go via the more energetic (but sometimes mixed) route with annealing.
My understanding from studying mainly zen and dzogchen, is that it’s more about “right view” than it is about a neutral greyness.
Our mind is always creating concepts of things, and this is not true reality. Even sitting quietly and focusing on the breath, you might notice your mind starts to form a concept of how you’re breathing, maybe a visual feeling associated with the sound of your breath that you spatially map onto a loose concept of a body. Dzogchen aims to cut through concepts by focusing on the view itself, an awareness that the mind is creating all things.
Suffering is just a word that in the context of buddhism means clinging to sensation. You can swap it out for emptiness, as in “All life is emptiness”. This is true also, in that all the concepts and sensations created by our mental activity are empty of anything real and permanent, like a dream.
My personal “concept” of nirvana, is that it is a state of no-conceptual-clinging, where pure awareness pervades every moment.
“Right view” is just one of the 8 folds on the 8-fold path tho. Deciding not to suffer might also improve your ability to do “right action” or “right speech” or any of the others, no?
I can't speak to avant garde techno Buddhism, but the classical Buddhist view is not this, and much simpler.
1. To live is to be in a state with unfulfilled desires.
2. To have unfulfilled desires is suffering.
3. So to live is to suffer.
2 is maybe easiest to defend. If you think "suffering" is an exaggeration, that's maybe because you're mistranslating "Dukkha." 1 might seem extreme, but even the emperor on his throne wants something that he's not getting. Our capacity for desire is endless. And even in happy moments, we are still all doomed to suffer and die, and that is a pain for us.
There is an element of classical Buddhism where one of the causes of suffering is our ignorance of the truth of the impermanent nature of things, but that has always struck me as a kind of marketing more than a deep insight into how cognition works. You're unhappy because you're not a Buddhist, meditation can cleanse your thetans.
This might seem uncharitable to classic Buddhism, but thats the straightforward reading of the texts. There's thousands of years' worth of different accounts of the best and most charitable way to interpret those ideas.
Your syllogism isn't to far from what Scott's saying if we supposed that unfulfilled desires ~= prediction error. Which isn't that much of a stretch because both are "unrealized expectations". And unfulfilled desires are temperature-like in the exact way Scott describes.
To drop in a Tibetan perspective, focusing on desire is a little simplistic. There are desire-types, who say "I want this", but there are anger/fear types, who say "I do not want this". Of course one could re-formulate that as "I desire not-this!" but that is too semantical, the reality is that there is a huge difference between people who dwell on sweet dreams to achieve a goal, and who dwell on fear, anger, or frustration about things they really do want to avoid. I am the second type! I know it all too well. They also talk about an "ignorance type" who just have no idea what they want. Who go through life "um that sounded like a good idea at that time". "Random" people.
I've always found John Vervaeke's reformulation of the noble truths in cog-sci terms extremely helpful.
In short, he reformulates the noble truths as "ennobling provocations" and states the first one as "all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour".
But for those without an hour to jump into a dense lecture:
"We need to understand the Noble Truths as things not to believe, but to help you re-enact the Buddha’s enlightenment. They should be ‘the four ennobling provocations’."
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche says something similar in Joyful Wisdom:
"The Buddha didn’t present the Four Noble Truths as a set of concrete practices and beliefs. Instead, he offered the Four Noble Truths as a practical guide for individuals to recognise, in terms of their own lives, their basic situation, the causes of the situation, the possibility that the situation might be transformed, and the means of transformation."
Vervaeke again:
"Suffering [read as ‘pain’] doesn’t make much sense, because it is a comparative term and therefore can’t be applied to ‘all’. It is more ‘all is threatened by’. […] Buddha isn’t saying everything is painful, because if everything is painful, then nothing is painful."
I've found this helpful, because suffering’, as you've indicated above, always sounds a bit depressing, and can inspire the opposite reaction to the one the Buddha was aiming for.
The point of a provocation is to confront reality. People don’t like to confront suffering. It’s too emotionally loaded. "Suffering" inspires resignation. It also frames the whole journey to enlightenment in an unhelpful way - as if enlightenment were relief from pain, as opposed to freedom from entrapment.
"Dissatisfaction" is often used as a better translation of "dukkha" but it suffers from the same problem as suffering... it's too loaded to Western ears.
While "dissatisfaction" can get people to steadily address issues, in a way that "suffering" can’t, it can also get them to substitute in surface-level symptoms for their real issues. Like believing having a new house is the answer to a deeper wanting to become mature (cf Fromm).
"I’m dissatisfied because of this thing, or that set of circumstances," we too easily believe, rather than tracing the feeling to the only place it can really exist: as an emergent property of the connections in our brains. The point is to see your reality more clearly, and if anything feels more like something you have rather than something you are in the process of becoming, it will never feel real.
"Suffering" is therefore better read as "self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour": the actions we choose (consciously or not) to take and the thoughts we choose to think that, because of a distorted worldview, do not make our lives better.
Whole video (and whole series) is soooo worth the time.
FWIW, I don't think so. I think the chase for the 'right' word is in danger of obscuring the more important point here, which, as ever, is that it's not so much about pointing at the 'what' (the 'precise' definition/word choice) but pointing towards the way those whats are isolated representations of in snapshot form.
The use of the reformulation, for me at least, is less about being a better choice of words, though that's clearly part of it, and more the challenge they inspire to think about what's going on under the surface - part of which in this case breaking out of the worldview that's always looking for precise definitions even when doing so is ultimately unhelpful :)
A narrow fixation on something like this is arguably exactly the sort of self-deceptive behaviour that one meditates to see more clearly isn't such a great way to be seeing the world...
This feels like some weird strawman argument, to be honest. What Buddhists actually say that "Life is suffering"? This does not capture the meaning behind at all.
Secondly, people should really stop thinking about Buddhism as being true or false. You live in a certain way and accept certain views based on the stage. Like, some Buddhists are living some kind of strange dream based on Theravada and tripping on jhanas, constantly seeking nirvana and what not. This changes very much when you move on to Mahayana, which most people never do, because they would have to transcend their individualism and actually give up something. Not to mention Vajrayana, because at that point, you basically don't give a shit about enlightenment, it's not even a concept.
So perhaps it would be beneficial to stop seeking truth in the myth you decide to live. It's just a myth. And suffering is very related to Buddhism, sure, because it's the human predicament. But the take on it evolves, changes, based on your path and view. You start in bit of a borderline condition, where you apply splitting and binary views very much. Good and bad. Happiness and suffering. Samsara and nirvana. But this is just the very naive start. And it keeps changing and evolving into something much more beautful and profound. Better not stay stuck and the starting line, I would say...
They surely wouldn't. Vajrayana is based on Mahayana anyway, and on Theravada as well, but the view is such that the other vehicles are taking it a bit too seriously 🙂
You see, I can only talk about my view. And I very much like what Chogyam Trungpa explained in The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma. It's a series consisting of 3 books, one for each vehicle, and there you can see the gradual path. You read Hinayana and you are like, right, this is the way. Even the fruition is explained. And then you pick the next one and CH.T. is like, well, yeah, it's like that, but it's also bit of a bullshit, and the next space that opens up is this.
It's rather natural when you don't decide to get stuck with certain dogma, that XYZ is the nature of reality and that's why I am going to do ZYX. Because in Hinayana you work on your own suffering, not to cause suffering to yourself and others. But then it gets a but limiting. You learn a bit of compassion and you are like, hey, this is not just about me. And you open to the world out there. You become a Mahayanist. And there you spend some time until your get the feeling that the Bodhisattva path is bit of a bullshit as well, although it's a beautiful and profound bullshit 🙂 And you move on, you evolve. Can't speak for Vajrayana that much, still getting accustomed to that 🙂
So yeah, well, surely they would not agree with my view that their approach is somehow lesser, but they are arguing about something they don't find important and can't see. So there is nothing to argue about and it's pretty much pointless. My point was more perhaps about not getting too stuck with any view really. Because they are all empty in the end 🙃
You see, the situation is complicated. Because people think Buddhism is something monolithic. It basically isn't. The vehicles are different in major ways and dogmas, and even within the vehicles there are heavy conceptual differences between various schools. So the answer will always be like, it depends who you ask.
When you look at it from the Vajrayana/Mahamudra perspective, which is about understanding the nature of mind, then there is really not much to talk about. Things are basically in bit of a superposition of existing and not existing. Buddhists there would say that everything is mind, all the appearances out there, and mind itself is empty of any substantial nature. So everything is empty indirectly and we can relax. In a more modern language you would say that you are just tripping on concepts that are created by your mind, and while things do exist in some sense, even out there, their nature is such that they are made up by the brain. Which may be a different way of saying that hey, the brain is just detecting patterns that are there, but are they real? They are real in some sense, not real in some other sense. So the idea is basically, stop grasping the patterns as something true and real, because that creates the whole samsara and suffering thing, the identification, just discover the nature of mind, which is an experiential thing, to experience how things are put together, and then just rest in the knowing that comes when you understand the emptiness of everything. You see, everything is created by the mind, the mind is empty, so everything is empty, yet there is some kind of knowing. There is experience. Just rest in there. And from that place, enter the world again, but this time liberated.
The trick is obviously that on the way to reach the nature of mind, all your patterns, traumas and stored energy in your nervous system will get in the way. So actually it feels like you've always been liberated, but to get there requires work. Once there, everything makes sense, compassion, joy and whatever other Buddhist values comes naturally. It's all rather simple.
So yeah, the mistake is that you are seeking truth, while you should be seeking knowing. Which is behind concepts and behind all grasping. It's the untimate letting go, particularly of your ego.
I want to piggyback here on your naming of emptiness -- sunyata -- and connect it to your response to me below where you put "spaciousness" down next to my "freedom." If there were an English word that captured both spaciousness and freedom it would be useful.
"Emptiness" is another concept widely misunderstood in translation. In English we hear "devoid" or "nothing there of any value" or "nothing there at all." Where my understanding of emptiness is "spaciousness." It is the opening in which freedom can unfold. The opening into which a wholesome engagement with experience can unfold.
The thing that fills that space usually is ego and that ego (coming from wrong view, clinging, aversion, delusion, etc) is what fills up or constricts or makes unavailable that spaciousness. The "emptiness" is a space held through equanimity, mindfulness, compassion, concentration, that allows experience to come into it and move through it and unfold freely.
Thanks. Coincidentally I am currently doing Manjushri deity practice. Manjushri is the buddha/bodhisattva of wisdom, but he also represents the skillful ability to speak your wisdom from a certain place. You could say it's no mere coincidence I end up proclaiming Dharma here just today 😁
Anyway, that's bit of an internal joke of mine 🙂
You see, I just remembered that emptiness basically always occurs paired with something else. In Heart Sutra, there is emptiness and form and their inseparability. There is the union of emptiness and awareness. Emptiness and compassion. Clarity and spontaneity. Because emptiness doesn't mean there is no felt quality. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. It just means there is no substantial, unchanging nature. There are no Plato's forms.
There will never be the right word. Because what we are talking about is experiential. We call it clarity and spontaneity, but... I remember getting to that non-conceptual space while meditating for the first time. Actually my inner voice stopped and I could not think in concepts. Rigpa, pure awareness, perhaps. And there it is crystal clear some things simply cannot be named. Because naming itself is an act that kicks you out of that space. Dao really is not Dao any more when you call it that. So yeah, I am a proponent of the direct experience approach. Get to the place where you rest deeply for the first time in your life, because that changes everything.
If you are interested in that quality, I ended up experiencing it for the first time when reading A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod and meditating on what is being transmitted there.
And you know, then there is the whole chapter on buddha nature, the third turning of the wheel of Dharma. Once you realize emptiness, you get in touch with something. The primordial quality of that space. It's perhaps simply something encoded into being a human being. That we are deep down usually joyous and compassionate, full of love and power for the good. Ignorance is what obscures it.
You could say this is about what Jung would call Self. It's something so noble and bright at the center of your being that animates everything else. Actually there is no fight any more once this place is found, because it's so numinous that the ego is actually happy to yield. To kneel and bow. It's not forced to. It yields to kindness, compassion and love.
And this is the reason Vajrayana is the indestructible vehicle. It's the path of indestructible wakefulness. Something that once found, it can never be undone or taken away. The danger of Vajrayana is that you enter that place before you are ready, before you understand emptiness and no-self. It can happen that this tremedous energy is then fueled into ego and turns into a personal catastrophy, or unprocessed stuff is pulled even deeper into your personal shadow. But if entered properly, it is a noble and heroic path. All trying and achieving is ended, but at that moment the path of the bodhisattva is truly entered. The path is there only when there is nobody to walk it.
Internal Family Systems, which is descended from Jungian psychology, elaborates this same idea of Self. I was at an early training 15 years ago when its founder Dick Schwartz was first being asked to engage with Buddhism's idea of no self along side IFS's reification of Self. He wasn't there yet -- he is getting there over time -- to see that they are experientially pointing to the same thing.
The analytical mind divides and divides. occasionally it can synthesize. But it cannot experience the synthesis. Only lived experience can do that. And then lived experience is translated back imperfectly. This seems like a very basic truth to me now, but it took me a while in my life to grasp it fully enough so that it changed my whole life.
You can read and read and read about Buddhism or IFS or any other thing, but if you don't open yourself to the experience of it across time, steadily and regularly, then the words will not be able even to approximate the thing being talked about.
This is essentially correct on the whole of it but a bit too much philosophy. Do not create the illusion that people can just read, think and get it. Meditational practice is absolutely the core of it, with endless reps of mantras. Words can never explain it without the experience. BTW the reason I stopped was it did nothing to me at all... never ever felt a thing throughout years. No experience at all. Interestingly when I tried Zen I had a fleeting experience the first time... but then never pursued it somehow. Lama Ole's bunch had prettier girls so I went there. But there meditation was basically useless to me despite lots of trying. I even had Phowa. Cathy Harting, Ole's once girlfriend was fond of saying Phowa is so transformative, you cannot ever go back to materialism. But I felt nothing.
The Buddha didn't speak English though! So he never said "life is suffering". This really isn't just pedantry - "dukkha" in Pali has importantly different shades of meaning than the English "suffering". I think it would really help to let go of "life is suffering" as a caricature of the Buddha's teaching. To understand the Buddha you have to understand what the words he used actually mean.
Modern translations of dukkha often render it as "dissatisfaction" or "stress". It's the sense that something is *wrong* with the current experience. I expect many people who balk at "life is suffering" would find "life contains stress" easier to empathize with.
(dissatisfaction/wrongness seem to map onto the notion of prediction error in predictive processing, which is intriguing, but importantly, the Buddha's concern is the *subjective* experience of wrongness/stress)
"Stress" or "friction" also work quite well with the thermodynamic analogy. There are many dimensions to experience other than stressfulness, but every experience does have more or less stress, and reducing the amount of stress makes the experience better. And getting all the way to (or close to) absolute zero stress is profound in a way that I think most of us are not used to considering.
What would it be like to have a moment with *zero* sense of "something is wrong and should be different"? Subjectively, that is a perfect moment. There is nothing you need to change about it. It's not a hard or exotic thing to understand conceptually!
The Buddha's path is a pointer to a life without stress. You still have high and low-valenced experiences, you're still motivated to help people, you still get sick and die, but you don't get stressed about any of it. Stress isn't helpful.
(I don't claim to have experienced any perfect moments, and certainly not to have trained myself to *only* experience such moments, but having done a few meditation retreats is enough to at least see these dynamics qualitatively --- some moments have much *less* stress and correspondingly more sense of peaceful perfection --- and to get a sense of where they can lead)
Yeah, some interpret this noble truth also as simply the fact that there is certain baseline existential anxiety, restlessness of being, so to speak. And you get it because you don't see the real nature of things, you are ignorant.
In any case, I agree that stress plays a big role. My practice has lowered my stress levels tremendously. Eventually you just stop and rest fully for the first time, there is nothing to be done and that's a moment that is paramount. You start seeing another way. I do believe this is also why Buddhism is the path of nonagression. Because experientially all stress is agression towards youself. You eventually end up giving it up.
I learned from Joseph Goldstein the idea that dukka also means a cog in a wheel that is a bit out of true, which means that the axle running through it cannot rotate smoothly... and therefore you will have a rough ride. Without being centered by equanimity and the other virtues and practices on the path, one's ride will indeed be bumpy. This bumpy ride is dukka. Dukka is a kind of constant, grinding friction that reproduces itself cyclically.
If I understand correctly, it's not that truth is unobtainable, it's that it's a wordless experience, one that can't truly be communicated in language, even to oneself. The ultimate truth isn't a measurable quantity out in the world, and it isn't a category that can be analyzed in your head, apart from other categories. "Truth is a quale" is probably the closest Western rational philosophy can come to it (but not quite right, because words). That is, truth is the quale itself, not something that results in this quale. With the further understanding that the "truth quale" consists of the absence of all other qualia. Because true truth is a single unity--it encompasses everything. So saying "X is Y" is a very unBuddhist way of putting anything (but they say it that way anyway, because, again, words).
You see, this reminds me very much of non-duality. It's something that you can't really argue for, because it's completely paradoxical and it's actually based on a weird evolutionary twist that at one point we started to be able to model ourselves as we model others, then identifying with the model. But really, there is only one entity and this split between 1st person and 3rd person perspective is at the core of our predicament. You fear death because you can model yourself and imagine that model not existing any more.
So actually learning non-dual experiencing/stance is a very clever hack to counter this issue/paradox. Remember all the sayings like awareness and experience are not two. Awareness is not independent of the experience. Awareness is like a mirror. You see the appearances, but you cannot truly see the mirror. And so this actually points to joining the experience into one. And we could say suffering is caused to large extent by this split as well. That is the hard thing. How do you explain the stance? How do you teach people to just experience and not split. Well, you make one step at a time. Emptiness of identity, of appearances, of mind... This all leads to the moment when you give up seeking any source and you just rest. And at that moment the inner and outer are one. There is just life, just experience. Who cares what is true?
But at the same time you learn that there is certain quality of that experience. It's empty, spacious, but it's not nothing. And the quality that arises is what Buddhism talks about further in Mahayana and Vajrayana. This is the union of emptiness and awareness, emptiness and compassion, clarity and spontaneity. It's so spacious. And this leads to self-liberating experiencing. There is so much space that your thoughts, you whole being is being liberated constantly, because there is nothing to get stuck on, to grasp.
And this really is the fruition of the path, as far as I understand. Learning and living the self-liberating mode. The spaciousness that counters all grasping. It's lovely. It's calm. It's like when the spring sun warms up your skin. But at the same time you perhaps find this quality in yourself, or will, to be a blazing sun for others that are lost in the dark still. So at the end it can feel like you are actually just finally entering Mahayana. But you know, it all feeds into each other, it's not a linear path.
"Compassion is not so much feeling sorry for somebody, feeling that you are in a better place and somebody else is in a worse place. Rather, compassion is not having any hesitation to reflect your light on things."
This is what you may end up with. It's incredibly meaningful. Because it's embodied and deeply authentic. This is something that no truth can give you.
This actually brings us to the relative and absolute bodhichitta. Which are tremendously important to understand. A Mahayanist would tell you, yeah, XYZ is true. But it's only the relative truth. And that is yet another paradox. Buddhism is really about learning to hold ambiguity, to withstand it. Because that's what human life is like.
That is trying to escape the paradox 🙂 Like, we think and remember, so past, present and future all exist in some sense. That would be the relative, conventional truth. But you can surely say that past and future and constructed, so they don't exist in some sense. From the point of the nature of mind, these are just empty concepts. Last but not least, you can pull out theory of relativity and say that there is nothing like the present moment, because it doesn't make sense on the scale of the universe 🙂 So I would say past and present are both relevant, the problem is only getting too attached to it, ruminating endlessly and what not.
Like, I am sorry, eventually you just learn there is no ultimate answer to anything, the difference is that you learn to be ok with it. And you can then just choose how to live 🙂
Having said that, to be fully immersed in life is surely worthwhile, that's what this is all about. But what does it mean? Well, it's about stopping to run away from life and facing it in its complexity and ambiguity, I believe. That is also one of the principal aspects of the path: renunciation, or definite emergence. You decide to stop running away. It's all much simpler that we like to think really...
No, because "all that exists" is a factual claim about the world, and it is not about that. Even a value judgement like "do not think about the future" is not about that, as sometimes we need to. Rather it would be a subjective factual claim "thinking about the future leads to worrying" and then decide whether it worths it in this case or not.
That does not correspond to my understanding of what the Buddhists are saying. It's not just things that exist or do not--entire modes of thinking are part of the illusion. There are no "facts," nor are there any feelings, nor anything else. Nothing exists, except the immediate experience of existing (which can include thinking about the future, as long as that doesn't become a distraction from existing in the moment).
Let's try this another way: you don't avoid thinking about the future in order to avoid worrying. You recognize that worrying is part of the illusion of the world. It acts to attach you to reality, which isn't real, so stop doing it. "Thinking about the future" in itself isn't a problem.
This appears to have interesting implications for science. Asserting factual claims (or denying them) isn't itself a problem--indeed it can lead to interesting insights about the world. Just remember that all "facts" are really modes of thinking, categories of sensations that you invent in your head, not stuff out in a real world outside of you somewhere. You should treat it as this really detailed and consistent simulation that your unconscious brain is running (because that is literally true).
I'm not convinced that you "move on" from Theraveda to Mahayana, as if Mahayana were a more advanced degree of the same insights. I think it may be equally plausible to say that Theraveda is the core of Buddhism as an applied science, and Mahayana is what you get when you turn it into a soteriological religion or even a mythology.
Depends. It's not more advanced degree, you need Theravadan insights for any Buddhist path. It's just that there is more stuff than the project of personal enlightenment, for some people. You cannot skip egolessness and impermanence in any case, unless you are there for spiritual bypassing and ego tripping. I don't personally know how Theravadans approach emptiness and compassion, but it's the core thing in Mahayana.
I'm not sure that I accept the label "arrogance." Isn't that normally used to refer to someone's attitude toward themselves, their position, or their stuff? I'm not in any sense a Buddhist, Theraveda or otherwise, and I'm not talking about a position I hold, but about how something looks to me seen from outside.
But what I mean by "science" is that a lot of belief systems seem to say "believe this because I say so" ("for he spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes"), but I've gotten the impression that what Gautama was saying was, "OK, try this for yourself and see what results you get." And that looks like a scientific approach to me, in a way that Christianity or Islam does not. But I don't claim to speak with authority here!
Right, yeah, got you. It got less scientific, though, when people started arguing what it is they are seeing, though 😅 There are multiple schools of thought in Theravada already.
Anyway, I think that the amount of woo and religion there gets poured into Buddhism depends mostly on your teacher. For Mahayana and Vajrayana it can still simply be a worthwhile way of living.
Theravada has this deep internal contradiction, that you want to be rid of the ego, but you want it to be happy, which is an ego-driven desire. So it has the contradiction of "I want to not want, I desire to not desire." Mahayana is a self-Jedi-mind-trick of telling yourself you want to do it for others, while of course knowing it is not entirely so.
It seems as if that's akin to the argument of the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krsna tells Arjuna not to worry about whether he wins or loses the battle, or about his regret for the deaths of his kin on the other side, but to act according to his dharma as a warrior—and of course by following that advice Arjuna and his brothers win the battle.
The Buddhist group I was in paid a lot of attention to a book called Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. If you’re shopping for the brand of Buddhism that will make you happier you’re already barking way far up the wrong tree
Yeah, the book is fine. I think, though, that we all start with certain intentions that are potentially lame 🙂 Really, we all want to be happy, it's just that the usual expectation to somehow bypass all the work is, well, not good and it will catch up with you for sure 🙂
I can't quite tell how Scott is seeing this from what he's written, but his dichotomy sounds like he's saying the opposite of Buddhist's "suffering" is "pleasure" or "happiness" or something like that. But the idea of "suffering" is misunderstood. To my mind, Buddhism says what you're moving towards is freedom, is an unfettering from clinging, aversion, and delusion. And that enlightenment is a sustained unfettering.
It's certainly not about maximizing pleasure nor about not having feelings. To get free is to cry when there is sadness and feel joyful when there is wholesomeness. It's to open to all of it with equanimity, not stoicism.
One is not getting unfettered from the world; one is getting unfettered from one's own clinging, aversion, and delusion. Which allows more depth of engagement with unfolding experience, including in the world.
My teacher says that the issue really is that we tend to narrow around things. That's what our brains do. They tend to get stuck and merge, identify. Can be thoughts, can be whole stories and narratives. And really the quality connected to true realization on the path is spaciousness and vastness, which cancels that narrowing. Any time you read about pure awareness, knowing, bright light mind and what not, there is spaciousness. It's like a clear sky. And in that spaciousness there is joy and spontaneity.
In some sense, or in my experience, as long as there is space, there is liberation. Some schools of Buddhism are more moralistic and they tell you what is good and what is bad, but Tantric Buddhism is not like that. It doesn't matter what happens in that space. It's liberated immediately. And it only serves to remind you of the nature of the mind, which is vast and open. And like that you practice as you live.
People should be careful, though. You can try to escape into vastness so that you don't have to face your personal demons. That is not what this path is for. As you practice, the space will open on its own. You cannot imagine or visualize yourself into it, you really can't and shouldn't. You need to stay embodied. Also because all the enlightened qualities are there to be embodied 🙂
Now that I am thinking about this once more, if there is any maximizing, it's regarding adaptivity and neuroplasticity. Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if the experience of spaciousness or just learning to add it to your experience was increasing your neuroplasticity. Well, this actually feels obvious, but no discussion is finished until you mention neuroplasticity, right?
"Not to mention Vajrayana, because at that point, you basically don't give a shit about enlightenment, it's not even a concept."
Sure, that is why Vajrayana does not have a concept of rinpoches, enlightened people's reincarnations being recognized. Wait... they do. They just do it in a different way - to recognize we are already enlightened.
All this is ok but it all works on the assumption that we can find out the most useful things about ourselves by introspection.
I worry this is a mistake - we might learn more about ourselves by interaction and more specifically dialogue. This is what quite a big chunk of our wiring is set up for.
Dialogue both with others and as we internalise the other with oneself isn't internal chatter to be silenced but a conversation to be progressed or an argument whose pathologies are better analysed with interpersonal tools than intrapersonal ones.
As a digression - I think that LLM's being unable to learn - on the fly - through dialogue is a big reason that they are limited.
Yes, that is one of the fundamental assumptions of dharmic religions, and not just Buddhism - or close enough to it. There are disagreements about epistemological specifics like whether this can be achieved through or needs to be aided by logic, external observation, ritual, etc, but it is generally taken for granted, and this is one of the causes of misunderstanding. All of them rely on what can be, and is metaphorically described as 'getting rid of fetters' to non-metaphorically acquire a direct perception of being. Why this is good is also different in specifics, but it converges on the same kind of understanding like the existence-knowledge-bliss of Hinduism. Lots of differences, but in dharmic religions, all the most fundamental assumptions are the same, or at least close enough.
"Ourselves" also includes the "world", so in Hinduism and Jainism, you can see that this is often called omniscience (Hinduism depending on the tradition, unambiguous soteriology in Jainism). A similar role in Buddhism is played by concepts such as the fully enlightened one being able to recollect all their previous lives, verifiably knowing nirvana and all the precepts of Buddhism, etc.
If you mean to saw that Buddhism works on this assumption, I would say not. The path depends on a three-legged stool that gets called the three refuges -- Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. "Buddha" is the part that's about a way of engaging with one's mind, Dharma is the whole collective lineage of teaching and practice, and Sangha is the community.
There is no sense in which Buddhism is devaluing interpersonal growth and connectivity.
Three parts of the eight-fold path have to do with how we engage with other people and the world, ourselves in interaction, in other words. Those are right speech, right action, and right livelihood.
These are not the only places that things other than introspection show up in Buddhism. The four brahma viharas are loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. These are supported through multiple kinds of practice but are intended to bring harmony and healing to the world.
Loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity are equally important realms of often relational practice as any kind of solitary mindfulness or concentration meditation practice. Not to mention that even the solitary introspection parts have historically most everywhere had communal and relational aspects. This is true even now when you go on meditation retreats in almost any tradition here in the West.
The pop Western understanding of Buddhism comes in part through the reification of the shallow idea of "mindfulness." But Buddhism as a whole is not just meditation or mindfulness or special mind states, and certainly isn't just centered on introspection. These are dessicated understandings filtered through pop culture. And it's tricky because many people talking about Buddhism in those ways don't know what they don't know, and that ignorance gets proliferated more into pop culture.
Things like, Oh well Buddhism is about: being mindful, reaching elevated states of consciousness, focusing a lot inwardly, letting go of everything and not feeling things anymore, chasing blissful states, disengaging from the world, emptying the mind, being stoic, and on and on. These are all various kinds of misapprehension.
People also often miss that Buddhism is not just a practice, not just a philosophy or a religion or a psychology, but also a moral system about how to live a wholesome life. The 8-fold path is not just a way to live wholesomely though -- it's the conditions one needs to cultivate in order to get free.
Even Plato would disagree with that. What do we learn from discussing the shadows of things projected to the cave wall? They are all illusions. What to learn from interacting from an illusion-ridden mind with other illusion-ridden minds? The thing is to get up and go outside the cave to see real things.
Certain bounded systems in certain circumstances *can* have negative thermodynamic temperatures, but that's hotter than infinite temperature, not colder than absolute zero.
This suggests that certain finite beings in certain circumstances might have negative suffering but that'd be worse than infinite suffering, not better than nirvana. (In the "prediction error" model, that's what would happen if your brain predicted stimuli more inaccurately than it would by guessing based on the maximum-entropy distribution, i.e. if its predictions are not merely uncorrelated but *anti*-correlated with what happens.)
Temperature is weird because it can be positive, negative, or infinite, but never zero: absolute zero is unattainable. That's why physicists sometimes deal with its inverse "beta", which can (more sensibly) be positive, negative or zero, but never infinite.
Huh, while you can't actually achieve it in the real world, mathematically absolute zero is a well defined concept (a system with 100% probability of being in its ground state).
Huh, so the "unattainability" formulation of the third law of thermodynamics is just Cromwell's rule?
Likewise: a negative infinite Elo rating is someone who loses all games with 100% probability (but even a bot who always resigns on its first move has a nonzero probability of playing black and white resigning on their first move)
(that can't happen in a natural environment for the sort of reasons Yudkowsky describes as "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" and everybody else describes as "even a broken clock is right twice a day", but in an adversarial environment, well, you already wrote the hell in Unsong)
Interesting idea to play around with but I don’t find it convincing.
Also, I don’t see how it helps against the charge of Buddhism being anti-human (if you are inclined to think that way). Nirvana still seems devoid of human content, as compared to a conventional idea of a good life or what Christianity says is the ideal human existence.
I see. I guess I thought you meant something like anti human in the sense of claiming that one should aspire to achieving a higher state of consciousness in a cave somewhere as opposed to living a life of virtue in the world.
Sam Harris' Waking Up app has some very good discussions with other teachers about the value of a normal human life vs becoming a monk and "desiring nothing but consciousness". He discusses this with Joan Tollifson, Shinzen Young and Michael Taft.
I highly recommend the app just for the discussions and theory (not sure if the teaching style is ideal, at least for me).
Nirvana is not devoid of human content, because it is achieved during life. Parinirvana (confusingly often called nirvana) is devoid of it, in some ineffable way, but there are similar conceptions of Christian heaven, especially some mystical approaches.
Anti-current-human, anti-human-as-usually-understood, for sure. The promise is, that it leads to a better kind of human with more of the truly valued human traits like compassion, humour, wisdom. It certainly comes from a dissatisfaction of the merely, conventionally, currently human.
But the abbreviation is "K" to avoid confusion with the prefix "k" as in kilo... just to really keep us on our toes!
FWIW, I don't recall ever hearing someone say "kelvins" as a plural, always "the sample is at 300 kelvin" (or even "300 K"). I do recall "let's raise the temperature 10 degrees".
I hadn't noticed that; I feel vaguely sorry for the hypothetical person whose name starts with "M", but shan't get an abbreviation, since that would conflict with "Mega"
My observation was specifically that of a professional scientist, working with other professional technical people, and noting that "kelvins" as a plural was something I had never personally heard in technical speech.
That said, I also checked the NIST official instructions in scientific publications for use of "kelvins", which basically said (pg 17) "don't spell it out, use 'K' instead"
It's also explicit that "degree Celsius" is equivalent to "kelvin" and by implication, kelvin should follow the behaviour of "degree"; i.e. plural if >1, singular if <= 1 (which comes up far more often than it used to, now that Bose-Einstein Condensates are a thing).
(but NIST gets to enforce standards for their publications in a way that the Unicode people can only dream of)
Heat is a form of energy, while temperature is the differential of heat by entropy. What that means is: while heat (or rather energy as a whole) is conserved, temperature is "the thing that equalises in order to maximise entropy". If you have two bodies with heat in them, and you connect them, heat flows from one to the other until they both have the same "temperature", because that is what maximises entropy.
I'll raise the pedantry even further: heat is not energy, heat is a flux of energy, driven by a temperature gradient. The quantity that is differentiated by entropy to define temperature is the internal energy, which is a state variable. "Heat" is not a state variable, and cannot be properly differentiated, which is why some texts choose to put a small slash mark in differentials of heat.
Heat and temperature are not the same thing. Something can be high temperature even without "having" a lot of heat. The normal example is the outer atmosphere, which has a high temperature but absolutely would not feel hot if you happened to be there.
The entire time I was reading this I was thinking about how many takes on a Christian heaven posit that heaven is a state of blissful happiness purely because of the absence of temptation and sin (ergo evil). Lots of symmetries.
I used to think like that, but I think they are actually closer. While Christianity seems to be about gaining something good, one lever deeper the good thing, the divine spark, being created in Gods image was always there, it was just clouded by original sin. Hence man has no absence of good, but covered up, clouded, dirtied good. Similarly Buddhism likes to say it is about polishing a diamond, the good is already there, you just need to remove the dirt from it. So in both cases, good is not entirely absent, but clouded, dirtied, hidden, pushed down, and that way not truly present.
This model is quite wrong from what we know about the brain. Pleasure and pain are not direct opposites. Pain is much more fundamental to our nervous system - we have dedicated receptors to detect it across our body.
Pleasure is different. It is a system designed to tail off through dopamine spikes. It’s not designed to keep us in permanent pleasure, because that wouldn’t be evolutionarily advantageous as roaming animals.
This truth seems to validate the buddhist’s claims more. Pleasure is always fleeting, pain is not.
Since they run on separate systems, you can also feel both activate simultaneously, as in the case of spicy food or BDSM; this seems to strongly contradict the claims made in the post.
(I remember a blog saying at some point that actually, the body stores hot and cold separately too, and when you have a fever both the heat-regulation and cold-regulation systems are out of whack. But, as a commenter above points out, there is a "real" physical temperature separate from our perceptions of it, which isn't the case for pleasure/pain.)
I don't think craving is the same as pleasure (if we use "pleasure" to mean the sort of bliss Buddhists are after). I don't think the most stable pleasures are necessarily mediated by the dopamine system. See eg the literature on "wanting vs. liking", or https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable .
Wanting versus liking has always seemed to me like the right lens for the first noble truth. We are built to constantly want, and getting the thing we want almost never actually satisfies the wanting in any lasting way. No longer being driven by that cycle of craving seems like it still leaves plenty of room for liking things, and maybe actually makes enjoyment easier and less fraught.
How do you come to this idea that Buddhists are after bliss?
I don't mean to deny that there are all kinds of Buddhist teachings out of many lineages and cultures, but I've been a Buddhist in the Vipassana tradition for forty years and this has not anywhere been part of what I've learned or practiced.
Dopamine seems better understood as mediating motor learning, than pleasure per se. Charlie Harrison's comment that dukkha means "unsatisfactoriness" rather than "suffering" is interesting because "pleasure" comes from the same root as "placate," implying that etymologically the word "pleasure" at root means "non-unsatisfactoriness," and thus reflects a single-factor model. People also imagine that opioids represent pleasure, but I think they're better understood as primarily mediating breath pressure and secondarily mediating other sorts of cybernetic regulation making use of the same system.
Overall it makes more sense to me to think of pain as simple relatively easy to spot aversive processes, but positive motivations as too complex to be represented by specific neurotransmitters; something more like pain/fear/suffocation vs agency/curiosity/rationality.
Others have written that "life is suffering" is not a helpful interpretation of the first noble truth. I'd just like to add a bit of my intuition.
When a person comes to meditation they often have a vague but deep sense that 'something is wrong' maybe mixed with occasional insights along the lines of 'apart from my own suffering, I can see that everything is all actually very ok and life is beautiful'. Both those insights together lead a person to realise that maybe the problem is actually the way they are seeing things.
In my current understanding, the first and second noble truths are pointing to: the way people habitually try to search for fulfillment, by grasping after things, is doomed to failure.
To address your point about practicing meditation being like going to Britain - I'm afraid it's hard for me to know because I live in England! But in my experience meditation doesn't flatten the emotions or the experiences of life. It doesn't even eliminate pain, sadness or frustration (although it sometimes helps me to avoid creating more of it). What it seems to do, for me, is to gradually reveal another way of seeing things where the pain, sadness and frustration are part of something bigger. And that bigger space is the 'actually very ok and beautiful' we all sometimes have glimpses of.
"... Buddhism... nirvana ... sounds like a letdown. An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain..."
over the past few years I’ve felt our paths gradually diverging. I used to enjoy your writing immensely — the intelligence, the humor, the curiosity. But lately your posts seem to circle endlessly around the same few themes: America, Trump, AI, America again.
As a curious, open-minded European, I find myself losing interest — not because these issues don’t matter, but because they’re framed from such a narrowly American point of view. Life outside the U.S. can be genuinely good — safe, socially secure, with affordable healthcare, education, job security, work life balance and without the constant noise of political self-obsession.
Take someone like Evan Edinger, for instance: a former conservative-gun-loving American who traveled to the UK “for a while,” discovered how sane everyday life can be elsewhere, and never looked back. His story echoes that of many Americans I’ve met or heard their own stories who found Europe, Japan, or elsewhere to be more livable, less stressful, and freer in many many ways that matter.
So, yes — I think our time as online companions has come to an end. I still appreciate what your writing once was and the ideas I’ve enjoyed through it. I only regret not joining that ACT meetup in Zürich a few years ago — it was just ten minutes from where I live.
I find comments like this utterly bewildering. You're complaining about Scott being "too American" while in the very same breath aggressively boasting about all thhe ways Europe is better than America, then turning around and saying you don't like geographical self-obsession. And without the tiniest trace of irony.
As an Australian, I look at both Americans and Europeans and see equally great arrogance and self-absorption generally. But on this blog particularly, it's Europeans who take the cake. I'm struggling to remember the last time I saw anyone on here do an "all the ways America is better!" boast, but I've seen it from Europeans (like yours here) more times than I can possibly count.
American greatness is low status these days, something that only unwashed yokels can unironically believe in, while Euros (and Canadians) feel superior in comparison, because their yokel contingents are less prevalent.
Conversely, this response reads odd to me. The person you're responding to very specifically just says "and elsewhere" multiple times, in believable contexts (e.g. calling out Japan specifically, where they don't reside). That doesn't map to "geographical self-obsession" to me.
(To be clear, I also find the comment you're responding to bewildering, and I don't endorse it. Your criticism just confused me even more than the post you're responding to.)
Dunno, but I am a European and unironically think the US is the greatest country in the world and much better than Europe under most metrics. It is freer, richer, many orders of magnitude much more innovative and a place that looks to the future.
Boasting about America being great became associated with Republicans, so Democrats avoided that. But the recent slogan "make America great again" kinda implies that currently America is not great.
So you suddenly have something that both political parties agree on, only with different connotations.
D: "America is not great, and that's how it is supposed to be". (because it would be racist or imperialist for America to be great, or something like that)
R: "America is not great, and we need to fix that." (by trying to become more like Russia, ignoring the fact obvious to everyone else that Russia, actually, is not great)
Meanwhile, Europeans who don't like their politicians can say: "okay, my country sucks, but some other parts of Europe are probably great".
At some moment it was cool to talk about conquering new territories, even from America's allies. Now it seems cool to send armed forces against domestic opponents. (There are probably more examples, but these came to my mind immediately.)
I agree that most MAGAs don't consciously want to be more like Russia; they just kinda happen to support similar policies (probably while thinking that their ideas are uniquely American).
Yeah I took it as a slight about the weather. He could have easily said Pittsburgh instead, except then very few of his international readers would have gotten the joke and even most Americans have never been to Pittsburgh and might not get the joke.
If you can’t read a post about Buddhism without a one word joke about British weather triggering you like this, you’re probably the problem. This has to be the most ridiculous comment I’ve ever read here.
> As a curious, open-minded European, I find myself losing interest — not because these issues don’t matter, but because they’re framed from such a narrowly American point of view.
I understand the sentiment (of the quoted sentence - the rest seems to me unrelated) and have sometimes shared it, but really I would not have expected it from that humorous poke at Britain. As a French guy, I am totally in familiar territory there :-) . Nor from that post where nothing is about America or AI.
But yeah. I do think Scott's writing is still great, but you don't have to force yourself in a community of foreigners of which you do not share the themes of interest. Fare thee well.
I didn't have the negative reaction to your comment as other responders here and I don't hear you aggressively bragging.
I'm an old fart American who has lived in many places in America, rural and urban, and who has been traveling widely for decades on all continents, and not mainly as a tourist, though that too. This is just my personal experience, though it's echoed by quite a few other Americans I know -- that I experience a kind of functional, grounded wholesomeness and cultural sanity when I travel in Europe. It's different in different places and obviously there are similar dissolutions happening there as here in the U.S. But the feeling is so different and feels like such a welcome counter-balance to so much of what is happening here in the U.S.
I'm sorry you feel the need to leave this space. I understand your disappointment. For me the gift of this particular post by Scott is the presence and depth of the various voices that show up here to dialogue with it and with each other.
What as a European envy about America is that things happening. It is not about the quality of everyday life, which can be mostly worse. It is technology, venture capital, invention, Silicon Valley. Shaping the future. Basically, in a way, *power*. They only country that in the big power struggle can prevent Global Universal China from happening.
I find that "functional, grounded wholesomeness" absolutely terrifying, because it's so clearly a product of an enduring, collective trauma from Nazi occupation and World War II. (And stuff before that no doubt, but that's obviously the most salient). It's not like Europe is naturally some calm, easy-going place, I mean it couldn't be further from that. It's just that the last time their passions blew up, they blew up to a level so utterly, unimaginably beyond anything the worst imaginings of Americans can comprehend, that the result is, 80 years later, whole categories of issues that are Not Discussed, that respectable parties never touch, coupled with increasingly aggressive criminalisation of anything that slightly pattern-matches to these taboos, and, as a natural result, a slowly growing undercurrent of terrifying bottled extremism that goes far far beyond what's seriously entertained by the fringes of American thought. And all the while, everyone puts on a happy face. It's so rare to even see Europeans, at least online, even acknowledge this history at all and its effect on their current attitudes, which I think is one of the clearest signs of unresolved trauma.
None of this is remotely healthy. I don't think those of us who live in a place that's never been occupied in anything close to living memory can comprehend the freedom from fear and freedom of honesty that we have.
To me, America looks like a loud, quite obnoxious family that gets into constant arguments and screaming matches over everything. The children fight, wrestle, throw things at each other sometimes. The parents have regular screaming arguments and sound like they're about to kill each other but are still, just barely but still, together. Meanwhile, Europe looks like a family whose children are perfectly polite and well-behaved, whose company seems pleasant at first...until you you hear the mother's whispered threats to the child who almost hinted at a taboo topic, notice the cold shivers and anxious glances when Mom's "former companions" are mentioned, and get snatches of the rumours about where Dad's old friend Miss Black is thought to be buried.
The loud family is definitely far from a healthy and nice home. In fact, the neighbours are constantly on the verge of calling the police when the parents are screaming abuse at each other on a nightly basis. From the neighhbours' perspective, it's probably hard to imagine anything worse, and they'll repeatedly wonder why they can't be like the calm polite second family down the street. And I come from a family that's mostly a lot healthier than both (though with a lot of the family seeming to want to spend every day sitting on the couch drinking beer it definitely has room for improvement) and look on both other families as toxic in their own way.
But if I had to choose between them, I would choose the loud American family where nothing is taboo and everything is a reason to start a fight a thousand times, a million times without a moment's hesitation, because the other family chills me to the very core of my bones.
Nice write — I agree. Europeans, and Germans in particular, still carry a collective trauma 80 years after WWII. Ideally, this lingering trauma serves a purpose: to anchor a deep cultural reflex against another European or pan-European war for at least another 80 years.
That said, we are all shaped by our upbringing and tend to prefer what feels familiar — what we call culture. Culture is not decoration; it emerges as an adaptive survival mechanism for individuals and for groups. And naturally, when many different cultures interact, misunderstandings are unavoidable.
In this context it’s useful to look at the cultural framework developed by Geert Hofstede, the Dutch researcher who identified several dimensions along which national cultures differ — power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, long-term orientation, and, most famously, individualism vs. collectivism.
Across all countries he analyzed, one outlier stood out dramatically:
the United States scored by far the highest on individualism, to the point where “personal freedom and individual autonomy” overwhelmingly outweigh community, hierarchy, or collective obligations in almost any social or political question.
This extreme position doesn’t just shape American behaviour — it also shapes how many Americans interpret other cultures. When you read countries with a radically individualist lens, you inevitably misread societies whose internal logic balances autonomy with communal responsibility in very different proportions. The result is not malice, but massive structural misunderstandings: other cultures appear “irrational” or “inconsistent”, simply because they do not follow the U.S. template of individual choice above all else.
What the last 50 years of open travel in the West have given us is precisely the opposite: the freedom to choose, as individuals, our own preferred mix of these cultural dimensions — how collectivist we want our environment to be, how individualist, how hierarchical, how consensus-oriented.
I did that myself: I moved within Europe from a strongly collectivist environment to a less collectivist, more individualist country — one with more personal freedom, but also more personal responsibility. Yet even here, the level of social cohesion and the expectation that society looks after its members remain far higher than in the U.S.
And we still see the same dynamic across Europe: people migrate into their dream culture, reinforcing the traits of the society they join while also subtly exporting the values of the society they left. Culture isn’t static; it’s a living flow shaped by individual decisions — especially when those decisions are backed by the freedom to move.
Still, people mostly seem to move the other way around. Life in Europe is pleasant. But the big wins of technology, the truly heroic, world-changing stuff happen in the Silicon Valley. America is not better, not by far, perhaps, if one runs a utilitarian calculus, on the whole worse. But so much more interesting. There is more venture capital on the main street of Palo Alto than the whole EU. Things really do happen there. Bad things, good things. But at least not nothing.
Ironically this comment is a great example of how utterly dull some continental Europeans are. One can scarcely imagine a Brit being so offended by so trivial a joke. In fact, one more easily imagines a Brit *making* the joke.
Cool. Still, I identify with the hero of Scott's story who refused to be enlightened. Assuming humans are not designed for an absolute 0 degree of suffering. I fear no pain less bad than at the dentist. Have an appointment on Tuesday.
I’m very grateful that people with more knowledge of Buddhism than Scott have spoken up in the comments to provide better information.
I just want to add my personal perspective as someone who has merely familiarized himself with some of the introductory concepts of Buddhism and who meditates for a short time once every other day or so: I don’t necessarily find that meditation fills me with joy or pleasure or whatever. When meditation feels most “successful”, what happens is I feel a sort of pressure inside the middle of my forehead, my closed eyes can see a dark spot appear there. Then if I’m able to keep going even beyond that, which has happened only a handful of times, I catch a glimpse of my own non-existence, which does have a kind of exciting or ecstatic feeling as I look back on it but not in the moment. In the moment it feels more like a rush or a thrill, like going down the hill of a roller coaster.
Why can't I just sit in a dark room and wirehead myself into perfect bliss?
Assume perfect conditions: it's Sunday morning, you're alone with nothing to do, all your physical needs are met for the moment, you have no worries on your mind. Still, you can never go into bliss-land.
Why? Because "you" are literally an agentic problem-solving loop that your brain runs 24/7.
If you attend to your moment-by-moment experience, there are all these needs that must be met. The needs may be quieter or louder (e.g. being peckish vs. starving), but the stack of needs is always full. Being "okay" or "satisfied" means that current needs are low-volume, not that you're out of needs.
The stack is always full: you can see this when you learn to meditate. Even when there are no immediate physical needs, your brain dutifully supplies more by ruminating on the past and future; you can literally see it making up problems on the spot to fill the stack.
Today, the closest thing we could have to an "artificial consciousness" would be taking an agent like Claude Code and running it 24/7 with an instruction like: "Find problems with my app and solve them." The first part is crucial: the agent is supposed to *always find problems*, and if it doesn't find any it will probably hallucinate / confabulate them.
How do you suppose such an algorithm would "feel from the inside"? (This is just an exercise: I'm not making any claims about artificial qualia.) I think it would feel constantly in tension: just like us*.
This constant tension is dukkha in my understanding. Hence when you understand dukkha, you also understand anatta (no-self) because short-circuiting dukkha is the same thing as short-circuiting the loop, the algorithm that generates "you", which causes the self to drop.
*Where this analogy breaks: in our case the process that fills the needs stack is unconscious, happening in the background. To us, needs just appear in the field of consciousness as a given. What we feel are the needs themselves and the work we do to solve them.
"Splendid, splendid, magnificent!" cried the ACX readers as they attained stream-entry. The gods rained down flowers from heaven. A bald eagle flew into the comment section, and shed a single tear. Then everyone clapped. The name of the commenter? Albert Einstein.
I like this analogy also because it can provide important insights via the software/hardware distinction: optimizing our "software" to cause less suffering will not resolve (some of) our hardware problems. The Buddha himself famously (not) suffered from back pain later in life; Rob Burbea suffered from IBD and died of cancer; Culadasa lived for years with undiagnosed Lyme disease potentially partially because he was so chill and able to just ignore the symptoms for a while.
this is quite well written, when I saw the title I was expecting to have beef with most of the article, but you basically got most of it. Here are some other notes: the jhanas and nirvana aren’t totally different thing, the jhanas are a staircase to nirvana. J8 is an extremely defabricated state and J9 is nirvana.
on “is there anything good” I think kind of? I can get very near nirvana whenever I want in a few seconds (annoyingly that last inch is hard for me) and I mostly don’t. There’s like an artistic interestingness to the activity of things. But nirvana.. is sort of just better in some ways. It also doesn’t really feel like “no life” it feels close to like “full life” or “fully merged with god” or something. It feels far less “anti life” to me than it used to when I thought of it in the abstract
The other thing is as you defabricate conditioning you get closer and closer to nirvana while also sensory clarity goes up and up (less stuff to render?). So it’s actually less like this big trade off of life vs nothingness. If you’re “pro life” you defabricate up until that last inch and the world just gets very beautiful, very jhana-like all the time, thinned out and shimmery, more present, light. Then I guess if you’re a hardcore Theravada (but I don’t really know anyone that is in practice) you go that last inch and try to blink out. But I don’t see a big reason to, being an inch from nirvana gives you all the upside of life with like 99% the upside of nirvana, like orbiting a black hole of goodness without falling in, you just get to enjoy living next to that black hole without the downsides of falling into a black hole
To me the badly translated phrase “life is suffering” started to make more sense when my kids got old enough to verbally complain about being bored despite having rooms full of toys and neighbors’ houses full of their friends. The phrase is still literally false, because of the bad translation, but it became easy to see that suffering is a mindset one adopts, by forming expectations and then attaching to those expectations.
BTW has anyone else here (Scott included) read the book “Why Buddhism is True” by Robert Wright? I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts. I very much enjoyed it.
So, Buddhism is essentially proto-wireheading? I don't see why it's so appealing then, unlike the actual idea of wireheading. Perhaps the lives of ancient Asian peasants were awful enough for it...
Nirvana is just the same life you always had but now when suffering strikes in whatever form, which is always, your point of view automatically shifts to where it doesn't matter. The world of illusion is believing too much in a model of the world and getting stuck in it. That model locks you into a specific point of view. This is good, this is bad. I like this, I don't like this. This goes here, that goes there. Joy and suffering are when things are where they're not supposed to be. In a different model, they're supposed to be somewhere else. All models are fake and some are useful, and that includes Buddhism. It's bad to get rid of world hunger, but good to get rid of the suffering if you're the one that's hungry.
So, one thing I’ve always failed to grasp is… if the end result is permanent bliss regardless of external stimuli, how is that different from wireheading? Are we just teaching ourselves to put our brains into self-wirehead mode here?
That depends on what you mean by wireheading. This is accessing the ground of being in dharmic religions. If you like, you can view it as wireheading plus, sure.
The basic philosophical.problem ancient Hindus were trying to solve was that sorrow inevitably follows happiness in an endless cycle through life. So they looked into finding a higher level of happiness, bliss, that was permanent. It comes from, among other things, defining "I" in a counter intuitive way. Who am I?
I've been studying Advaita, thanks to a friend who is super into this, to really get it. They had philosophical differences with Buddhists but their basic assumptions and the questions they were trying to answer, were the same.
Hindus believe in one universal self (very different from the Christian soul - Alan Watts explains in YouTube). Buddhists in no self (to which Hindus debated this way : when you wake up from deep dreamless sleep, how is there a sense of continuity in who this entity is?).
> when you wake up from deep dreamless sleep, how is there a sense of continuity in who this entity is?
Isn't the source of continuity separate from consciousness? Memories, working memory, my sense of context (year, name, etc), aren't all these just thoughts outside of "my" control?
This is well put; echoing some of Nick's past tweets, we seem to have a "Buddhist endowment" where biologically-healthy minds allowed to self-organize without certain classes of perturbations tend to settle into a state of high harmony (symmetry). This may be contingent upon both our biology and our laws of physics; things didn't have to work this way a priori. But it makes well-being more a matter of subtraction than addition; remove the bad, and you find an ocean of good feeling underneath (bc of thermodynamics, basically).
I also tend to link this with vasocomputation; with less tension (and latches in particular) a nervous system can better self-organize into a thermodynamic minimum high in harmony/symmetry. In some sense this can be read as "humans use the vasomuscular system to control sensations a lot more than other animals, and the ways we do this still has rough edges not yet smoothed by evolution. This gives humans a novel sort of hedonic burden. Buddhism is the observation that we can learn to use this system differently and avoid this burden."
All compounded phenomena are illusory, producing suffering if grasped at or rejected (aversion) by the mundane self. This mundane self is produced by the samsaric causes of this delusion; it is itself empty, just like all compounded phenomena. Everything—thought, memory, sensation, and the perception of self—is impermanent. Empty of inherent existence.
Nirvana is liberation from this delusion, not some stable sensory state for the self. It is beyond the duality of subject and object or observer and observed. Nirvana and samsara are one. Once the mundane self becomes Buddha or transcends these relative samsaric states, the state is bliss only in so far as it is incomparable to a mundane state of happiness, pleasure, or even joy. Our temporary states of joy are as close as we get to glimpsing liberation, so we don't even get hooked on them, as they keep us in samsara. We see that, in fact, if it is in us, we don’t even reject samsara; that rejection merely propels its existence. Liberation is beyond method, concept, or grasping.
But we don't have dharma containers or cultures really right now (it's the degraded age) - so we are all just bypassing. Just don't be an asshole this life and maybe next eon a proper era for practice will emerge. (Or do tantra w a teacher if ya wanna dedicate everything to liberation - 3-4 lives still- rough road lol.
> All compounded phenomena are illusory, producing suffering if grasped at or rejected (aversion) by the mundane self. This mundane self is produced by the samsaric causes of this delusion; it is itself empty, just like all compounded phenomena. Everything—thought, memory, sensation, and the perception of self—is impermanent. Empty of inherent existence.
That’s it exactly (from the emptiness framing). But someone embedded in the scientific materialism frame might read this as nonsensical. Hence, the heat metaphor is useful insofar as it is in language they understand and at least points them to something closer to the truth.
From _What the Buddha Taught_ by Walpola Rahula (from the Theravada tradition).
The first noble truth is Dukkha.
Dukkha has the ordinary meaning of 'suffering', but in addition it also includes deeper ideas such as 'imperfection', 'impermanence', 'emptiness', 'insubstantiality'. It is difficult to find one word to find one word to embrace the whole conception of the term dukkha, as so it is better to leave it untranslated.
The existence of happiness is not denied, but all forms of happiness are included in dukkha. **"Even the very pure spiritual states of dhyāna [jhana] attained by the practice of higher meditation, free from even a shadow of suffering [...], states which may be described as unmixed happiness [...] are included in dukkha."**
In one of the earliest Buddhist scripturess, after praising the spiritual happiness of these dhyanas, the Buddhas says that they are 'impermanent, dukkha, and subject to change. The word dukkha is used explicitly.
"The conception of dukkha may be viewed from three aspects: (1) dukkha as ordinary suffering (dukkha-dukkha), (2) dukkha as produced by change (viparinama-dukkha), (2) dukkha as produced by change (viparinama-dukkha) and (3) dukkha as conditioned states."
"A happy feeling is not permanent, not everlasting. It changes sooner or later. When it changes, it produces pain, suffering, unhappiness." This vicissitude is included in (2) dukkha as produced by change (viparinama-dukkha).
There's a lot more there. The chapter on dukkha is 20 pages, you can read it in one sitting.
To me, there is something unsatisfactory about this explanation. Why can't you reverse the logic and say that the first noble truth is happiness? Sadness is included as viparinama-happiness, because sadness is always impermanent, and you will feel happiness whenever it passes.
Because of the Buddhist view of the usual progress of one who seeks the dharma, that would be viewed as an unskillful presentation. This is bad because, before enlightenment, noone actually "gets it"- some are just trying. But you can view it as such and it's kind of the idea of eg. tantra.
"Life is Suffering" refers to living out of our left hemisphere. If we are able to live from our right hemisphere, then we enter nirvana, a world without suffering. Refer to https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight for an example of this, and Dr. Iain McGilchrist's work on the bi-hemisphere structure of the brain for a scientific understanding of this phenomenon.
Here is my attempt at contextualizing the suffering claim based on David Chapman's writings:
The phrase “life is suffering” is central in Theravada Buddhism, a tradition that has been especially influential in the West.
Theravada is centred on a core dynamic of renunciation: distancing oneself from worldly attachments and desires.
“Life is suffering” isn’t primarily a literal claim about reality. It's a "View", a practice-enabling perspective. It serves a specific purpose within renunciative practice: cultivating aversion to
worldly attachements, seeking purity in detachment. It's a worldview held for pragmatic reasons.
Other forms of Buddhism hold different Views, each one usefully enabling its own kind of practice. Some practitioners adopt different worldviews as they switch between practices, entering a View to support the practice they engage with.
Instead of asking whether these perspectives are correct, it’s more revealing to ask what they do: how do they shape practice?
Rather than evaluating these perspectives on how well they fit into a coherent worldview (if they are correct or not), it's usually more fruitful to look at what the perspectives _do_ to the person holding them (how useful they are).
They are not really about carving reality at its joints, but rather about shaping the holder in interesting ways.
Disclaimer: Buddhism appeared in an extremely competitive religious environment and is brilliantly clever. It is very hard to compare/correlate its lateral ideas to what we used to. Did I get it right? 🤷♂️
It would be very helpful if we had a "Noble truth #0" that is not hidden in commentaries but predates the one about Dukkha and explains how it appears and connects it to one of the few firmly established ontological objects in Buddhism - Karma. We can think of Karma as a universal reward function. The value of this function can be represented in two good/bad classes or a scale as described here though traditionally it is extremely multidimensional (not a singular, quantitative ledger). Dukkha is not an outcome of Karma but rather its fuel that spins the wheel. A being reached nirvana doesn't become infinitely good or reaches absolute zero on a karmic ledger. The difference is that Karma is not applicable to them anymore as they solved the universe and don't need a reward function to minimise the prediction error - Buddhism basically tells that you cannot get rid of your ignorance by grokking leetcode of Karma but it has another solution.
Hm, I heard that dukha is a state of discontent, not strickly speaking suffering. It helps with framing you describe. Even in a joy of sex or drugs you have some discontent.
"An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain."
Maybe the best sentence I have ever read in a blog post. Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from a song, "If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain."
Very nice- Yah the Tibetan approach is even a little more nuanced. "Samsara" is suffering and the heat analogy is great. But there are three types- Manifest suffering (the one everyone calls suffering), changing suffering (things are less bad, like lower temperature. Think- i'm hungry, and now I eat ahh thats better, or I stand, and now I sit, ahh thats better, I'm lonely and now I am married, ahh thats better), and pervasive suffering (grasping or holding on to a separate sense of self, or I, independent of everything and everyone). So the whole this is unsatisfactory until we get rid of that false sense of I, see through the illusion of things, etc. Until then you could still say one is 'better' than the other but its still off.
Its not designed to be pessimistic or negative, but just a way to juxtapose liberation and normal thinking. Another way to call it is instead of 'suffering' it could just be 'not-liberation', but thats not as exciting.
I think Buddhism was invented to stop revolutions. If you think all life is suffering it is no point in trying to improve your life by toppling a tyrannical government. Instead you should just sit still and meditate.
Does this pan out in practice? What percent of people meditate at all in traditional Buddhist countries? Aren't laypeople taught to just do good deeds so they get reborn as a monk, so they can then meditate?
I can't believe I'm here to Aktually this post, but it contains several misconceptions. Only touching a few here:
- "Life is suffering" -> Not the noble truth. 'Suffering/dissatisfaction is inherent in existence' is much closer and means something completely different. It means that by default there's always an undertone of suffering. It also doesn't assert that you can't be happy if you're not a meditator.
- Second big misconception is that there's one Buddhism. Theravada is the more monastic tradition. Yes, it was the "original", although many teaching and suttas have been added over the years. There's vajrayana for example which has very different views.
- Nirvana/Cessation means lights out basically. It's like mental death / no predictions. There's no joy / happiness in Nirvana. It's a temporary state. *When* you come out of Nirvana is when you realize you were in Nirvana. Different traditions assert different things about Nirvana, but you can't walk around and life in Nirvana. Again, some people may claim otherwise, but they may also claim that once you reach Nirvana, you can fly at will, so take it as you will.
- You're not supposed to be an emotionless robot. Again, some of the more extreme highly monastic traditions may claim this, but then they also may claim that their goal is to be "lights out" all the time. Look at the research around Matthieu Ricard or at a picture of the Dalai Lama laughing and it should tell you as much. You're going to feel all your emotions and they are deeper because you're not caught in some mental game fighting them or your situation. There's an assertion that people are biased towards love and joy when they become more enlightened.
I think "life is suffering" and "suffering is inherent in existence" are similar enough that everything in this post applies equally to the second translation.
Not all sects of Buddhism are exactly the same but I think they are similar enough that everything in this post applies to all of them. At least I think there is some core truth that the Buddha got which is encoded in the Noble Truths and that every sect is working on it in their own way. I think "there isn't one Buddhism" is a deepity, and if you want to go this far, I could equally well argue that "there isn't one Theravada" or "there isn't one Burmese Forest tradition of Theravada" or even "there isn't one Buddhist-tradition-according-to-monastery-X". Every category breaks down into slightly different specific examples!
I don't think that all Buddhist traditions say nirvana is exactly the same thing as nirodha-samāpatti, and I think a more standard interpretation views nirvana as the sort of state you are in after enlightenment.
I don't think this post claimed you were supposed to be an emotionless robot; I think it claimed the opposite.
Ok, let's skip over semantics as I agree that the first noble truth's interpretation is debated.
> I think "there isn't one Buddhism" is a deepity, and if you want to go this far, I could equally well argue that "there isn't one Theravada"
I disagree with this. The goals and methods of Theravada and Vajrayana differ, so they might as well be different things. They agree on the 4 noble truths as in there's suffering, grasping is what causes suffering and letting go of grasping is the path out of suffering.
Buddha from the Theravada suttas wouldn't recognize most of Vajrayana as his teachings. There's no emptiness in early Buddhism while that's the core of Vajrayana. Nirvana is the goal of Theravada while Bodhichitta (help all beings end suffering) is the goal of Vajrayana. Theravada practices mindfulness as a continuous dissection of experience so as to untangle subjective experience. After initial concentration practices, Vajrayana tends to practice non-grasping / openness to experience. Djogchen believes you're already enlightened and just need to stop grasping. There are parts of Vajrayana designed to work with emotional energy. Much of Theravada views emotions as an impediment to be shed.
>I don't think this post claimed you were supposed to be an emotionless robot; I think it claimed the opposite.
I meant this is a misconception that people have about Buddhism, not that this post claimed it. But the post does say:
> "But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering."
And I think this is false. As mentioned above, there are advanced practices in some traditions for working with emotions. The suffering part comes in when you fight the arising or passing away of emotions. And I'm not claiming that no Buddhist tradition says all emotions are suffering. There are traditions which claim once you're enlightened, you're beyond all emotions. But this isn't the one true face of Buddhism, hence my assertion that there are irreconcilable differences between the different traditions.
BTW, The Alembic in Berkley has a bunch of meditation programs and I recommend trying out Michael Taft's Thursday night meditation to get a taste of the non-theravada style of meditation. They're all on YT as well. e.g. A recent one relevant to this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHG96hI-vm8
The argument that breaking a group into subgroups is a deepity because we could keep breaking down the subgroups is not a convincing one, even if in this instance Theravada and Vajrayana are similar enough for us to not care about making the distinction (although it seems like a lot of Buddhists in these comments disagree).
Imagine you have a favorite mug. One day while drinking from it, you try and set it down but only get it halfway on the table, it falls and breaks.
If you're like most people, this causes you to suffer, a tiny amount compared to some of the things going on around the world of course, but still suffering. You're likely to castigate yourself for not paying enough attention, when you use a different mug tomorrow you'll look at it regretfully.
But, you don't actually have to do that, there's no divine law set down saying that broken cup must lead to your suffering. You did not consciously choose to cause yourself pain and yet fundamentally every bit of suffering in your life happens because of your mindset. For every bit of sadness, anger or fear you experience there is no universal law that requires it to happen.
And yet you suffer anyway, and this is the nature of life being suffering. We cannot escape it yet we can be "better" by trying to escape it.
But if we want to not be sad when we break our favorite mug, doesn't that mean we can't love it in the first place? Don't we have to flatten out our emotional lives, give up all the tiny moments of joy we took with our mug to avoid the pain of losing it? And isn't that a terrible trade? Isn't there more joy than suffering in this world? If we give them both up we end up poorer as a result.
And the Buddhist here would shake his head and say you have confused detachment for non-attachment. Anyone can detach from the world, people do it all the time it isn't hard. Non-attachment is hard, it is not the natural state of being.
To be non-attached is to look at the mug when it is whole and know that it is already broken. To enjoy every moment with it more because you know it is transitory. To feel more joy because you do not take it for granted or poison it with the dread of its ending. If you could do this for every thing in your life, no matter how big or how small, no matter how trivial or how important then you would have already reached Nirvana.
"This is why trained meditators are always talking about all the cosmic bliss that they feel."
Speaking only from experience, I don't hear this. I knew plenty of old hippies who meditated growing up, and they always associated meditation with peace and serenity. Similarly, I didn't hear people talking about Buddhist monks like their lives are better than sex or heroin or sex on heroin. I really only hear about this view of meditation from your blog. Maybe everyone else has heard this constantly.
"Better than sex or heroin" is usually a reference to jhanas, a special form of deep meditation. There is some debate as to how deep you have to go to call it jhana. In some schools, only a select few experts can attain jhana.
"Likewise, it seems surprising that all life is suffering: even when you’re having sex? Even when you’re on heroin?"
This makes sense to me. Why are you on heroin in the first place? Because you wanted to feel better than your existing circumstances, be that "I'm living a hopeless life in a sink estate" or "I'm an idiot who thinks I can do drugs and avoid the pitfalls": in both instances, you want extra pleasure.
What happens when you're on heroin? Generally, you get addicted. I don't really believe the stories of "I've been on heroin for years and my life is fine and I can give it up in the morning if I want", but set those aside. You get to the point of "no extra pleasure" because now you need heroin to be at the same functional point as you were before you started. Once you get the fix, you enjoy the high for a while, then it wears off and you're scheming how to get your next fix.
And it seems from accounts that addicts don't just stick to one drug, they're often mixing an entire range of different drugs because they have developed tolerances and need more of everything to chase that high.
Do these people look like they're having fun blissful times?
So desire leads to suffering, and we desire more than we have (often more pleasure) even when our lives are seemingly okay. This desire leads to discontent, unhappiness, and yes, suffering because we think "what more is there? I should be getting more. I should have what I was promised".
Then we start chasing that elusive joy, and we end up causing more suffering to ourselves in the pursuit.
Recognise that life is suffering due to desire and cravings, work to cut out that desire, free yourself from illusion, find true reality (for Buddhism, that is nirvana, however that is explained: end of false ego and consciousness, returning to the universal cosmic energy freed of all sense of the self or the I, being in harmony with the telos of the universe *or* retaining individual personhood but becoming enlightened like a buddha).
It's not "there are no good things in life", it's "even the good things are a trap, because they condition us to want more and to be unable to do without them so if we lose them, we suffer".
It's parallel to the story of Caesar and Amyclas, the poor fisherman. Caesar needs to cross over into Italy, but it is a stormy night. He demands that Amyclas ferry him over; the fisherman tries to dissuade him but eventually agrees. Amyclas can defy Caesar even in this slight way because he fears nothing, because he is so poor: he has nothing to lose. He is not afraid of the armies camped on his doorstep because he has no wealth, no possessions, nothing except his boat and his life. Even if Caesar kills him or they drown trying to cross in the storm, losing his life is nothing to fear because he is so poor and wretched, so there is very little to lose if he dies.
Amyclas is free because he is not hag-ridden by the same desires as Caesar, the powerful and ambitious general trying to cross over before his enemies can gather their strength.
“The most popular of Lucan’s figures was Amyclas, the poor fisherman who ferries Caesar from Palaestra to Italy. Lucan uses him as a peg on which to hang the praise of poverty. Amyclas, he says, was not at all discomposed by Caesar knocking at his door: what temples, what ramparts, could boast the like security (V. 527 sq.)? Dante translates the passage enthusiastically in the Convivio (IV, xiii, 12) and recalls it more beautifully in the Paradiso when he makes Thomas Aquinas say that the bride of St Francis had long remained without a suitor despite the fact that he who frightened all the world beside found her unalarmed in the house of Amyclas (XI, 67 sq.)” – C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image"
I remain agnostic about whether this moment of "peak pleasure" or "absolute zero suffering" actually exists as a reachable state rather than it collapsing into a "nonbeing". My intuition is that it does - something like a configuration of the phenomenal field where all field lines are parallel with no self-intersection. How large the "volume of the field that is properly combed" determines *how much nirvana there is*. Bliss is undisturbed being. And any sensation is, at the end of the day, a kind of disturbance.
(I speak from a place where I still, personally, very much enjoy Jhana 1, 2, 3 - but I know over time things calm down and will likely enjoy pure equanimity more and more as I anneal properly)
The dark room avoids external surprise, but it leads to internal surprise. We experience vivid and often frightening hallucinations, and hunger, boredom, loneliness, etc. are, for our phenotype, unexpected states.
I've read (Manfred Clyne, _Sentics_ that while in physics, cold is merely absence of heat, the nervous system detects cold as a distinct sensation. Anyone know whether this is true? Cold certainly seems like its own thing.
I'm not sure whether this affects the argument, but possibly boredom and sensory deprivation are their own sensations.
If I understand him right, he says that valence is a characteristic of each experience, not an experience in itself.
So there aren't different types of valence, there's different types of emotional states that have a high or low level of valence, but valence only differs quantitatively.
I think I agree with him, and imo this means that boredom and sensory deprivation can be different but insofar as they are bad, they are bad in the same way
Absolutely. Only direct apprehension, comprehension and experience beyond (and including) the sensorial frames will reveal- and it really cant be taught- only pointed to. Totally different ontology to logic/logos/western materialism and individualism / obsession w "truth" etc etc
What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.
Tentatively, if the human default is to expect good experiences to be better than they actually can be, then nothing is actually good enough. Life is composed of everything being disappointing.
The only solution is to change or lower expectations.
If you're saying that Buddhism is about lowering expectations, I think I would provisionally disagree?
Suffering, Buddhism says, (I know you know this so forgive me for repeating) comes from clinging, aversion, and delusion.
When we learn to do these things less, we feel freer and more spacious and experience flows more smoothly for us. The ego, or a more rigid idea of "self", is doing this clinging, aversion, and delusion in order to protect us from our fears and unsteadiness in the face of uncertainty, change, old age, illness, and death.
If we can approach these feared things having released more of our habitual defenses, then experience becomes entirely good enough, more than good enough, easy to appreciate and feel satisfied in. Not through lowering expectations, but through releasing our ego-protecting burdens that constrict the spaciousness where enjoyment and appreciation can happen.
One small example: when I went through cancer treatment, very long and arduous and terrifying in places, I felt such gratitude and appreciative joy for the people taking care of me. And I felt such gratitude for being made to face my mortality so deeply and directly and how that burned off my habitual aversion, clinging, and fear. This brought me quite unexpectedly in what is generally considered a terrible experience into states of just profound profound gratitude. It was transformational for me and now on the other side of it, the freedom from fear and the gratitude of it persist in my daily life. Please know I don't say this to boast -- it was all entirely unexpected to me and not the result of any special thing in me. Other than maybe my willingness to open to it a little in some kind of way. I think the opening may have been important, but it wasn't about lowering or changing expectations. And I had wise people helping me open to it in ways I could hear.
If it's our nature to avoid things, we may have trouble accessing that opening-to something hard. And yet, life brings hard experiences right to our doorstep and sometimes we are cracked open by them unavoidably. My mother's death from cancer and my taking care of her in that when I was in my 20s was another experience like that for me. It felt to me that all roads other than opening-towards were closed off to me and so I cracked open, and in the cracking open I found love, grace, calm, gratitude, joy.
Keep in mind that Buddhism evolved in a third world country. It was an attempt to accept the world as it was, in which suffering really was pretty universal. Christianity by contrast set out to remake the world and appears to have succeeded.
Hi Hector, thanks for the question. Of course I only have a few words. Christianity, at least as I see it, did two things. First, it gave hope, meaning, and a sense of purpose and of community to the vast majority of ordinary people in the Roman empire who found themselves trapped in servitude with no way out. It did this by promising that ultimately there was justice in this universe and, consequently, that they would be rewarded in or after death. To buy into that vision required faith of course. In effect Jesus taught by precept and example an ethic of self-sacrifice for the sake of the future.
But at the same time Jesus suggested (said outright?) that this faith and this sacrifice would somehow lay the foundations for a new world free of servitude ("thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven") which, based on the evidence, has actually been achieved (however imperfectly) at least in the former lands of Christendom.
It is all based on capitalism , capital itself being little else than "the accumulated crime and sacrifice of centuries, plus interest." (See the famous book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.) In other words Christianity took this evil (servitude)and turned it into something good (capital). It redeemed the time in the words of St. Paul, by making a virtue out of necessity.
That's pretty clumsy. See here for a more precise statement of the same idea: https://shorturl.at/mplH5
You are missing the point of Buddhism and its practice. While meditating, Buddhists accept the reality as it is, what they observe in their mind and body. But that is just the 1st STEP towards understanding the truth, take BACK control of our mind, and reduce our suffering through the practice of mindfulness. What you are saying is a MASSIVE understatement.
Buddha and his teachings has revolutionized a major part of the world and transformed beings internally. During 6 BC I would argue that the "Third world country" you are referring to where Buddhism began was actually an intellectual and philosophically very advanced.
And how did Christianity remade the world exactly?
By prosecuting Galileo? By telling the world that the earth was at the center of the universe? By telling that sun revolves around the earth?
"Life is suffering?" Why not "Life is joy?" The analogy of "cold is the absence of heat" that we notice when heat is reduced applies very well to "suffering is the absence of joy." To be alive is to be, and to experience the remarkable universe in which we find ourselves.
The vast majority of people whom I hear complaining about the suffering of life remind me of someone who enters a lottery, won $100,000, and then is bitter s/he didn't win the million dollar prize.
The economist Julian Simon wrote an entire book on this, "Good Mood," about how we perceive our expectations vs. our actual situation influences our happiness, and about how more conscious and thoughtful analyses of these can actually increase our joy. Maybe the "heat," or joy, is there, but we fail to notice it because we tell ourselves "life is suffering."
I really think he should be practicing Vipassana meditation while studying Buddhist teachings, otherwise he will be misinterpreting and misunderstanding the teachings.
I don't mean this comment as an argument against the techno-Buddhist position, because I'm sure that I don't understand it yet. But I'm writing this in hopes that someone can correct my confusion.
I don't think a single dimension of happiness/suffering captures what I find important in my life, but I also don't think the standard two-dimensional model of suffering and happiness works either.
For me, happiness comes in two very different types. Type 1 happiness consists of things that feel pleasurable while you're doing them, and type 2 happiness consists of things that feel pleasurable after you've done them.
A prototypical example of type 1 happiness could be eating ice cream. For me, it's important for my wellbeing to have a certain amount of type 1 happiness occasionally, but I quickly reach a point of satiety.
All of the things I value the most in my life are type 2 happiness, and my actual experience of them is usually closer to suffering than it is to type 1 happiness.
Some examples:
- Strenuous physical exercise. Runners will usually tell you that trying to run a new personal best in a 5K is a miserable experience, and the only way to succeed is to keep pushing yourself harder when every part of your body wants to stop. But somehow we suffer through it and then can't wait to do it again.
- Debugging code. My dominant emotions while I'm coding are generally confusion and rage, but I get an emotional high after I finally understand a problem and fix it.
- Raising kids. I currently have two toddlers, and there are brief moments of joy, but frustration and boredom are much more common. Yet there's nothing I'd rather do with my life.
I imagine enlightenment would somehow allow me to do all of these things without experiencing emotions of pain, rage, and frustration. But I don't actually want to remove those - they're essential parts of the experience.
And the jhanas sound like a supercharged type 1 happiness, which simply isn't very appealing. I'm uninterested in infinite bliss for the same reason that I wouldn't plug in to Nozick's experience machine. Namely, how is this going to help me write better code?
I'm not a techno-Buddhist (my experience in this area is entirely analog) but I'll give it a go.
> Namely, how is this going to help me write better code?
It probably won't! Or, if it does, that would be a second or third order effect, downstream of what those affable Bodhi tree-huggers are talking about.
Regarding your categorization of "Type 1" and "Type 2" happiness, those are good ways to think about ordinary life, but you will need a more precise, higher fidelity view of your moment to moment experience to really grok what is being talked about. A framework like the four foundations of mindfulness can be used, though there are others that are equally valid. There is no real substitute for direct experience here but, essentially, in this framework each moment of your conscious experience can be broken down in four different forms, or channels, of input into the field of consciousness (field of consciousness in this sense just means the entirety of everything you experience at a given moment). The four "channels" in this model are, roughly, sensory input, hedonic valence, emotion, and thought. So in one moment you might experience the raw sensation of an itch on your arm, an annoyed & non-verbal desire to scratch it and the thought 'A mosquito bit me'. This would be input from all four channels more-or-less simultaneously (not literally, but close enough for our purposes).
Your "Type 1" happiness is positive hedonic tone connected to a select sensory inputs. "Type 2" is more complex, but, if you look closely, it is experienced as thoughts, as remembrance of past moments, the moments having combinations of all four channels of input, in response to which you experience positive valence + emotions + thoughts of meaning, connection, accomplishment, etc.
You might ask, "But how is Type 2 happiness suffering? It feels like the exact opposite!" Good question! Different traditions put different spins on it, but the answer that resonates best with me is: It is like a hot coal that you do not know you are holding. You do not know you are holding it because of a delusion, the core of which is that you believe that there is a continuous, independent you that will be okay if you can secure enough of this happiness, or meaning, or accomplishment or whatever. This is incorrect. This delusion is analogous to our understanding of aging and death. We all know, intellectually, that we will grow old, sick, and die (in that order, if you're lucky!) but when one of these things ACTUALLY happen to you, or nearly happen in the case of death, it is very surprising!
None of this is to say that you shouldn't seek out meaning and connection in life. Just the opposite, these are the best things in life. But you will always be trapped by your delusion unless you take the time to actually see. To look and to know it, directly. It is possible to drop the hot coal, even if only for a moment at first. Having done so, you will never forget it.
I genuinely hope that was helpful. Happy to discuss further if you (or anyone) want. I spent 4-5 years obsessed with this stuff before ~~samsara~~ *er,* ~~children~~, *uh* other responsibilities led me to put it down for a time.
> But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss?
Probably because the brain isn't predicting that nothing will happen. At least so long as it hasn't been trained to.
The simplest way to reduce prediction error seems to me a highly regular and highly familiar environment. But I doubt 20 years old the same assembly line would produce much bliss either.
1. As some have noted, Buddha didn't say "Life is suffering". Instead he said: "Birth is suffering; old age is suffering; illness is suffering; death is suffering; being coupled with the disliked is suffering; separation from the liked is suffering; not getting what you wish for is suffering. "
2. There's indeed some confirmation of the "temperature view" in the original Buddhist suttas.
Most notably in Dhammapada: "There is no fire like lust, no crime like hate. There is no ill like the body, no bliss higher than Peace (Nibbāna)."
Note that here (and in countless other examples) passion (and hence suffering) is described as fire and Nibbana, the highest happiness - as peace, immobility, cessation - but also oftentimes as the coolness.
It could be an artifact of life in India where there no such thing as "too cold", but on a deeper level coolness represents stilling, which was obvious even in the ancient times for whoever watched boiling water cooling down.
If you think about it, it's all there in that single phrase - "there's no higher happiness than peace". It is mind boggling and certainly goes against default human perspective. Default not just culturally, but also existentially.
3. In trying to flatten all mental life to one dimension and trying to objectify this dimension, your perspective (both in this particular article, but also more generally in rationalists take) is losing one key Buddhist opposition: the mind (attitude, view) vs the world ( 6 senses).
The suffering is not out there in the world, as something you can measure.
Suffering is a function of a view, of an attitude *towards* the senses (including thoughts and emotions).
As one sutta states (MN 75) our default view where through valuing sensual pleasures we desire them and endulge in them we're like leper who covered in open wounds is trying to alleviate his suffering by "cauterising his body over a burning charcoal pit".
That charcoal pit (sensual object) is factually painful and once the leper receives medicine and is healed he would run away from the pits. Here's the key passage:
“Master Gotama, that fire is now painful to touch, hot, and scorching, and previously too that fire was painful to touch, hot, and scorching. For when that man was a leper with sores and blisters on his limbs, being devoured by worms, scratching the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, his faculties were impaired; thus, though the fire was actually painful to touch, he acquired a mistaken perception of it as pleasant.”
“So too, Māgandiya, in the past sensual pleasures were painful to touch, hot, and scorching; in the future sensual pleasures will be painful to touch, hot, and scorching; and now at present sensual pleasures are painful to touch, hot, and scorching. But these beings who are not free from lust for sensual pleasures, who are devoured by craving for sensual pleasures, who burn with fever for sensual pleasures, have faculties that are impaired; thus, though sensual pleasures are actually painful to touch, they acquire a mistaken perception of them as pleasant."
As a sidenote, there's a very similar passage in Platos' Philebus, where Socrates repudiates hedonist view by bringing up need for scratching:
“Would you say that the pleasure of scratching, if someone is very itchy, is good and belongs to happiness?”
Even though the itching seems pleasant for someone who's very itchy, their overall state is of suffering for sure.
This also explain the "Dark Room Jhana" problem. Whether sense objects are there or not is not an issue. It's your view towards them that is the problem. Just like the fact that you're separated from the loved one doesn't make someone stop missing them - on the contrary.
As long as the view that puts value in external, sensual objects maintained, there's no freedom from the painfulness of the desire.
As the consequence, once there's no desire towards such objects and towards sensual pleasure, one can still experience unpleasant sensations and emotions, but it doesn't cause suffering. This goes against the idea of flattening everything to one dimension. Within the container of the right view, right attitude there's still space for pleasant of unpleasant emotions.
The peace is the function of the overall view, that mind that knows it cannot be touched, because it's not dependent existentially on the fleeting phenomena.
Prediction error is important, but it's not the end all and be all of everything the brain is doing. Emotions are not unidimensional; there are specific brain regions, activity states, and neurotrasnmitters/neuromodulators associated with specific emotional states. These things can generally be upregulated and downregulated with respect to some baseline.
Expectation/reward matching is part of this process, but some things are most simply explained by basic stimulus-response models: you eat something tasty, a pleasurable brain state is activated.
When the Buddha became enlightened, it is said he recollected all his previous existences. Enlightenment then is the experience of recollecting one's previous incarnations. If one has this personal experience, reincarnation, as an idea, moves from being just a theory-- open to internal debate-- to a lived experience known as thoroughly as the memory of getting out of bed this morning. Not a beautiful metaphor or a backwards superstition, but something that actually happens to people. Other propositions begin to flow. Reincarnation is real. The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth: also not made up. Life is having to go through it all over again, lifetime after lifetime.
I mean I'm far from being a Buddhist, but I do think it's useful to model suffering as the default state of life, and every deviation from that as an aberration.
For one thing, the major issue with modern life is a mismatch between reality and expectation. Life is *objectively* pretty good but a bunch of people I know are miserable, because they expected it to be better. Just like people in Florida think Montana is too cold to live in, the hedonic treadmill doesn't care how much better their life is than some theoretical other life. It wants the problems to go away. All the problems. Forever.
If we define suffering as "having any problems whatsoever" then yes, your life is suffering. Even while having sex. Even while on a jet ski. Even if someone gives you a trillion dollars for some reason.
Another reason the life is suffering framing is useful is that in an objective sense, no matter how much sex and jet ski time you get, the universe is entropic and everything important to you is trying as hard as it can to turn into an evenly distributed smear of dead energy all the time. That's a natural law of the universe and while we might eventually get *very good* at making it happen slower, we'll never stop it. I'm not big on the "if something's temporary it's worthless" framing here, but the fact that this is happening even during the best day of your life means that some amount of suffering permeates even your best experiences and best memories. You're either in slight emotional/physical/spiritual pain all the time or doing some work to avoid being in pain all the time. If tomorrow I win the lottery I'll win the lottery, my grandmother will be dead, I'll have mild back pain cuz I'm 40, and one day my daughter will have to reckon with my passing.
So almost all religions (and most secular worldviews) start with the assumption that we're in some fallen state and then offer a mental reframe to the obvious conclusion that bad things happening doesn't make your life worthless. It's not that we don't know this conclusion is obvious, it's that our brain isn't wired to focus on it consistently. It needs to let you know about the bad back and the child rearing way more than it needs to remind you that life occurring at all in an essentially entropic universe so that you can taste ice cream is a miracle.
“I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question.”
Why not seek to find this out before writing this piece? It seems like without it there’s a significant risk that you will incorrectly frame the problem or misunderstand the opposing arguments.
People with this position definitely exist (I personally know one). I don't actually care if they are Buddhist, it's more important for me if they are AGI-researchers.
I'm with you Sam. There is a lot of proliferating misunderstanding of really basic Buddhist concepts that's been going on in the West for decades. Including in models of psychotherapy as well (all of "mindfulness" framed clinically or in a self-helpy way).
You raise an interesting broader question that I hear as: what do we owe an extensive and long-lasting lineage of thought and practice in terms of engagement with it before we begin to express opinions about it or to characterize it as this or that kind of thing?
I think that must be the blogger's quandary, or at least blogging on very wide-ranging subjects where one has little knowledge base. For me, there is the need for humility entering these well-trod paths. What's getting put forth here and in many of the comments are really basic misapprehensions. Scott has a remarkable wide-ranging and nimble mind and I'm glad to get to read his writings. But there are areas of surprising overreach and I have noticed that this is a regular one of them.
Right. To be fully alive is to have dissatisfaction as a driver. To be in a dynamic condition. It’s the push to go beyond the static condition of complacency. William Blake writes “Without contraries is no progression.” But dissatisfaction does not describe the entire state of being alive. Only an essential component of change.
I get you, but buddhist do not see that kind of happiness as positive
Happiness and sadness are seen as different faces of the same coin. When you feel happy, you will unavodally feel sad by contrast (even in a neutral situation) so it's not an ideal situation and will lead to Suffering later on
The ideal situation for buddhists is another kind of "happiness" that most people that do not meditate or do hallucinogens never experienced. It can be described more like bliss/presence, an absence of boredom, pure joy of being that does not have any sub consequent negative effect
I’m hopefully joining a cacophony here, but “life is suffering” is a mistranslation of the first noble truth. The most common translation used by modern translators is “there is suffering”
Assume the following: discontentment is a parameter of human existence that varies from "perfectly content, I feel no desire to take even a single iota of action to change my current state" to "every fiber of my being feels like it's being horribly tortured and is demanding I do something to stop it". Where that parameter happens to be set at any particular point in time can be said to control the type of behavior that people exhibit at that point in time. As discontentment increases from zero, it results in more and more effectual behavior (until the level of suffering begins to adversely impact one's ability to effectuate change). This discontentment provides the motive force that propels people to effectuate change upon their environments, in an attempt to reduce the discontentment.
"Life is suffering" could then be translated to, "To be alive is to have a nonzero amount of discontentment".
The point is not to stop experiencing joy, but to recognize its impermanence and not be bothered when the joy ends. Or when it doesn't start. That's Dukkha 101. Then it gets complicated with the whole anatman thing, but that's less relevant to the inquiry of "is Buddhism about not having fun".
Couldn’t we also say that joy and suffering are like the north and south poles of a magnet? My point is that we can pick all kinds of scientific metaphors to explain human experience, and that doesn’t make them accurate. Joy and suffering are experienced through two *different* regulatory pathways in the brain and body.
The premise seems confused to me. Like you’re taking a religious phrase spoken by Buddha, then asking a techno-rationalist guy with partial relation to the original Buddhism, and running with that. Like you’d never accept the religious explanation, so you’re talking with someone who says something you can actually engage with.
For what it’s worth, Joseph Goldstein, a more religious Buddhist, talks about life is suffering as well and addresses this point. In more traditional Buddhism, life is suffering because it’s unreliable and temporary. The allegory is more like how you can’t really stay happy through earthly sources. You can’t simply eat more and more chocolate cake to get happier and happier. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying chocolate cake, but you’ll inevitably lose the pleasure you gain from it. I think this is a difference from techno-rationalist Buddhism but mostly a different emphasis, I’m not sure they’d disagree with each other on their points
Can we define the term more precisely? When I read it, I assumed it referred to people who apply Buddhist techniques while ignoring the supernatural beliefs. That definition is incompatible with "tripping without drugs". Not sure what you mean by 2. But maybe my definition of "techno-rational Buddhism" is wrong, and what I mean is called something else? E.g. "secular buddhists".
> But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering.
Some quick research using your favorite LLM would have shown you that this statement is categorically false. Or were you setting us up for a strawman argument?
The Pali Canon and the Abhidhamma describe a range of emotional states other than suffering. They don't necessarily map one-for-one to the modern Western list of emotional states. For example, on the positive side, there are pīti (joy), muditā (the joy that comes from seeing other people's happiness), and mettā (loving-kindness towards others). Most importantly, there's karunā (compassion, as in empathy for the suffering of others). Notice that some of the things Buddhists list as emotional states are what we'd consider basic emotional feelings (such as simple joy and anger) that arise from interpersonal relationships.
There are various types of tranquility, as well as other positive emotional states. Additionally, there are negative emotional states. But the suffering that's mentioned in the First Noble Truth is based on the idea that loss, unhappiness, illness, and death will eventually catch up with us, no matter how comfortable our lives. So, all those positive emotions will evaporate, and unhappiness is our base and final state.
Moreover, Buddhism emerged at a particularly tumultuous juncture in Indian (and Eurasian) history. The Bronze Age civilizations had collapsed several centuries before, and the Earth's climate had cooled, spurring tribal migrations, famine in farming cultures, and warring petty kingdoms. The archaeological record of India shows that the economic output on the Indian subcontinent was at its nadir during the period when Buddhism (and Jainism) arose. Life was shit back then, and Buddhism offered a way to develop equanimity when everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
The closest I've come to understanding this is thinking "desire is wanting the world to be in a particular state, suffering is when the world isn't in the state you want, life entails desire entails suffering"
Your very first premise is not quite correct. The Noble Truth is not "Life IS suffering". The truth is more closer to "there is suffering in life". The full expansion of the First Noble Truth is "birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering." The list goes from most gross, to most refined types of suffering. The most subtle "the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering", COULD be interpreted as "Life is Suffering" but this subtle understanding of suffering is meant to lead one to open up to Nibbana and total cessation.
The fundamental issue here with the metaphor can be expressed in western terms as confusing ontology with phenomenology. This would be recognized fairly immediately as incorrect by someone with a passing knowledge of Buddhist theology because it implies that the goals of Buddhism are basically hedonic. Hedonism seeks to eliminate the FEELING of suffering. Buddhism seeks to eliminate the self, transcend existence, and therefore escape the impermanent world. The focus on suffering as an end state is an error. To desire to suffer less is a form of taṇhā, a craving for something, which you must seek to eliminate. Any teaching that presupposes a continuing subject who ought to exist in a better state is, by classical standards, non-Buddhist and a form of avijjā (ignorance).
Life is suffering is a translation of sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha which means literally "all put together things are a bad fit." Sabbe is all. Saṅkhārā is san (together) plus khārā (to make/do). Du is "bad, difficult" and kha is "hole, space." So the specific claim is that all created things are a bad fit. Meaning unstable, not suited for purpose, unsatisfactory. Creation in this sense is similar to Christian creation: all of existence.
It's one of three phrases, the Three Marks of Existence. And it's actually not the one that gets top billing either theologically or in the actual text. The first one is actually sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā, "all creation is impermanent" which underlines the other two. This is more important to Buddhist philosophy than dukkha. And aniccā isn't that hard to translate. The last one is sabbe dhammā anattā, all things are not self. Dhammā is fairly hard to translate. It usually ends up being translated as something like Law in the broadest sense, the order of the universe.
So it's three claims:
Everything is impermanent
Existence is a bad fit
The self does not exist
From there you spin out Buddhist beliefs about predestination which often end up much stronger than even the strongest Calvinists because they not only don't have to belief in free will, they have to NOT believe in free will. Christian predestination has to constantly be moderated by a theological commitment to free will. Buddhist belief in free will have to be moderated by a theological commitment to a lack of self and a mechanistic view of cause and effect (paṭiccasamuppāda). (Islam has the same tendency against free will but more moderately than Buddhism.)
The Mahayana tradition has sukha ("good fit", the opposite of dukkha) which can lead to jhāna. However, this is simply the belief that you must escape the world in a temporary, limited way to eliminate self more efficiently. Jhana is a way to leave the world, not the goal. And only one of several. Some Buddhisms even recreating close analogs to heaven like the Pure Land where you continuously entered a meditative state and reincarnated until you transcended the cycle. But it was never itself the goal. Very explicitly you must not allow yourself to desire jhāna.
This has been reinterpreted by some western traditions to provide something far more personalist, emotional, therapeutic, and less literal. This is not an eastern tradition. It's a fusing of western enlightenment and romantic individualist traditions with Buddhism. It inserts empiricism, psychology, and individualism into Buddhism which is basically lacking in the actual Asian tradition. It mostly happened in the 1960s onward in California. In doing so they basically reinvented hedonism. Which sounds like a dunk but I mean that strictly: hedonism, the actual Greek philosophy.
Epicurean hedonism basically believes that you achieve a flourishing life through ataraxia, literally "undisturbedness." The elimination of suffering through the elimination of excess desire. Some pre-Christian western pagans even had a belief in reincarnation. "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul." Exactly the temperature model you're pushing here.
I am increasingly convinced that Buddhism (which is a religion with a rich theology) benefits immensely in upper class liberal circles from being novel and distant. So they can both turn it into the shape they want (and imagine it's ancient) and have a spirituality that doesn't feel 'conservative' like their own traditions. It's theologized secularism with an eastern gloss.
If you actually engage with Buddhism you find basically all of the same things they supposedly object to in Christianity. Some of them even more so. For example, in practice Buddhism is MORE hierarchical than Christianity and LESS egalitarian. If you are born as a poor woman then that is your karma and your job is to live in that and NOT imagine yourself as equal to your master. That's a form of desire. It completely lacks the sense of everyone having a soul that is equally valuable to God. Different classes, races, and genders also have different karmas in a basically hierarchical way. Some later traditions softened this but they had to awkwardly edge around black letter canon about gender or class rules.
I don’t think “suffering” as redefined in the temperature model matches “suffering” as used in colloquial English.
Colloquially, if I inflict pain and pleasure on someone in equal quantities (say, by pricking their finger and giving them a massage), their net wellbeing is unchanged, but their suffering has increased. On the temperature model, however, “suffering” is unchanged.
The temperature model is satisfactory, logically, but I worry it redefines “suffering” as something more akin to net wellbeing, which would in turn make our initial response to the claim “life is suffering” (oh no!) misleading - “life is net wellbeing” (or perhaps, “life is suboptimal net wellbeing”) is not nearly as evocative, but is probably a better fit to the manner in which “suffering” is used in the temperature model.
This entire post hinges on "Life is suffering". That's not the first noble truth. The first noble truth is: In life there is suffering. If I google the four noble truths and go through link by link not a single one of the says life is suffering. They say, "suffering in our lives", "there is suffering in life", "suffering exists".
Nirvana isn't some void of no emotion. The goal isn't to feel nothing. As a human being, you will experience emotions. There will be emotions like sadness, anger, disgust, happiness, anxiety, etc. You can't simply stop these emotions, they must be felt. The point is to not get attached to your emotions. Another way to think of it is that you aren't becoming your emotions. Just because you feel anger doesn't mean you become the anger. Instead you are an observer of the anger. You are detached from the anger. Then at some point, the anger goes away. Life is constant change, sometimes you'll feel sad, sometimes you'll feel happy, they will never last forever. You can't attach to and forever hold onto bliss. The state of nirvana is primarily acceptance. Accepting your sadness in the present moment and not assigning meaning to it. Specifically not assigning the meaning of: this is bad, I don't want it. Because if you do then you suffer. Sadness isn't something to be avoided, the avoidance is what causes the suffering because now you have a desire for the world to be other than the way it is (in Buddhist terms this relates to the 3 poisons: desire, aversion, ignorance. Multiple ways to say the same thing).
Meditation isn't numbing yourself to stimuli. The point of calming the mind is to exist only here in the present moment. You are sitting and breathing, letting the thoughts go, not attaching to them. They come and they go. Your emotions come and go. We don't assign meaning to any of it. And if you do this frequently, when there is external stimuli you can respond to it in the present moment without the experience of pervasive suffering because you aren't assigning meaning to it. Instantaneous acceptance of the world and your emotions followed by instant response. This is also why many Buddhists abstain from drugs or alcohol. There is no need to numb the experience of life, it's just life. I'm quite confident nearly everyone on planet Earth has experienced Nirvana before. I like to describe it as a state of flow. When you are one with whatever you are doing, perhaps a hobby like playing music. To improvise requires letting go of anything you just played and only living with the current note. Most people experience a state of flow for a limited time. The concept of enlightenment is being in that state at all times, life as a state of flow. At yet you can't cling to that either. You can't "achieve" enlightenment. It's not something to be checked off a todo list. The reverse of not being in a state of enlightenment isn't a failure. There is no meaning. I don't exist in a permanent state of enlightenment, far from it. There are few people who do. But those people still feel emotion. You really think the Dalai Lama never experiences happiness?
This sentence is a bunch of bullshit "But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering". You aren't even in the same hemisphere with this one. This whole post is putting words into other people's mouths. "According to the Buddhists, Buddhists are asserting". This is not an argument in good faith. Additionally these techno-Bay-area-Buddhists seem like terrible sources of information because this is not the first post I've read where the dharma (Buddhist teachings) is so drastically misunderstood. There are thousands of years of teachings, hundreds of texts, and more than enough metaphors trying to describe these ideas. This temperature argument is not a very high quality addition.
An aside on suffering: there are different kinds of suffering and you can't avoid all of them. The suffering of pain like breaking a bone isn't something can be avoided, even if you are in a state of nirvana. The suffering of loss like losing a loved one can't be avoided either. Detachment doesn't mean you don't love. Detachment is the absence of clinging. If a loved one dies you can think of it as skipping the 5 stages of grief and going right to acceptance. You'll still be sad, but you don't have all this denial and anger that comes from attachment. That kind of suffering can be avoided. That kind of suffering is called pervasive suffering and that's what Buddhists try to free themselves from. Accept the broken bones, accept the loss, accept your own death. You don't need to cling to your house, your job, democracy, etc. Nothing is permanent. And once you realize you'll never be able to hold onto anything permanently no matter how hard you try, all you're left with is the present moment. You'll never have anything except the present moment. That's the point of meditation and that's the state of enlightenment.
Finally because I'm seeing it in the comments: Buddhists aren't uncaring husks independent of the world. Exactly the opposite. A core teaching of Buddhism is interdependence. The idea of "oneness". You don't need an acid trip to come to this realization (although it can help). It's also why detachment doesn't mean you don't love. You love as much as possible because you are everything. "You are something the whole Universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing". The love you give comes back to you because now the world has more love in it, and you are part of the world (karma, not a cosmic justice system).
Life consists of a series of challenges - problem, resolution, fruits.
The fruits of the challenge are never FULLY satisfactory - you can never complete a task, and then say "I have no need to complete any other task." This runs counter to lived experience - if you accomplish your main professional goal, are you going to stop eating?
The conceit is that there is only one true form of satisfaction since all others are subject to temporal or spatial constraints.
The Buddha completed the challenge whose fruit is no need for further challenges. Permanent satisfaction - I daresay it's not possible in other contexts.
Addendum - the idea of Jana being better than sex is misleading imo. Is listening to your favorite song better than sex? Are the five minutes you are awake in bed after waking better than sex? Is being released from prison better than sex?
The idea of comparing these experiences to meditative absorptions is actually obscuring in my opinion. Getting released from prison and tasting chocolate ice cream both have positives, but the qualitative gulf in those experiences is enormous.
Take Buddhists at their word - if jhana is so subtle and powerful, comparing it to sex only serves to anchor your concept in familiar experiences.
I am a Buddhist, and I can confirm. There is only one objective kind of experience, suffering (which is not the best translation of the term, but it'll work for now). Whenever you're happy, you're just suffering less than you are used to.
(which leads to a very interesting rebuttal of the repugnant conclusion, which is that utility is entirely contained in the below-zero interval).
Another analogy: when you're sick, you realize you take for granted how good it feels to be healthy. The day after you recover completely has a niceness that it wouldn't the day before being sick.
Tibetan Buddhist here. I have an introductory (basic) teacher qualification from the lineage I studied in.
In general, Buddhism is something you do, more than something you believe in: written teachings are pointers, rather than the point. You aren't really expected to 'get' the Four Noble Truths by reading them and discussing them intellectually. Better to take them as a starting point for inquiry and then bring any confusion to the cushion. Understanding does come from within, even if it's a cliche to write that.
Think about the difference between reading about someone winning a marathon, and actually going out there, training hard and trying to win one yourself.
As they say, "shut up and meditate!" and yes, indeed this is an unsatisfactory answer ;-)
This post seems to be claiming everything is just one spectrum of suffering, and the Buddhist goal is the maximum blissful state at the lowest end of the spectrum of suffering. I'm no expert on Buddhism but I think the Buddhist claim is actually the opposite of this - they want people to escape from the ordinary existence of living on this spectrum of pain/pleasure where one runs from aversions and chases cravings, and to move beyond it, eventually to a state of ambiguous existence.
Many say that "dukkha" better translates to "unsatisfactoriness" rather than "suffering". The Buddhists say people chase things thinking it will provide lasting pleasure, but everything is temporary, and people become habituated to all pleasures. Even the Jhanas states themselves - the first two are extremely pleasurable, but the meditator is expected to go beyond them to the equanimity of the fourth jhana, beyond sadness or happiness or pain or pleasure. Later the meditator even goes into higher jhana states of such as the seventh and eight states of "base of nothingness" and "neither perception nor non-perception". If the goal of Buddhism was bliss, you would stop in the first and second jhana states. But in traditional Buddhism, in the highest state (of the Arahant) one escapes from attachment to the Jhana states too. Their goal is to internalize the emptiness and unsatisfactoriness of everything. Their ultimate goal is parinirvana at death - which is the escape from the cycle of rebirth and is compared to a fire going out, without a clear position on whether there's continued existence afterwards.
"It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things". If the traditional Buddhist view is negative about life, there's no need to change what they're saying. Buddhism demonstrates how many things people chase are more temporary than expected, but one can still have a more positive view of these temporary pleasures than the Buddhists do. One can reject their worldview of reincarnation and still accept their practical observations and techniques for understanding experience and being less caught up in craving and aversions. I think many modern Buddhists do this, but the core idea still involves moving beyond the spectrum of suffering rather than staying caught within it.
I notice that often, even when I am supposed to be having fun, I am actually going around trying to set up the perfect scenario for me to enjoy myself, but something is almost always missing. I wonder if nirvana, if it exists, is something like complete peace with the moment and a sense that everything is as it should be, forever. The total absence of dissatisfaction, which is heat.
Haven’t read all the comments so this has probably been pointed out already, but the “dark room“ example is a misunderstanding of the predictive model. Among the many variables that the brain is tracking are things like sunlight exposure or blood sugar, and so doing nothing in a dark room will in fact generate a lot of error/surprisal as they fall out of their expected range.
I don't think that view is at all distinctive to Buddhism. When I was first looking at economics, I encountered Ludwig von Mises's account of "utility" as being the relief of felt unease or dissatisfaction; a year later, in a course on later Greek philosophy, the Epicurean concept of ataraxia, or absence of mental disturbance, and its differences from Aristotelain eudaemonia. I note, for example, that Epicurus thought that a good life was one of modest and easily satisfied wants, and that learning to want more was imprudent. There is at least a family resemblance of those ideas to Buddhism, or perhaps a case of convergent evolution (though I would refer you to the Existential Comics dialogue between Buddha and Hume for an examination of how far the convergence goes).
The thing that strikes me as dubious about this account is that it seems to treat pleasure and pain as degrees along a one-dimensional continuum. In those terms it's perfectly possible to say that all pleasure falls short of possible greater pleasure, and thus contains an element of dissatisfaction or frustration that could be regarded as pain. Though no one seems to argue that all pain falls short of possible greater pain, and thus contains an element of relief that could be regarded as pleasure, so that Paolo and Francesca can be relieved that their punishment is less harsh than that of Muhammad, who can be relieved that his punishment is less harsh than that of Judas Iscariot (in Dante's account of Hell).
But it seems that pleasure and pain are really different things functionally. Pleasure is a quale that shapes behavior on an ongoing basis, by acting as a reward and an incentive. But pain is more of an interrupt signal, one that tells us to set aside our pursuit of pleasure or of whatever other rewards we aim at, and drop everything to escape from something that's harming us. (Admittedly, human beings can learn to enjoy capsaicin, or spanking, or piercings, but that seems secondary.) Putting this two things as degrees on the same continuum seems like some sort of category mistake.
The first noble truth does not have "life" in it, it says "There's stress & suffering" (as "dukkha" includes the whole range). And then the nibbana is the unconditional happiness that does not die, quite the opposite of gray mist. Buddhism is the most optimistic religion of them all: you can reach deathless happiness through your own efforts.
Perhaps it's just that, well Buddhism was invented a long time ago. That quote is old. And thus the quote was more true when it was first said than it is today.
Years ago I made up a philosophical movement of the future for the Transhuman Space setting of GURPS: The ataractic movement, whose founding idea was that all actions motivated by the brain's chemical reward mechanism were addictive and led to self-destructive behavior. The ataractics taught various methods of conducting your life to minimize chemical reward and to avoid the fallacy of thinking "this made me feel wonderful, so it must be true." Other people in the setting often nicknamed it "neural Buddhism." I wonder how accurate the comparison is?
I think there is some kind of meaningful zero point on the joy-suffering scale, it's the point at which you're ambivalent about whether you'd choose the present experience versus temporary oblivion.
If a genie offered you the opportunity to skip the next N minutes, would you take it? Life will go on and you'll do the same things, but you won't subjectively experience those minutes. Sometimes the answer is clearly yes -- if I'm really sick or injured I'd be happy to just skip the next few days until I'm better. Sometimes the answer is a less clear yes, like if I'm on a fourteen-hour flight maybe I'd have dinner and watch two movies and then skip to the top of the descent. Other times I'm a bit bored but would rather experience it than skip it, like a typical work day. And some experiences are fantastic and I wouldn't skip them for the world.
It seems reasonable to call everything below the line "suffering" and everything above the line "not suffering", and if the best the Buddhists can offer is a permanent zero then... well, the atheists can offer me the same thing, eventually
Nirvana is a dissociative state, which is why emotional valence (aka. hedonic tone) becomes irrelevant in the scheme of that detached bliss.
In order to complete your analysis, however, you need to look into Daniel Ingram (argually the father of modern 'rational Buddists' movement), thereon PCEs and Richard of Actual Freedom Trust (which best elucides the dissociative nature of the enterprise being talked about here).
"But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from lsusr a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening."
Maybe you should talk to someone else. After all, streamentry is only the first stage. (Thusness lists seven: https://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html ) I bet there are many good teachers willing to talk to you. The problem is being able to tell who is a sufficiently advanced requires to know the space yourself. So let me give you some names of people whom I consider to "get it" for sure:
I agree that it's helpful to have a crisp model of what the precept means, analogous to the heat model.
Left undiscussed in the post is whether the model is actually true.
Here's a counter-hypothesis: mediation is more like learning to play a musical instrument: it's an exercise by which some can, through great effort and practice, get their brains into states that have very high positive valence, but this has nothing to do with suffering being a scalar quantity characterizing all brain states.
I think what they are proposing is that you want to focus on getting your meta-goal-pursuit model to converge, instead of constantly swapping between different instrumental sub goals, since those don't help the meta-model actually converge. Getting what you want this one time doesn't help reduce the gap between what you want and what you're experiencing now; setting in meditation does.
We are poignantly aware that life could be better, and "unsatisfactoriness" strikes me as one of the clearest lines going through that point. Good concept.
From the Christian, and originally Jewish perspective, it is a description of humanity being fallen, which bleeds out into the rest of Nature. We are able to recognise good but cannot get there for more than a moment.
It’s more “to live is to suffer” than “life is suffering”. Positing that Buddhism says that suffering is the only emotion or the only thing in life is suffering is a complete misunderstanding.
Re. "It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things." :
Having an Aspie theory about suffering which contradicts both human experience and human neuroscience does not excuse forgetting that life includes good things, which they're still doing.
It might be that "enlightened" Buddhists actually feel what they say they feel, because they CAN'T feel good things. Anhedonia feels like what Buddhists claim everyone feels like. Perhaps Buddhist meditation trains your brain to be anhedonic. It's on them either to show that they don't have anhedonia, or that everyone else does, too. This would be hard, since what they're claiming is literally that they have anhedonia.
I'm a musician and a Buddhist. When I make music, I experience great joy and euphoria. At the same time, if I am mindful, I notice tension, mental constriction, and craving. In other words, that joy is suffering. Clearly, I am not anhedonic, nor am I claiming I have anhedonia. Instead, I am claiming something that most of us find pretty intuitive: there are greater and lesser pleasures. Injecting myself with heroin while binging on pornography, for example, may be very pleasurable, but I think we can all agree that this is also in some sense suffering because of its greater context, and that taking a peaceful walk in the park or having a meal with our families may be less pleasurable while also somehow being a reduction in suffering and an experience of a greater, more fulfilling joy. The Buddhist view is that the peace of nirvana illumines the extent to which every sensual pleasure we normally enjoy, including walking in the part and eating a meal with our families, pales in comparison.
Why did you use the word "sensual"? Do you mean that all pleasures are sensual? Or that only sensual pleasures are less-satisfying than nirvana? I think there is a consensus across many belief systems that emotional and / or intellectual pleasures are generally or always more-satisfying than sensual pleasures.
The two examples I gave (walking in the park and eating a meal with our families) depend on the senses and so are sensual pleasures (you need the senses to be aware you are doing those things, and then you derive pleasure from that). The mind is considered a sense in itself, and so intellectual pleasures are usually going to be sensual as well, some moreso than others (enjoying a book about history includes the pleasure of tactile sensation, visual imagery about historical events, etc.). If you consider the idea of enjoying a purely mental sexual fantasy, that should make clear the way that the mind itself can be sensual. Emotions too are sensual. Plus, most of what we actually enjoy in sensual pleasures is the emotion — when I make music, what I enjoy is the emotion that arises in response to the music, but it's still a decidedly sensual pleasure.
"There is pleasure of the flesh, pleasure not of the flesh, and pleasure even more spiritual than that not of the flesh."
Pleasure of the flesh is borne of sensual stimulation (here, the Buddha discusses the basic five senses specifically, but the mind is also considered a sense base, and the sexual fantasy example should I think make it clear that it fits). Pleasure not of the flesh is jhana. Pleasure even more spiritual than that not of the flesh is when "a mendicant who has ended the defilements reviews their mind free from greed, hate, and delusion, pleasure and happiness arises."
It's entirely reasonable to wonder how this type of pleasure and happiness can arise non-sensually, but it's obviously not anhedonia. An analogy might be spilling coffee on your shirt while you're in a good mood — the experience itself is very unpleasant, and the emotion will still be negative, but the general background feeling of the mood colors it a different way on a very subtle level, which also leads to it sticking around for a shorter period of time.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm not sure you're using the word "sensual" fairly. It seems to still have a negative connotation, yet you're including feelings like love, friendship, mathematics, and justified pride under sensual pleasures. There is a sense in which that's technically correct, but using that sense--that anything involving the mind is sensual--puts EVERYTHING humans can ever experience, including nirvana, under sensual pleasure. There are no transcendental, extra-neural experiences. I don't need to convince you of that, but you're not going to convince me otherwise. If Buddhism requires believing in spirit, I'm going to conclude that it's hopelessly wrong.
The key difference between sensuality and non-sensuality in Buddhist thought is whether the pleasure derives directly from the sense-object or not.
Buddhist thought posits two "types" of mind: mano and citta. The division is a bit obscure, but you can basically think of it in terms of foreground and background, conscious and subsconscious, specific and general, or potentially even left and right brain (this is more tenuous, but I've found some parallels when thinking in terms of split-brain studies). In a condition of ignorance (i.e., samsara and not nirvana), when a pleasant or unpleasant object arises in mano, the citta reacts with passion, which is experienced as either greed, aversion, or delusion — we either want more or less of the thought, or we're not even really aware of our reaction to it. Because of the default ignorance of the citta and focus on mano, we identify with the citta and then go with the grain of its passion. The first objective of Buddhist practice is to know or "see" the citta (the "subconscious" dispositions towards conscious experiences), and the second objective is to use that knowledge and "vision" to tame it. I say there is a potential (albeit weak) analogy with split-brain experiments because we could to some extent say that mano confabulates thoughts from the citta's passions.
So calling a pleasure sensual is not inherently a negative judgment — even if we accept the mano-citta divide, there's an extra step involved in deriving an ought from it. Its broader utility lies in its ability to point out where the pleasure is coming from. A non-sensual pleasure, by contrast, is one that arises independent of any specific sense object and instead takes a calm and dispassionate citta as its "basis". It is perhaps in some very weak sense metacognitive (but tacitly, not an explicit metacognitive narration, and I think we need to be very careful with thinking in these terms), similar to the pleasure a recovered addict might experience from understanding they are free from addiction despite experiencing strong pangs of desire from time to time — those moments of mere desire are bodily/sensual, but the identification *with* them, which includes a felt sense of responsibility for appeasing them, is what turns them into craving (I prefer calling it "compulsion"), and that is what suffering is. Nirvana, then, is "liberation" from the "bondage" of passion for/dependence on/dentification with coarsely sensual states, and the pleasure of nirvana is like that of a recovered addict: we wouldn't say that a former addict lives in a state of perpetual pleasure, we would just say they no longer suffer from the addiction. A more classic example is someone who has escaped a prison: we expect them to be happy due to their freedom, not constantly in a state of bliss. There are a couple ways to read the distinction between "pleasures not of the flesh" and "pleasures more spiritual than that not of the flesh", but I think teasing that out would start going into too many technicalities.
Metaphysically, I don't think this requires positing a spirit that is concretely liberated from the body (and I think that would actually likely go against Buddhist metaphysics, as the Buddha specifically points out that conceiving of self outside of the aggregates, which include physical form, is wrong view). All it requires is accepting that there is some type of stratification of mental states, such that we have foreground and background experiences that range from coarse to subtle, and that shifting our attention from the coarser to the subtler states is possible. Granted, this is just one reading of it, and like any philosophical/religious system, some people will disagree with this reading, but I think it is a plausible interpretation, and it's the way that the teachers I primarily follow explain it (Bhikkhu Anigha and Ajahn Nyanamoli of Hillside Hermitage).
This is an exceptionally lucid articulation, especially your distinction between mano and citta as a foreground–background dynamic. I think you’re exactly right that “non-sensual” pleasure doesn’t imply negation of sense-experience, but rather a shift in where the pleasure is sourced, from object-dependence to a kind of felt coherence within awareness itself.
What strikes me as worth exploring further is the qualitative difference between what you describe as the pleasure of independence (freedom from compulsion) and what might be called the pleasure of transcendence (freedom through phenomena). The first corresponds, as you note, to the recovered addict’s freedom - the cessation of craving, a peace that no longer depends upon sense-objects. The second, though, seems to occur when that peace becomes transparent within experience, such that even sensory experience (i.e., a drink, a touch, a sound) is no longer “owned” by the citta or filtered through passion. It is precisely at that point that the sensual is not denied, but redeemed as such.
This, to me, parallels the Zen adage: “First a mountain is a mountain, then it is not a mountain, then it is a mountain again.” At first, pleasure is naïvely sensual, bound up in grasping. Then, through insight, one sees the emptiness of sensual pleasure and abandons identification with it. But finally, in transcendence, pleasure returns - not as sensuality, but as the radiant simplicity of what is, freed from compulsion and self-reference.
So yes, I think the distinction between sensual, non-sensual, and transcendent pleasure is not one of phenomenological type but of quality of relation. The same phenomenological event (e.g., tasting a drink) can be experienced as craving, as neutral observation, or as a direct manifestation of reality’s luminous coherence. What changes is not the object, but the structure of identification and dependence within consciousness.
In that sense, “pleasure more spiritual than that not of the flesh” is not about another world but about this one seen through a purified mode of relation - the pleasure of suchness, perhaps.
There are no transcendental, extra-neural experiences
This is vague but obviously Buddhism doesnt believe that experiences requires anything like a brain, there are formless realms where there is no physicality whatsoever and ghosts which are physical but obviously dont have brains.
Nibbana is obviously not sensual, its not even a part of the 5 senses or a thought about them in any sense. Its not even really a thought.
Re. "It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things." :
Having an Aspie theory about suffering which contradicts both human experience and human neuroscience does not excuse forgetting that life includes good things, which they're still doing.
The reason why this is confusing is because, a putthujana doesnt even know what suffering is, so they think that its possible for them to ever not suffer and in fact think that things that are full of suffering are fine. Happiness is also suffering. https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN75.html
The first noble truth is that the 5 assumed aggregates are suffering, thats everything.
This is why the happiness of nibbana, actual non suffering, not mundane happiness, is described as not feeling anything, as in, feelings not being felt. This includes pleasant feeling, neither pleasant or unpleasant feeling, and unpleasant feeling.
So no, anything “good” not only cannot make up for suffering, to think that it even conceivably could is to put things on two completely different levels on the same level.
The description in that article as suffering being like heat and nibbana being a pure absence is not bad, its much better than thinking about things in terms of a scale with bad things on one side and good things on the other.
It also doesnt contradict human experience anywhere near as much as you think. Addiction alone should make it clear why this view is plausible. In reality people know that excitement can be stressful for example.
Thinking in terms of anhedonia is absurd and would imply that people would anhedonia, so 70 percent of depressed people, are enlightened. In which case depression and suffering would be strongly negatively correlated.
Okay, thank you for trying to explain, but you have finally made it crystal clear to me that Buddhism is bad. You're just saying that happiness is suffering, and death, or consciousness without feeling, is happiness. What you're trying to achieve is what all "AI safety" work should be focused on preventing: a future full of thought but empty of feeling.
I'm not going to give a hearing to the idea that happiness is suffering. That's the most-perverse thing I've ever heard. I'm using "pervert" in its literal sense from the Latin: to twist something good into something bad. Buddhism isn't trying to do bad things to people; it's trying to twist their minds into perceiving every thing, good and bad, past and future, as bad. I am done with Buddhism. I choose life.
I'm sorry to write a reply that sounds angry and rude to your sincere attempts to be helpful. I'm not angry, and I don't want to be rude; but on the other hand you've convinced me that Buddhism is destructive and that people should be warned against it in the strongest language. I used the word "perverted" because it means precisely what I want to communicate: to turn something good (happiness) into something bad (suffering). "From Latin pervertere, from per- ‘thoroughly, to ill effect’ + vertere ‘to turn’." I'm sorry I originally used the word "evil", which I usually reserve for acts done with malicious intent. I don't believe you have any malicious intent.
But your words have convinced me that Buddhism is very wrong. They also make me suspect that, like Daoism, phenomenology, Nazism, post-modernism (especially Foucault), BDSM, the social justice movement, and MAGA, it might be a movement that tries to deal with trauma by normalizing traumatization, because a world full of traumatized people makes more sense to traumatized people. The repeatedly traumatized person shifts toward using instinctive or behavioristically-conditioned reflexes rather than reason. This is just a theory, and I realize "trauma" is dangerously hip. But it's the most sense I've been able to make of these things so far.
This reminds me of Leonid Lipavsky of Oberiu, who reportedly once said to Nikolay Oleinikov, (my loose translation) "Joy and sorrow are not opposites and indifference is not their average, just like there is no middle ground between being whole and being broken. Joy is the normal condition."
Huh, interesting, I don't think Sarah Constantin is any sort of Buddhist but she wrote about something like this in this old post: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/hedonism-revisited ; see the section "Liking is (Mostly) Painlessness". She relates it not to Buddha but to Epicurus!
>the brain tries to minimize prediction error. But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss?
Sitting in a dark room fails to minimize prediction error if one of the predictions is about how much activity-related dopamine it expects. So when you're sitting quietly in a dark room the prediction algorithm is satisfied except for the fact that it keeps saying "hey aren't we supposed to be DOING something?" Maybe getting that urge satisfied by an endless stream of algorithmically-optimized dopamine-producing short-form videos/tweets/reddit posts solves that problem and goes some way towards explaining why so many people are now terminally online.
Instead of suffering you could use craving in the heat analogy. Craving more of a pleasant thing is better in the moment than craving for a bad thing to stop, but it is still craving. It's that life tends towards craving, wanting something other than what is, which causes suffering.
"Life is suffering" is hard to understand because the core proposition can't be understood intellectually. It makes sense only when you start paying close attention to your experience (of life). When you do that, you realize that the best learning is from when you suffered the most.
Maybe this is the bay area techno-narcissist "Buddhist" conception of the first noble truth. But this is a description pretty much antithetical to how any "actual" Buddhist would describe the meaning of the phrase life is suffering. The idea is that everything is impermanent, including your own thoughts and emotions and sense of ego.
Suffering in this sense is the grasping and craving for the impermanent. It doesn't have anything to do with achieving some kind of permanent orgasmic state or something. Nor is reducing suffering the erasure of pleasure, enjoyment, aversion, or pain. It's overcoming the grasping and craving.
I'd rather live a life where I don't give a crap about whether other people have experienced more bliss or more joy than me, whether it's from Jhanas or Heroin or Mushrooms or a perfect spa-day. Good for them. Great for them. Or perhaps bad for them. Let others flourish. Let others brag. Let it to be unimportant to me.
From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:
“Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind, we do not care for any excessive joy. So we have imperturbable composure.”
but as a matter of philosophy and science, in my personal opinion and nomenclature:
Joy != Pleasure != Good != Peacefulness != Composure != Important
Because counter-examples abound. But if I had to name which one is the most important, I would say "Important".
Perhaps "Dukka" is the state of Scott Alexander, who I assume has never experienced Jhanas nor certain drugs (nor does anyone have to experience any of them), expressing sentiments like this:
> The real “zero suffering” isn’t neutral / blah / just okay. *****It’s nirvana, which feels more blissful than we can possibly imagine.*****
Well, the problem is that other's people decisions can affect you and they can also do so in a negative way.
For example, if some decision maker also eats up the tales/claims of this totally-not-a-religion religion, and then takes copious amounts of psychadelics to reach the 67th Ghana, their judgement will probably suffer even outside of their hobby.
Would their judgement suffer in any way that’s much distinguishable from the judgement of other leaders based in more established religions?
Did Napoleon have good judgement?
Or Caligula ?
I don’t think it has much to do with it, but the more you know yourself clearly the better decisions you will make. I don’t think there’s much of an argument against that.
"I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question."
Right. Just in case anyone is interested, Buddhist scholars have been debating these issues for thousands of years. "Nirvana as the absence of suffering" is a very superficial interpretation, although it's not so much wrong as just a drastic oversimplification.
Our material existence isn't real: this is the foundational belief of Buddhism, to the extent that it has one--language is a phenomenon in the material world, so anything you can say in language (including "Our material existence isn't real") isn't real either, but since language is the only way we have to communicate with each other, it has to suffice. Just bear in mind that Buddhist scholars are in the business of putting into words that which (according to them) is inherently wordless.
Religion is about the search for Perfection, however that is defined (to the extent that it has a purpose, etc.; from here on I'm going to stop being meta), and in Buddhism, the primary thing that separates us from Perfection is attachment to the material world (note that "being dead" doesn't detach you from the material world, attachment is a psychological state of being). "Suffering" is more or less "being separated from the Perfect", much as in Christianity hell is separation from God. Thoughts and feelings are the things that keep us attached to that material existence, so the best way to seek the Perfect and escape suffering is to detach yourself psychologically from your own thoughts and feelings. One does this via several different means, including meditation.
I'm not implying that any of this is true (I'm not a Buddhist), even less that any of this is capable of being converted into a rational style philosophy or mental framework. It's not just woo, it's the granddaddy origin of all woo. It is the true "Woo."
But I will propose that if you want to critique something, you should take the time to learn what it is.
>Thoughts and feelings are the things that keep us attached to that material existence, so the best way to seek the Perfect and escape suffering is to detach yourself psychologically from your own thoughts and feelings.
I think this is a little sweeping. Thoughts and feelings are things that keep us attached to the material existence, but I don’t know that detaching yourself psychologically is the best way to express the remedy. The detaching part is right as long as one sticks to a very literal definition of attachment. Your thoughts and feelings must be well known to you, clearly, and thoroughly understood it, but not rule you so in that sense you must detach from them. It’s a full-time job …
While I personally agree with you, that's not my understanding of traditional Buddhism. They seem to be aiming for something like a deeply meditative state 24/7, while remaining able to engage with and carry on one's daily tasks. Imagine yourself so immersed in the moment that you forget you exist. For a Buddhist, that's the desired default state. You feel joy or sadness, but you are no longer aware that it is you yourself that feels the joy or the sadness. You just feel it, and react appropriately.
Just stumbled across a quote from C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces doing totally unrelated things, but it's so on point with this piece, I had to share:
"There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite and our capacity without limit."
One of my guesses is that the popular life is suffering thing is a mistranslation of sabbe sankhara dukkha which is more accurately described as "fabrications are without the possibility of lasting satisfaction"
What's important is not the thing ("happiness" or "suffering") but our attachment to it. The Buddha taught that when we are unhappy/suffering, we naturally want it to end (aversion) and when we are happy/not suffering we are afraid it will end (attachment) and cling to it. So in neither case are we truly happy. The solution is to let go of attachment; if we can't/won't then indeed all life is suffering.
I’m skeptical this is true either though. A big issue is it asserts happiness/joy/positive valence ect can be squished down into a single measurable direction like temperature. I think most honest meditators, if they really do practice mindfulness across a wide array of moments will notice isn’t true. I love meditation and have found a lot of peace and deep joy & pleasure in it but the positive valence I get from it isn’t of the same kind as all the other joys I experience nor are all the non mediation joys the same kind as each other. Imagine if someone said, actually there’s no such thing as good or bad movies, just movies that are less bad than others, the ultimate movie is something with no flaws. There’s some sense in which you could frame quality films as just lacking the flaws of other ones (a compelling story isn’t a positive thing but just the lack of the flaws of a boring story, a good sound track isn’t a good thing but the absence of a bad sound track) but that feels borderline deceptive. I can see myself being happy mediating nonstop but I can also see myself happy playing good videogames non stop or listening to good new music nonstop. Mediation is easier to maintain and also easier to get into higher more intense kinds of pleasure but I also think that fails to capture most of what people rightly care about in life. Movies can be good in lots of different ways, and saying all that matters is just how good they all are would be collapsing a lot of meaningful complexity like films that are good at intrigue versus nobility versus connecting you to someones else mess experiences versus being funny versus sad. Feeling amazing meditating is not the same or objectively better as feeling good eating a nice meal or feeling good having sex or feeling good reading an interesting book.
This kind of reminds of people saying stuff like “you don’t need friends to love you when you can love yourself” or “you don’t need drugs to get high, you can just get high on life if you have the right attitude towards it.” It’s taking the fact that you can have positives without x that share a lot of the desired qualities of x but completely fails to acknowledge the way x isn’t interchangeable. Just because loving yourself will make you happier than not and maybe even having friends isn’t strictly necessary to being happy, it’s silly to say loving yourself is interchangeable or a substitute to people who want to be liked by others they feel meaningfully close to and like back. It’s true you can get into intense highented sensory states that make things enjoyable and push worries and thoughts to the periphery of your attention if you allow yourself to focus on the external senses the right way, but that doesn’t mean anyone can get everything they want out of weed without weed itself. Just the pure experience of feeling content and deep pleasure and satisfaction really fails to capture all the many textured meaningful differences one can want out of life and I think it’s just silly to frame those wants as inferior product to zen like nirvana.
This doesn't move me much on the (un)desireability of nirvana. Though it is super interesting, it remains as opaque as ever whether I should think of turning down the suffering-as-temperature as plugging into my 'actual terminal values' vs hacking and changing them the way I consider opioid use to hack people's values. In fact, if this is really the pitch, that enlightment lets you turn the suffering all the way down, down past merely "happy", so that you're always feeling cosmic bliss...I'm really confused how to evaluate the desireability of that. Its phrased like happiness or suffering are these reified things (or relative levels of the same reified thing) that are input(s) to my value system rather than signals *from* my value system about my past/present/future situation.
I understand what you/they mean by "temperature is heat", but the physicist in my couldn't help wince very hard at that. Temperature and heat are related but different concepts, which can at times behave counterintuitively if you are expecting them to behave the same way (see comment above about negative absolute temperatures being hotter than positive ones). Not that this affects any of your argument, it just means this isn't the best analogy ever.
It's also been translated as 'out of kilter' , which is based on ancient imagery, notably as an ill-fitted wheel that makes a cart wobbly or gives a bumpy ride.
So you can semantically define "happiness" and "suffering" as two directions on one continuous axis, and call the quantity represented by the axis "suffering". That's fine, but so what? I can easily call the quantity "happiness" instead. Is the idea that there's an "absolute zero" to suffering, but not to happiness? If that's all it means, "life is suffering" still sounds like a deepity.
"The neuroscientists say the brain tries to minimize prediction error." Why do people seek novelty? How do exciting thrills minimize prediction error?
Also I always interpreted Dukkha as referring to the hedonic treadmill -- nothing is ever permanently good and eventually begins to feel hollow and pointless. Removal of that solves the fundamental problem.
"Life is suffering like temperature is heat" is obviously missing something because we can observe joy and suffering coexisting as distinct phenomena. Imagine you're eating a very nice meal, but also you have a headache. Overall the experience balances out to about neutral. Now imagine you're sitting in a waiting room with nothing going on. Again, the experience is about neutral. These situations have equivalent emotional temperatures which suggests that "life is suffering" should say they have the same amount of suffering. But our common definitions say that the meal scenario contains a bunch of suffering plus a bunch of joy while the waiting room contains very little of either. You can maybe save the emotional temperature interpretation by creating some really galaxy-brained definition of suffering, but at that point you've just invented a whole new concept and tried to cheat by naming it the same thing as an existing concept.
Scott writes, quote: "...many Buddhists claim to be able to reach jhana, a state described as infinitely better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that."
...what a totally un-Buddhist way to think. The concept of Nirvana is something else entirely. Nirvana is to have reached non-existence. Its closest equivalent is the atheist-Western idea of life after death. That is, nothing at all. To have finally left the otherwise eternal wheel of being born and re-born for ever and ever. To have broken that cycle, that is Nirvana.
The fun thing - and the basic reason West is West and East is East - is that Buddhists fear to live forever and hope to reach a state of non-existence. While Westerners fear the state of non-existence and hope, against all odds, that there is a paradise - or at least a hell - waiting for them after the final door.
To use the analogy with temperature, where zero K is the absolute cold, and zero C is where the ice melts or water freezes, perhaps it makes sense to use analogical two scales for suffering -- one where the absolute zero means no suffering whatsoever not even microscopic frustrations (which is best achieved by permanent death), and another where zero is the boundary where existence seems net positive or net negative.
The claim is factually inconsistent with everything we know about neuroscience. If it were correct, we would expect to find something like suffering neurotransmitter(s) that when blocked cause bliss. What we actually find is the opposite, and even that’s an oversimplification. Maybe it’s not a good idea to give too much credit to life advice from someone who lived when people still believed in spontaneous generation and that the sun and moon are discs?
Wife left me two years ago. I tried to kill myself. In my own experience, there is an upper limit to how much joy/happiness one ever experiences, but seemingly no upper limit on how much one can suffer.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you're doing better.
And I agree about what you said.
In my own pits of hell with disability... and symptoms that I can't even describe to most humans without metaphors... I remember saying to myself "hell has no bottom, hell has no bottom, hell as no bottom".
I personally find the "techno-Buddhist" obsession with "how blissful and euphoric can we get" to be extremely irritating. Sure it's nice. But it's also silly cherries and sprinkles.
In my amateur opinion, it flies in the face of why the religion was established in the first place.
Each of the Noble Truths has a duty attached to it. The duty of the First Noble Truth (roughly, "There is suffering") is to understand it. Canonically, truly understanding what suffering (dukkha) is constitutes partial enlightenment, so that alone should put into perspective the difficulty of answering the titular question from an emic perspective. But even without getting to that level, a basic reading of the texts makes it clear that what's discussed here is missing the mark as to what the Buddha means by suffering.
If you look at the formulation of the First Noble Truth in SN 56.11 (https://suttacentral.net/sn56.11/en/sujato), it says, "In brief, the five grasping aggregates are suffering." "Grasping aggregates" (pañcupādānakkhandhā) is a technical term (as is dukkha), referring to a specific mode in which the five aggregates (khandas) arise. The aggregates (form, feeling, determinations, consciousness, and perception) are exhaustive building blocks of our experience, but they themselves are not dukkha — they become dukkha when they are grasped. Emotions, such as happiness or sadness, or experiences such as having sex or being tortured, are classed as experiences in Buddhist thought, i.e., they are configurations of the five aggregates. Since the aggregates themselves are not the issue, but only the mode in which they arise or are related to, the states described here are insufficient to determine whether suffering is present: we need to know whether the happiness, sadness, sex, or torture is arising within the grasping or non-grasping mode.
If dukkha depended on specific configurations of aggregates arising, such as bliss, then its cessation would be impossible so long as we hold to the foundational doctrine that all the aggregates are impermanent: the cessation of dukkha would require the ability to make certain configurations permanent, but the attempt to do so is precisely the cause of suffering the Buddha describes — ignorance of impermanence that leads to craving for the continuance of states:
"Now this is the noble truth of the origin of suffering. It’s the craving that leads to future lives, mixed up with relishing and greed, taking pleasure wherever it lands. That is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving to continue existence, and craving for nonexistence. "
The cessation of suffering is then described as:
"Now this is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering. It’s the fading away and cessation of that very same craving with nothing left over; giving it away, letting it go, releasing it, and not clinging to it."
Notice that the cessation of suffering is not explained in terms of the aggregates, but craving, which is a disposition or attitude *towards* the aggregates, indicating that reading it in terms of a specific configuration of the aggregates themselves would be a mistake. However, a dispositional shift towards the aggregates will induce a change in the ensuing configurations of aggregates to some degree as a side effect, in the same way that learning math will lead to more experiences of getting high grades on multiple choice math exams, even though it's possible to get high marks by randomly guessing. Similarly, an enlightened person would have different experiences to some extent as a result of their lack of craving (such as spending time in meditation instead of having sex) because they would lack the ignorance and craving that enables them to seek them out, in the same way that a mathematician lacks the ignorance that enables them to fail math exams.
Another analogy is the difference in an OCD patient with a handwashing obsession before and after overcoming the disease. Before treatment, handwashing is experienced as distressing and may last hours at a time. After treatment, they still wash their hands for reasonable amounts of time, and they may even have certain scary thoughts pop into their head, but they relate to their experience in a different way. The reduced time spent washing their hands is an example of how their experience reconfigures post-treatment, but that is an effect, not a cause — treatment pre-recovery would likely include restricting time spent washing by sheer force of will, exhibiting an external similarity, but that is distressing in a way that it isn't for the person who is recovered and no longer requires a huge dose of willpower to step away from the sink but instead does so because they no longer relate to their thoughts and inclinations in the same way. I wrote an article that explains Buddhist practice as exposure-response therapy, which can make this clearer: https://ottotherenunciant.substack.com/p/buddhism-as-exposure-and-response.
Whether this sort of modal/dispositional/attitudinal view the Buddha lays out makes sense is debatable, sure, but it needs to be made clear at least that that's what the Buddha's offering — not some way to achieve eternal bliss. One of the issues that Buddhism faces is that there is nowhere near as much English-language scholarship on Buddhism that clarifies these issues in the way classical theist philosophy does. That leaves most of the interesting debates untouched and instead leaves most Buddhist critiques at the level of "but believing in a sky daddy is stupid!" That's a shame for both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, as both lack the opportunity to really engage with and clarify those views so that an informed decision can be made about them.
I thought that, in the prediction-error-minimisation model, you experience happiness/positive feeling when something good happens because your brain is forced to 'expect' good things, so that you can reduce prediction error by causing good things to happen; e.g. brains 'expect' to feel well-fed all the time, and so are 'surprised' to find themselves feeling hunger, driving them to 'correct' the 'error' by eating. If there is some such hardwiring of expectations going on, then the state of zero-prediction-error isn't sitting in a dark silent room, it's maximal flourishing; the brain will only report 0 prediction error when its predictions that it's successful and popular and safe etc. all come true.
There's also some element of self-modelling going on; my brain would be surprised to find itself sitting in a dark silent room, because that's not something I tend to do. If I became the sort of person who regularly sits in dark silent rooms doing nothing for long periods of time - like a trained meditator - maybe my brain would update its self-model and report less and less error as it predicted higher and higher likelihoods of sitting in a dark silent room on a regular basis.
There are 3 sufferings. The suffering of suffering, like a bad migraine. The suffering of change, for example, the fact that if you live long enough, all the people you love deeply and bring you joy will mostly die first. Last, the all pervasive suffering, which is similar to some of the existentialists and psychologists when they speak of the fundamental anxiety, dread and uncertainty that characterizes existence.
Then Nirvana--has nothing to do with Jhannas or happiness. It represents the end of suffering the breaking free from the endless and meaningless cycle of birth, old age, disease, death and rebirth. It cannot really be defined except negatively, so its not really easily subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Suffering is not really a propositional truth like water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. It is an existential truth which is realized through experience and contemplation on that experience. If you do not or cannot realize it, its not truth.
Buddhism starts as a suffering minimization exercise (dualism) but you’re meant to go past that part (non-dualism). Mental states can be categorized as joy or suffering or neutral or they can be put of a scale from zero to suffering but so what? The categories were made for man not man for the categories. You are not your mind (or you are not your mind any more than you are everything else). Your mental state only matters in the way that something like the weather matters. It might matter in a particular context but not in itself.
"The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle parenthetically refers in the Nichomachean Ethics or, as it may be rendered, not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.
The truth of this remark turns upon the negative character of happiness,—the fact that pleasure is only the negation of pain, and that pain is the positive element in life."
First of all, I'd like to point out that what you're talking about here is Abbidharma Buddhism, that is, early Buddhism or the type of Buddhism known as Theravada or Hinayana. Mahayana Buddhism, to some extent, answers the very arguments you raise but that aside:
I think the first noble truth is better understood as 'There is Suffering', or perhaps even, 'conditioned experience is suffused with suffering'.
It's interesting that you should raise Valence. This is a key concept in (this school of) Buddhism, where it is known as 'Vedana'. The idea is that sentient beings' cannot interact with the world without introducing Vedana/Valence. As soon as they have sense contact with an ( apparently) exterior object, the next thing they do, automatically and almost instantaneously, is categorise that contract in terms of Valence. I'm going to simplify here and not talk about samskaras (mental fabrications) because I think it will distract from the main point. Next, the being has, not just contact with an exterior object but a desirable or non-desirable contact. This in turn causes the sentient being to 'cling', that is to either want more of the contact, or desire the contact to be withdrawn. This is what causes the Dhukka or Suffering.
So then, the practice of Buddhist meditation from the point of view of the Theravada, is to remove the clinging action. Nirvana (which means something like 'extinction') is not a heavenly state, it is a sentient being that has had the clinging action expunged from their neural activity set.
How it does this is worth a quick detour. The mind is taught to develop single pointed focus. Once the mind is focused sufficiently it is able to see the mechanism following contact that creates the Dhukka. The Dhukka and the sense of being a self separate from the (apparently) exterior environment are shown to arise in mind together, as a result of the clinging action. Once this is clearly seen, the sense of separate self is (somewhat) abandoned and the selfing and clinging actions and the tendency to ascribe valence/value to contact is attenuated (cutting the fetters).
I believe this should explain why Jhana states still involve 'suffering' for a non enlightened being. In order for a Jhana state to be regarded as pleasant or to be assigned any qualitative value, Vedana needs to be invoked. This creates clinging, which creates Dhukka. Nirvana/Extinction is the end of this cycle. In it's early stages Nirvana is experienced as a 'great relief' and so it can be confused with an ecstatic or pleasant state but it is not. It is more like glee, at being able to relinquish a heavy burden one previously didn't even realise was an encumbrance but instead mistook for being a part of oneself.
Who are the rationalist techno-buddhists and where can I learn more from them? Are you referring to Ingram and the pragmatic dharma movement, David Chapman, or another set of folks?
Scott, PLEASE always take into consideration that something that was not said in English, might be hard to translate to English, and will be often translated inadequately!
The First Noble Truth is that life is *dukkha*. Dukkha originates from the word when you travel on a chariot, and the wheel is not well fitted and greased, so it squeals and the trip is uncomfortably bumpy. In other words, it means something like imperfection or unsatisfactoriness. It just says life is not always perfectly happy, usually, something is missing, usually, some of our desires are not fully satisfied. That we will never run out of "rooms for improvement", and thus never will be fully content.
ALSO important that the Buddha specifically said "old age, sickness, death". THAT means, when you are young and healthy, and your parents are doing well now, it is perfectly possible you actually feel perfectly happy!
But I have seen my grandparents go demented, their prized garden, the pride of their lives going to weed, then so demented they did not recognize their kids, and then die. I saw my parents die of cancer, one of them in considerable pain, the other could not even feed herself and was nursed like a baby and felt it was humiliating. And now at 47 when I stand up my lower back hurts, and it will only get worse, not better. How could I be perfectly happy? Clearly I see and feel how our bodies are fragile now. And I miss my family.
So at a certain age of life, the youthful happy invicible feeling evaporates, and we all get an understanding of the fundamentally tragic aspects of life.
Which is why Plato called philosophers souls that are aware of death "dead souls".
This is why a Zen master said no one should practice Zen before 40 because they have not suffered enough.
This analogy would make more sense to me if it was described in terms of heat flows rather than temperature. Its not just perception, theres a physical difference between feeling hot and cold. When I am cold heat is flowing out of me into the environment. Is sex fun because suffering is flowing out of me to rest of the universe. That doesnt seem like it should always be true. Something about karma being the 1st law of thermo? I could be selfish and build a suffering pump and be happy. Is nirvana an insulator? I want to be careful about reasoning by analogy, i just struggle to see the difference between naive and true temperature if its not described in terms of flow.
This analogy is correct. Thank you for moving the public understanding of this matter in the right direction
And yes it's true that jhana is better than heroin and sex but I should add that this is largely true only when you've become attuned to what's really going on in your body and notice that there are still little bits of "meh" flying around in your consciousness even on heroin.
But the non-meditator doesn't always notice because they habitually apply some sort of cognitive tension in order to not see everything that's going on.
In extreme cases of that tension you get addiction or mental health issues or whatnot. It is a form of avoiding to see. It's canonical term is "ignorance"
But ignorance not reliable and so we might have moments of bliss but inevitably when we relax, or when the sources of meh become larger (like when you start aging and dieing), we have to pay back that debt
Meditation relaxes ignorance/tension ahead of time, so you get to see the bits of suffering earlier. It's a downpayment on the suffering you'll inevitably have to go through, and because you're applying awareness to it you'll get through it more efficiently (for reasons that would be another comment)
The buddha says "life is suffering", and he really yells it at you! He's trying to get you to stop tensing up to ignore it. Wake up!
As a Theravada Buddhist myself and a Vipassana meditation practitioner, I strongly agree as well as disagree with many of your statements. And would like to shed more light on it-
1. “But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering.” - You must make this clearer here as to why. Without stating the “Why”, you are simplifying and chopping off the crux.
Firstly suffering is 'NOT' an emotion. It is a reality we experience. Negative emotions like sadness, anger, etc. lead to suffering or "dukha". Now your statement misunderstands and incorrectly interprets this point I am about to make. According to Buddhists, this is so because when you experience pleasant and happy feeling, you get attached to it and want more of it and you start craving for it. Then when situation changes and the pleasant feeling goes away, you continue craving for that pleasant feeling and when you don’t experience that pleasant/happy feeling or situation, you get sad and may experience other negative emotions . And this sadness and negative emotions or state of mind is what we call suffering.
Now the 2nd case is when a person experiences unpleasant feeling or situation and naturally reacts to it mentally in order for it to go away. When a person continually reacts to it with aversion or negative emotions like anger and it does not go away, then a person again experiences sadness along with the negative mental state with negative emotions and reactions generated. This again is what we call suffering. So suffering is embedded in both pleasant and unpleasant feelings- that is the crux of the Buddhist teaching.
Now there is an additional 3rd case when a person may not experience any feeling and just experience neutral feeling of neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Here still a person craves for pleasant feelings as it had previously experienced it, and when it experiences neutrality, it goes against his expectation of pleasant feelings and a person again experiences sadness and thus suffering.
2. “It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things.” See you are misunderstanding the Buddhist teachings altogether if you misunderstand the noble truths itself. The first noble truth is that “There is suffering in life”. And the rest of the noble truths are like a diagnosis of suffering similar to how a doctor diagnosis a disease. This is not a pessimistic view. This is a realistic view. The intention of these teachings is to lead to a solution that helps decrease whatever suffering one may have in life and by ignoring suffering itself you cannot do that. That is why the first noble truth says that there is suffering in life.
- That is why it is so important that theoretical study of Buddhist teachings should go hand in hand with Vipassana meditation practice otherwise you will be caught up in doubts, misinterpret teachings and will never truly understand Buddhist teachings. It is to be experienced first.
I don't want to have a fight, but clearly, at least in my eyes, Buddhism is an attempt to except the world as it is; whereas Judaism and later Christianity was (and is) an attempt to reform the world: to introduce the concept of History (with a capital H), whose theme is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom—not in the mind, but as a political and economic reality.
And if I am to believe my eyes, it appears to have succeeded in large measure. Based on the evidence all around us, the kingdom of God (as Jesus would describe it) would appear to be already here, at least in the West, even if not yet fully realized or firmly established. As for what that might finally look like in the end, here's what I see: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
This tracks with my experiences at silent meditation retreats. After a week of silent meditation and in-unison chanting, I felt completely light and blissful, grateful, and connected to the universe. Returning to reality, however, was painful, and I was suddenly put upon to handle multiple situations simultaneously and not have so much time for peace. I think meditating is very difficult for moms, because of the clingy, intrusive, and boundaryless nature of children. I still go through periods where I meditate, but it never sticks as a permanent habit, and where I get to meditating for 20 minutes is not the same as having an entire week unburdened and dedicated to it. I don't think I am making the wrong the choice for myself though. I think I would rather have my stressful life full of children and pain though than just stay permenantly in meditative bliss. It's lovely, but it's one note.
This is an understanding that I came to myself. But aren't there other dimensions to life, apart from the suffering axis?
Yes, prediction error, however small, always hurts (if only because it often manifests as fear) and, all else being equal, it is probably best to learn to minimize it (meditate, practice simple life, unattach). But maybe it's not wise to minimize it all the way to absolute zero if that would flatten all other dimensions of life too? Just like, a universe that stays at absolute zero will never evolve or produce life?
Buddhists agree that you should do good to other beings, even though that, inevitably, produces some suffering heat. Buddha himself chose a life of serving others over instant nirvana. I think "do as they do, not as they say" is apt here.
I'm late to this one, but in short, no, I think your friend is wrong. Some presentations sound a bit like "it's all degrees of suffering", but that's not what Buddhism claims is actually happening. This is best explained in the context of the Three Marks of Existence. I'll use the Mahayana version known as the Four Seals, but it should be more or less the same (if any Theravadin wants to chime in to compare, I'll be happy to hear!).
In short, according to Buddhism, non-liberated minds have the persistent habit of adding a layer of emotional reactivity on top of everything. You see an object, or think of something, and the cognition itself is crisp and clear. Yet right afterwards, this unconscious mechanism activates and brings a serving of persistent, sticky mud on top.
This comes in the form of the good old "three kleshas", namely attraction (rāga), repulsion (dveṡa) and avoidance or ignorance (avidyā). The first is like an inner "salivating" at some future pleasure or benefit from the object; the second wants to push it away; and the third wants to pretend it didn't see it.
In the context of adding themselves as a layer of gunk on top of whatever is going on, these are collectively known as "taints" (āsrava). The precise formulation of the second Mark is "all tainted things are suffering" (sarve sāsravāḥ duḥkhāḥ). Tibetans like to point out that *nearly*, but not all, compounded things are "tainted".
The hallmark of these taints is that they leave an after-effect. If you're just experiencing a genuine emotion that is appropriate to the present moment, it will just last as long as it needs to. But when āsrava comes on top, it lingers on, coloring your feelings for a while. If you've ever felt the after-effects of strong anger or some other emotion, congratulations, you know the flavor of what Buddhists call āsrava.
This whole thing is *crucial* to Buddhism. The entire basic Buddhist endeavor is to stop the mind from producing āsrava, no more, no less.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that they have put a lot of thought into how exactly āsrava is created, and why. The main theory I've heard, is that there's an element of the mind whose habit is to constantly bring up the "I" in relation to everything. You see or hear something, and this little guy chimes invariably in: what's in it for me? Is it any danger to my well-being or to my status?
This "I" is not the mere sense of being alive and conscious. It's a conceptual "I", filled with our complex sense of identity, how we see ourselves, what we stand for, how we think others see us, plus all the scripts we've swallowed whole about what life is about and whether we're succeeding at it or not. It's all the stuff we'd bring to therapy. This is what the Third Mark is telling us: "this self you cling to, is not you".
This "self" is always extended in time. We glide through the present moment without paying much attention to it, because our sāsrava minds are always projected in the past or future. That's where our projected losses or benefits happen. So the First Mark says: "stay in the present".
And this layer of taint is painful even in the middle of ostensible pleasure. So the Second Mark says, "all tainted things are suffering".
In short, what Buddhism is saying at its core is: if you train your mind to pay close attention enough, you will notice that 1) the present moment is more real than any enduring conceptual entities (that's a "process ontology" in modern terms); that 2) the sticky "taint" is added by the mind as a separate painful process, and is not an inherent part of the original cognition, or even less of its object; and 3) that the thick "self" in relation to which this "taint" is being created, is just a bunch of self-reinforcing concepts, but is "not really me". And if these realizations are deep enough, then without its the three legs to stand on, āsrava will just stop.
""three kleshas", namely attraction (rāga), repulsion (dveṡa) and avoidance or ignorance (avidyā)." - and if you reverse each of these, you get Spinoza: "I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."
...Somewhat against this theory: When we are at the self-reported peak happiness (sex, heroin), it's not like we're deeper than usual into meditation or at least meditativeness. Rather... the opposite?
What if there's a twist: Buddhist minimum of suffering is real, but it's a local minimum, not global. From close enough, you're attracted to it; but from some other point, your ball may roll into an entirely different valley... and eventually reach lower suffering than the most awakened Buddhists?
Yes, the intuition "there's nothing below absolute zero, and nirvana is the closest you get to absolute zero in mental activity" sounds valid. But maybe suffering is a bit more multidimensional than temperature, in which case there may be several suffering minima, like on a 3D landscape.
This is the explanation of the dukkha that always made the most sense to me:
"To truly experience the subtle nature of unsatisfactoriness, one needs to have achieved some success in terms of everyday life within the conventional parameters of dualism. Understanding of unsatisfactoriness is not the despair of a destitute failure – it is the feeling of suspicion which arises for someone who has proved themselves capable, competent and able to function within the bounds of what is possible within samsara, the social context of dualism. The niggling feeling arises that the whole thing is vaguely hollow and that nothing is quite what it seems. We have worked for the good things we have and live in a reasonable degree of comfort, yet we become aware of a sensation of unsatisfactoriness about our lives. We find that we can achieve almost whatever we set out to achieve in terms of what the world offers; yet we come to realise that these achievements are at best a pastime. Khandro Déchen has pointed out that the life of Shakyamuni Buddha can be understood from different perspectives, according the style of teaching being presented. She said:
"According to the Ulukha-mukha Sutra, the emphasis is placed on Shakyamuni Buddha’s discovery of the hollowness of success. As the prince, the son of the king, he had to be the best in every field. He had to be the greatest archer, wrestler, poet, artist, and musician. He had to excel at everything, because to be second-best or to fail would undermine his position as the future king. From this perspective it was through his success that he came to view all accomplishment with suspicion. All he had left was to find what lay both beyond and within the issue of hollowness. His path was based on the unsatisfactoriness of success as a reference point, rather than on the brevity of success in terms of sickness, old age and death. It is not that sickness, old age, and death are not issues which can turn one’s attention to spiritual enquiry; it is rather that there is a more subtle level of unsatisfactoriness which needs to be perceived. This perspective which sees through the referentiality of success means that even if we were immortal, the cyclic nature of serial successes would still leave us with a sense of unsatisfactoriness. According to this interpretation of the teachings, sickness, old age, and death cannot actually be described as unsatisfactory – they are simply the play of the nirmanakaya.
"The First Noble Truth, then, is awareness of the universality of the feeling of unsatisfactoriness, and the way in which it eventually undermines every achievement. The Sanskrit word mostly translated as ‘suffering’ is ‘dukkha’. ‘Du’ means worthless, and ‘kha’ means hollow. So ‘dukkha’ actually encompasses much more than the misery of life not going well, the experience of pain and personal catastrophe. It points to the illusory nature of the dukkha itself. In some way we create the unsatisfactoriness – it is not self-existent.
"Shakyamuni Buddha said that where there is dualism, change is perceived as dukkha. We don’t like the good things in our life to go away, but everything changes. Always. The apparent existence of all phenomena slips away from us, especially if we try to grasp at permanence. We have to have had some success within the social context of dualism (samsara) to really understand this. If our whole life has been deprivation, aggression, loneliness, anxiety, and painful confusion, then it would be easy merely to view bad luck, parental abuse, or societal injustice as the cause of our unhappiness. So in order to actually perceive dukkha, we have to have some measure of success and pleasure in our lives and yet still experience unsatisfactoriness. It is only then that we can begin to feel the illusory or empty quality of the experience of pleasure, as well as the tangible or form quality of the experience of pain."
Robert Wright, in "Why Buddhism is True" I think gave the best explanation of why the Four Noble Truths are literally true from a modern scientific perspective.
What if we reversed the statement to: "Suffering is life"? Does that still hold? If so, then it's really all about how we define suffering. In other words, suffering may not be something all that bad a thing if one is OK with life.
A Western version of this view is posited by the Epicureans. There are several ways in which Epicureans today argue that pleasure is the default state of the organism, like the arguments that we find in Epicurus' Principal Doctrines 3 and 9, and in Epicurus' Epistle to Menoeceus.
The study Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being by Ed Diener et al. shows, among other findings, that “individuals’ set points are not hedonically neutral”. > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16719675/
Christos Yapiyakis (one of the Kathegemones, or Guides, of the modern Epicurean Garden of Athens, Greece) argues in "Eustatheia (Epicurean Stability): a Philosophical Approach to Stress Management" that modern science demonstrates that the body seeks its own natural balance and health. This argument is confirmed by hedonic adaptation studies, as well as by biologists who coined the term homeostasis to refer to the natural balance found in living creatures and systems.
The decisive argument against this is that there are states with no suffering, like unconsciousness or death. If you have a crummy work, perhaps you would prefer unconsciousness to it, but unless you're depressed, in serious pain, or similar conditions, very few people seem to prefer unconsciousness (or death) to being alive and aware. This would make _no_ sense if there was nothing but degrees of suffering - in that case, unconsciousness or death would be strictly preferable. (Obviously Buddhists don't think suicide is a way out of suffering, but most people aren't Buddhists.)
Do you wake up each morning wishing you could just have eternal sleep instead? Likely not, but if all was suffering, you _should_.
I find this claim more easily evaluable when I compare it with the model of motivation I came away from Spinoza's ethics with, in which there are both approach motivations (play, curiosity, etc) and avoidance motivations (pain, fear, etc). From this perspective, "life is suffering" would seem to be a claim that the approach motivations are unreal and our behavior is adequately explained by avoidance.
This does have some accurate points regarding buddhist doctrine. However, I do think you should mention that most people who fail to achieve enlightenment eventually end up in lower forms of life with reduced chances for dharma, and tend to keep dropping until they end up in the Narakas, places of continuous brutal tortures that last incomprehensibly long times and would be considered extreme suffering even by human standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism)
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? I don't know.
What happens when a rationalist meets Zen which is irrational by definition and according to Bodhidharma himself can't be based on words and letters? Of course they try to explain it rationally, in words and letters, starting an Enlightenment AMA.
Getting an enlightened person to talk about themself is impossible not because they're shy, but because an enlightened person knows that any attempt to explain their experience in words would be futile, or worse, misguiding, and instead of helping people to understand the truth would inevitable drive them farther from it.
At least if it's been a Zen enlightment: there are other types of mystical epiphany and it may be different with them.
There is only one thing in this life that is truly bliss: firing up a gaming PC or console, starting Nier: Automata on Easy Mode, activating all the Auto-chips and dropping 2B sans skirt (in her thong leotard) into a place densely packed with enemies and watching her fight.
Anyone who has claimed anything else in any of the other comments is a complete moron, as are you. But I already knew that last part, which is why I don't read any of your shit. I don't know why this showed up on my timeline.
Life is suffering is a poor translation. Unsatisfactoriness is a better translation of ‘Dukkha’, or so I hear.
"Life is mid"
What if we think structurally (as in structuralism)? So joy has no intrinsic meaning, it's only significant as part of a system of differences and oppositions that is the material world? And Buddhism is about transcending that system of differences entirely. Have I got that right?
And if I have...what happens if you try to transcend the very system of concepts and methods of transcendence that is Buddhism???
I'll track down the link if anyone is interested, but I've seen a plausible idea that bliss experiences are a matter of contrast with previous pain, and clearing away bad habits defaults to neutral.
Hyperthymic individuals exist. They feel great in general, every day, from waking up to going to bed, minus rare events. Depressed individuals also exist, for which most things & situations are bad. Depression seems to also lower the threshold for pain & more general states of body discomfort. The existence of these kinds of individuals & their lives goes against the theory you mention. Also there are people who had pretty bad lives until they started practicing various things (various types of meditation mostly) and then their lives changed for the better, and robustly so. They don’t need to take a bat and break their foot every once in a while to be able to experience elated pleasurable states. Contrast DOES matter (getting a reward while expecting punishment based on your past experience will heighten the valence) but it doesn’t sit at the fundamental explanatory level of pleasurable experience. Beings that only live happy blissful lives (without ever knowing what we would call pain or suffering) are possible.
My wife has remarked to me more than once on my regularly being cheerful and happy (note that these aren't the same thing); I experience occasional distress, usually from external causes, but day in and day out I'm in a good mood, or so it seems to her. From my own experience I think I have to confess that that's true. I can remember that in my teens I was frustrated much of the time and often angry, but those days are long past. And I could imagine that this is partly a reflection of my avoiding doing things that make life more difficult for me, or to my systematic egoism (as Bernard Shaw said, "You had better take care to get what you like, or you shall have to like what you get"), but really I think those are secondary to a fortunate basic temperament that I can't take credit for, or only a fraction of the credit. I respect Buddhism as being more like a science than a religion, but I think its view of essential reality just has to be mistaken.
About hyperthymic individuals, it doesn’t matter that much what other people say about you, and it doesn’t matter what ideas you have about what’s a good life, what matters is how you actually feel subjectively, how much mental energy, clarity & positivity you have. I’ve had brief drug-induced states in which i was able to confront all sorts of nasty aspects of life (personal & general) without feeling miserable. In fact i was feeling great. A hyperthymic psyche is closer to this rather than having good life circumstances, but as a robust trait, not a passing exogenously induced state.
About Buddhism being mistaken in its view of Reality. There are ways of exploring Reality that are revelatory, that keep disclosing new subjective ways of seeing & relating to things. And there are ways of exploring that aspire to objectivity, ways which collapse reality to abstraction.
The former has produced a flurry of bullshit. The latter has proved immensely successful in augmenting our agency at the cost of reducing the agent to a mechanical skeleton, dissolving its warm passionate flesh into diagram.
The former is empirical & systematic but it’s more akin to an art form that directly concerns the 1st person subjective medium. One of the things we’ve ended up by taking this route is Buddhism. There are hundreds of branches on the tree that’s Buddhism, many of them in conflict about what’s real (or if we can ever say what’s real, or even if it matters what’s real), about what’s the goal (or if there’s even such a thing) & about what would be the right pedagogical means. So i don’t think "Buddhism" can be said to be wrong.
I firmly believe that Reality comprises two aspects (like Yin & Yang), an *objective/factual* aspect & a *subjective/poetic/disclosing/revelatory* aspect. I see them as *one* thing manifesting two different entangled sides that are feeding into each other. And yet, all meaning & value are aspects of/ residing in the subjective/poetic. The objective/factual truths are inherently valueless; they worth anything only indirectly, to the degree they’re feeding into & maintaining the subjective/poetic truths. Even quantum physicists get home to their *wives* & *kids.* Only an insane individual who’s lost touch with Reality would see quantum field equations/joules of energy/kilograms of mass/neurons running predictive coding algorithms/… (aka objective/factual truths) instead of their wife (aka subjective/poetic truth). So we have ways of exploring Reality that are *revelatory,* that keep disclosing new ways of being, seeing & relating to things, carving out dreams & magic out of an infinitely affording (aka sacred) Reality. And there are ways of exploring that collapse Reality to dead abstraction ("The poetic outline of the hills has been replaced by geologic theories of hill formation", Oliver Saks quoting some other guy). Some people today see "dolar prices" when they look at art, "meters altitude" when they climb a mountain, and "predictive construct in the service of control" when they refer to their self, totally missing the point. So from this perspective I believe my self is real. In fact, there’s a sense in which my self (illusory as it is) is more concrete than any abstract objective facts you might invoke about me. But according to some Buddhist schools there’s a more subtle, refined, wonderful & seemingly more real subjective experience to be discovered beyond the experience of self. And i tend to believe their anecdotal accounts. And i believe them even more given the fact that those who took the objective route seem to be in accord with some key Buddhist beliefs (ex: there is no enduring substantial self; nothing is permanent, maybe not even the laws of physics). I’m not certain on anything but i empathize with the Buddhist branches saying smth like, there’s no way to prove what’s the nature of fundamental Reality, but we can work within/ with our own subjectivity to reach empirically validated insights into our own minds, insights which lessen pain & prevent suffering while opening up bliss, and pursuing this seems subjectively good (just like taking your hand out of the fire seems good).
If someone hands me the ultimate objective truth in the form of some abstract diagram i'd have to ask if i'm allowed to share it with scientists & engineers, because unless it’s capitalized in some form (as subjective reality) it’s perfectly valueless. But if a Buddhist teacher exposes me to beliefs & practices that open my subjective reality to a new dimension that’s more subtle, refined, wonderful & seemingly more real then i’d be thrilled.
I cannot respond adequately to this discussion of Buddhism. My original intent was to reject the idea of ataraxia or utility, the idea that what we call "pleasure" is ultimately the relief of pain, frustration, or lack. It's hard to address most other questions of Buddhist views of reality, because Buddhism seems to be agnostic on a lot of philosophical arguments about the Nature of Reality; Nietzsche called it the first positivistic religion, and he had a point.
I do want to say that what you say has a very Humean flavor to me. But I'm not at all a Humean. In particular, I don't agree with his dichotomy of Is and Ought; I think we can know objectively what has value for a living organism, up to a certain degree of precision. A view of objectivity that limits it to tables of statistics and mathematical equations strikes me as impoverished.
One of C.S. Lewis's literary ventures that I'm fond of it his Evolutionary Hymn. But I find it ironic that that I mostly agree with the position he's satirizing:
Ask not if it’s god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.
Then you become David Chapman ( https://meaningness.com/ )
"If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him."
Apparently all those ancient Buddha's followers were doing it completely wrong (except for Devadatta). And yet allegedly many of them reached nirvana.
Can you clarify what you mean?
They failed to killed the Buddha.
(Maybe that rule wasn't a part of Theravada tradition, and only appeared later.)
Are you certain that you understand what my metaphore is getting at?
It seems hard to make a better case for the "Bloomers" of the previous post than retranslating "dukkha" from "sorrow/grief/suffering" to "unease/dissatisfaction".
I always thought the "life is suffering" bit refers to the endless chasing of the dopamine high by the human brain. It will never be satisfied, because there will always be a new desire. But to me, this is fine. I like chasing desires.
Also, something that people always forget when talking about Buddhism, is that it was a reaction to Hinduism. Buddhism didn't arise in a vacuum and didn't look at the human condition from a blank slate. Rather, Buddhism looked at the human condition through a Hinduism lens, and tried to overcome the limitations of that lens.
Feel free to like chasing desires, but are you young and healthy? The Buddha specifically talked about old age, sickness and death.
To copy from my other comment:
"I have seen my grandparents go demented, their prized garden, the pride of their lives going to weed, then so demented they did not recognize their kids, and then die. I saw my parents die of cancer, one of them in considerable pain, the other could not even feed herself and was nursed like a baby and felt it was humiliating. And now at 47 when I stand up my lower back hurts, and it will only get worse, not better. How could I be perfectly happy? Clearly I see and feel how our bodies are fragile now. And I miss my family.
So at a certain age of life, the youthful happy invicible feeling evaporates, and we all get an understanding of the fundamentally tragic aspects of life."
Joseph Goldstein described dukha as "reactivity" once. And the way he did it, made sense to me and the overcoming thereof, aspirational. Mostly I just stick with Seneca's description of the Sage as the aspirational ideal and the Buddhists to have a lot of relevant tech to implement it.
A less faithful but still interesting translation, imo, might be something like “life is jangly”? Or even “life is spicy,” if sound isn’t your preferred metaphor. Sapience has an inherent quality of glaring-ness or blaring-ness to it, like we’ve constructed our experience of the world from a series of carefully modulated Metal Gear Solid alert noises.
Exactly. "Travelling on a chariot whose wheel is not fit or greased well."
Yeah, my thought too. The canonical claim about dukkha is around the hedonic treadmill; nothing external is “enough”, everything external is unsatisfactory at the level of the base cravings.
The craving for more, the inability to be satisfied, itself causes suffering in addition to any pain or physical discomfort that you experience. So suffering-as-opposed-to-bliss does play a part here, but I think dukkha is more existential suffering rather than strictly the opposite of bliss/pleasure.
The way to sate your craving is not to strive for things or attainments, but to reshape your perceptions to enable what you already have to be enough.
Also, I’m fairly certain the Buddha though of the samadhi Jhanas as in some sense a distraction; it’s a useful payoff for your concentration practice but the bliss states are very much not the point of Buddhism, and can apparently hold you back from perceiving no-self etc. if you get too attached to the pleasurable states of the early J1/J2.
As the story goes the Buddha mastered the samadhi jhanas prior to enlightenment, and declared them to be a false path; Buddhism is the “middle way” between asceticism and bliss states.
Anyway I’m firmly in what I understand to be Scott’s camp of understanding Buddhism intellectually rather than having direct experience of the deep vipassana states, so take this all with the appropriate dose of salt.
Is Calvin being appropriately Buddist in this strip?
https://fiveelementsllp.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/1/9/21192700/9039372_orig.png
Life is suffering is NOT the 1st noble truth. Western guys are infamous for always misinterpreting Eastern teachings.
The 1st Noble Truth is that "There is suffering in Life".
With the two different views on temperature, one is tracking our subjective experience, and the other models the physical world, so it makes sense they would differ.
But joy and suffering are only subjective experiences, so what does it even mean for a Buddhist to claim that in actuality, life is suffering and all you can do is minimise that suffering? What truth claim are they making about the world?
I think they mean that if you track what's happening clearly enough, you'll find that there is only one thing at different levels, not two different things (joy and suffering). One way this could be true is what I described at the end, where the joy/suffering continuum is how we describe the simplicity/symmetry of mental states. In this case, the "objectivity" would be at the brain wave level or something.
That clearly doesn't track my subjective experiences very well. For example I prefer the experience of eating to the experience of being full, to the extent that I won't eat if I know I have a good meal ahead, so that I can enjoy the meal more.
It feels like you would have to twist yourself in circles to claim this more naturally fits in a single dimensional mentality.
I don't see how this contradicts the premise. Eating while full actually worsens your physical state. So you'd increase your suffering by doing it.
How does anticipating a great meal and thus minimal suffering by not eating too early contradict the premise in your mind. I really couldn't follow why this is even complicated to model for you in that framework?
No circles are required. Pain and pleasure are characteristics of suffering, not the thing itself.
In the heat metaphor, pain and pleasure might be thought of as a person without knowledge of thermodynamics noticing that conduction and convection are different things. In one sense this person is correct but, in a deeper and more fundamental way they are missing an understanding of the underlying physics.
Your cookie eating example is similar. We are hard-wired to notice that pain is suffering, but our delusion causes us to miss that pleasure is suffering as well. This is why, in my opinion, I prefer thinking of “suffering” (dukkha) as “unsatisfactory” rather than suffering. Unsatisfactory is also an imperfect match, but has the virtue of at least being closer to the truth.
Or indeed, that you are entrapped by desire: you wish to enjoy the meal more, that is, to get more out of it than the natural satisfaction of hunger. So you purposefully deprive yourself now (which may involve a small amount of suffering if you are hungry now) for the pleasure later, a pleasure which is fleeting since it will end when you finish eating and can be disrupted by "I feel full, that takes away from my enjoyment".
There is a certain kind of person who gets really into backpacking / ultrarunning / mountaineering for what they call “Type 2 fun”; that is, you are chasing something that is unequivocally experienced as suffering in the moment, but in retrospective is enormously rewarding (even pleasurable). You can draw some symmetries here.
I have personally experienced this plenty of times — upon returning from one winter mountaineering trip, I distinctly remember how incredibly pleasurable the visceral experience of everyday normal life was to me in the aftermath. It’s as if you experience every facet of an otherwise pedestrian day through the lens of all the suffering you aren’t subject to, and that’s a surprisingly good feeling.
I find that having to scratch an itch but not being able to for a while works this way. One you finally scratch the itch you feel practically euphoric for a little while. Same thing goes for having to hold it for a long time. So this effect certainly extends beyond just physical pain to other unpleasant physical sensations.
A hot shower and a good meal after working hard outside in the rain all day. It's pleasurable on many different levels.
Absolutely, and lying down in bed afterward.
Every exercise is like that. But this has nothing to do with dukkha, mistranslated as "suffering", which simply means we do not experience perfect happiness all the time.
Buddhism is clearly not about "pain is bad" or "discomfort is bad", not by a long shot. Try sitting in a lotus, it will likely hurt your knees. Try not eating anything solid after noon. Try begging for food and never handling money, and making your clothes of discarded clothes in a graveyard as the Buddhas first disciples allegedly did. They were not against discomfort.
"Type 2 fun" sounds rather like the experience of playing extremely difficult video games: you fail over and over, experiencing lots of frustration and negative feelings, and then you eventually succeed and you're glad you persisted. Why would I want to play a game on Super Ultra Impossible Mode? *Because it's there.*
Doesn't matter. The claim is simply the lack of perfect happiness all the time, a self-evident claim, nothing more. "Dukkha" just means unsatisfactory or not perfect bliss, not all the time. Even when you prefer the slight discomfort of working up an appetite before a meal (or say like the often intense discomfort of exercise), it still does not disprove that you do not experience perfect bliss all the time.
yeah, the one thing is correct imo. It’s all expansion and contraction, all contractions are seen to be the same type of stuff, and max expansion (nirvana) is when there’s no contractions. People disagree a little on this, possibly a semantics issue, but most teachers I respect the most end up converging on something like this. Though few take it to “and it’s important to valence-max!” they’re like this is how it works but whatever there’s other things than raw valence that matter
You're probably more learned on this than I am, but at least at the level of neurotransmitters / signaling hormones, don't we already know the objectivity is (at least) two things? From a baseline or set point, bad things happen to you and your brain floods with stressor signalers but good things happen or you take heroin and your brain floods with reward signalers and these are literally different things?
Are Jhana people saying they are making their brain resemble the Reward signaled state by taking away the stressor chemicals or are they saying they're sorta hacking their brain to feel reward in the absence of reward signaler?
(And if the latter - I wonder if they'd keep their belief if you discreetly dosed someone with heroin or some opiod without their knowledge in the middle of a Jhana...)
Important to distinguish between what experiments have shown and interpretations of what experiments have shown.
Pleasurable experiences have correlating neurotransmitters, yes. Painful experiences have a different set of correlating neurotransmitters.
Where we go into interpretation is the idea that the “set point” lies in between pleasure and pain. The clear experiments show acute stimuli producing defined responses. But it’s absurd to imagine an intense neutral stimulus that produces an intense neutral response. The data here is not as clear.
One might think the set point can be observed by just depriving a test subject of all stimuli. The issue with that (not merely an ethical one) is that it’s considered a form of torture. As a rule, the reaction of conscious things to sensory deprivation is intensely negative.
The idea of a “reward signaled state” which can be used to model a mouse in a Skinner box doesn’t generalize all the way to the entire brain, which integrates many conflicting stimuli constantly. In fact, to translate from another language into the language of experimental psychology, one of the key points of Buddhism is that simple pleasures do *not* put the whole mind into a “reward signaled state”. Suffering appears in all the imperfections of pleasure: it is too brief, it is too mild, it is obscured by anticipations of the future and distracting thoughts.
Opioids get close to producing a pure “reward signaled state” but they do it by numbing the valence of sensory stimuli—revealing that this should be perceived as pleasure! At any rate, shutting out the outside world is something quite different, qualitatively, from how practitioners achieve the Jhanas.
I don’t think practitioners would disagree that there are pleasurable and painful experiences and that they feel noticeably different. They’re more concerned with how stimuli add up to states of mind. And, more importantly, *whether* stimuli add up to states of mind. The idea of Buddhist meditative practice is to recognize that the suffering a person continuously experiences in their “default mode” is not actually the product of external stimuli but rather internal delusion. Accordingly, freeing oneself from that delusion leads to a more pleasurable state of mind regardless of external stimuli.
With all that said, I still don’t think it’s true that perfect freedom, in this sense, makes a person totally indifferent to sensory pleasure. Thich Nhat Hanh, no slouch at meditation, spoke at length about the immense enjoyment he would gain from eating an apple. I think his enjoyment of the apple was unburdened by the delusion that he needed it in order not to suffer, and for that, his pleasure was more intense.
And from a psychological perspective, set points aren't objectively absolute anyway, they change depending upon context. The brain doesn't detect absolute pleasure, or pain, or temperature, or even something as simple as light. The brain detects sensation as a deviation from a baseline, and the baseline is a standard of comparison that changes as we get used to things.
To take just one example, Weber's law states that the minimum change in stimulus the brain can detect is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus (the louder the sound, the more it must change before we can detect that change).
In a longer term sense, a lifetime of experiences condition us to expect a certain level of satisfaction/frustration, and deviations from that are what we notice. But this baseline is entirely a function of experience, you can change voluntarily, by a variety of means.
Huh, a physicalist speculation about something that was originally presented clearly in a non-physicalist way is not too useful I think. The way physicalist "techno-Buddhists" avoid this issue is that they simply say they do not know what is the physicalist explanation.
But if you want to look at it that way... me and most people who ever got interested in Buddhism, started with LSD and wanted to replicate that ego-loss experience with meditation... it was LSD first that made me feel one with the universe... look into explanations how LSD works if you want a physicalist explanation. That is your best bet at something truly scientific. Chemical hits brain.
Meditation simply seems more... sustainable... many people got their minds whacked open by the first few hits of LSD, but how many people could keep up a weekly LSD habit for ten years, not get any physical and mental health problems and still get that WHOAH experience all the time? This is why Buddhists ultimately don't recommend LSD shortcuts. That feels like short-tern body building with a huge assload of steroids, as opposed to a lifelong custom of healthy exercise.
Scott, you are ignoring a very important thing when you make this analogy to temperature. When it comes to subjective experiences, fundamentally how they *seem* is how they *are*, because subjective perception is the realm of seeming. Something can't feel good and yet "secretly" be bad, unlike how something can feel cold and yet "secretly" (or in external reality) contain heat. If an instance of qualia is subjectively apprehended as positive, it is positive as a brute fact, it cannot in any meaningful way "actually" be suffering. This is where your friend's modernized form of Buddhist philosophy of mind breaks down. I don't know if actual classical Buddhism claims the same thing, but if it does, it's wrong. Pleasure is not merely a lower level of suffering, it is a positive qualia that stands in direct opposition to negative qualia, rather than both being points on a scale of the same thing. All it takes to know this is to feel pleasure and directly know from this feeling that it is good.
Actually, not exactly. Because what stimulus your mind associates with the qualia of pleasure or pain (or warm or cold, for that matter) is subjective, it isn't a fixed measurable quantity like what a thermometer measures, it changes depending on context. Since we can control the context of our own experiences (by manipulating our internal and external experiences in various ways) we can exercise control, to a certain extent, over what sensations we associate with the qualia of pleasure, pain, hot, cold, or even bliss. Our control over the qualia we experience isn't absolute, but it isn't zero either.
I think the Buddhist answer to that is not that the pleasure you're experiencing is "secretly" bad, but that if you look closely enough you will see that it has some subjectively bad qualities to it as well (despite being on net good) - qualities that you normally *do* experience subjectively but may choose to ignore when thinking about that pleasurable activity. And they have also empirically discovered that the maximally pleasurable state can be achieved not by adding more pleasurable things, but by removing (or rather, not creating) unpleasant things in the mind - similarly to how absolute zero is not achieved by adding "more cold" but by removing heat.
>When it comes to subjective experiences, fundamentally how they *seem* is how they *are*, because subjective perception is the realm of seeming
Sorry, but wrong. When do I have a correct subjective experience, when I have eyeglasses on or without? It turns out, I see when driving better with eyeglasses and when reading a book better without.
Buddhist meditation, not just philosophy, adds or removes eyeglasses to the mind. It can lead to a re-evaluation of qualia.
For what it is worth, I mostly see pleasure as a *distraction* from things like anxiety and worry, negative qualia. It just temporarily takes my attention away from them.
This... generally worked like that in my circles. I did not quite understand why father enjoys travel, he explained to me he can only stop worrying about business stuff if he changes the environment. Thus his enjoyment of a beach was interpreted as "not office". And it was so common in my circles.
So it dawned on my really quick if I could talk my dad into meditation - never could, but never really could talk myself into it in the long run either - all this need for vacations and other luxury stuff, restaurants, films, entertainment would stop. They are distractions for negative qualia, like worry. So suppose one could meditate worry away, we would not need all these. We could live real simple like Zen monks, because happiness is just the lack of worrying.
Suffering and joy are two different levels of phenomena, not two ends of a scale. Joy is an emotion, suffering is a disposition towards that emotion.
As a musician and a Buddhist, when I write music, I experience joy and euphoria. But if I'm mindful, I can see that this joy is actually quite tense, and that the intentional act of delighting in it is suffering. Releasing this tension and letting it go is more "pleasant" on a deeper level even though the surface level experience may become more boring and unpleasant. In the same way, being on heroin may be extremely pleasant while being suffering-laden, while withdrawing from heroin may be extremely unpleasant while in some sense being more "pleasant", as the recovering addict feels they are regaining control over their life, which is in itself a cause for joy.
This sounds too complicated to me. I think joy is just distraction from happiness. Beach holidays, restaurants, movies - they are all about just not thinking about our worries for a while. From my perspective, dukkha = worrying, that is not, being in the present but in the past or the future. Joy is not thinking about that for a while, being in the present, as a distraction from that.
I don't think this is in conflict with what I'm saying. What you've described broadly lines up with what the Buddha calls "householder's joy" or "householder's equanimity", which is joy on the mundane level, not the supramundane level. Nirvana is the supramundane cessation of suffering, and I think it's easy to see why collapsing that into merely being present can't provide that: what happens if the present moment includes horrific torture?
If by being in the present, you mean completely abandoning all underlying dispositions towards changing experience, then I can agree with that, as it's still retaining the disposition-object or orientation-object divide.
Subjective (first-person, direct) experience can be approached and explored with a scientific attitude. The result of repeated investigations is that that you see more clearly the phenomena which you encounter as "joy" and "suffering."
Sounds suspiciously Husserl.
I don't recognize the name but thank you for the pointer! My influences have been a mix. As it has been presented to me from many angles, the Buddha himself is said to have urged his followers not to take his word for anything, but to test and see for themselves how their own direct experience is.
I read this as saying that there's an upper limit to subjective joy. Bold claim, feels intuitively false, but hard to rule out, having not attained nirvana myself.
(On the "modeling the physical world" side, you could ask if anything about the material workings of the brain supports this hypothesis. This also seems likely to be false - see Sovereigness' reply to Scott below on neurotransmitters - but I'm not sure this quite refutes the subjective claim. e.g. setting the logit inputs of an artificial neuron to +20 usually produces the same outward behavior as +20000; perhaps it's also basically the same qualia!)
Is it a bold claim? Shouldn't we expect there to be an upper limit to subjective joy, assuming we accept the claim that subjective experiences arise entirely from neural activity? Neurons saturate beyond a certain threshold. A rewarding neuron can only fire so fast! Given the intensity of a signal is usually a function of firing rate, any rewarding pattern of activity of sufficient strength should saturate in short timeframes, and the brain tends to attenuate signals that are too far outside the critical zone of the sigmoid activation function, so over time sensitivity to that stimulus should decrease.
It's almost certainly not possible to model something as high level as joy through the lense of a single neuron. Perhaps dopamine levels have some maximum but I definitely view joy/happiness as distinct from pleasure/dopamine, so while one may max out the other may not.
I think it's probably possible to concieve of some pattern based model of joy that has no upper bound as the patterns can explore an infinite configuration space. Although that might still have some upper limit due to a combination of finite max firing rate/finite total life time/finite total number of neurons. But I feel this limit would be so many orders of magnitude above the working level that it would be completely reasonable to model it as unbounded.
Definitely could be wrong and the buddhist claim might be objectively verifiable, but I'd certainly be disappointed because a universe with a maximum upper limit on goodness/beauty/joy seems much less interesting and wonderful than one where it can continue to go up indefinitely. Although if you consider both heat death and Big bang to be zero/some finite level and set a limit on the derivative I guess the universe achieves a maximum regardless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply there was a 'joy neuron' in the brain. 'Joy' isn't a well defined concept in neuroscience, but we do know a lot about reward circuits in the basal ganglia, and can measure the magnitude of those signals, and from them derive the algorithms used in reward prediction. These are not 'single neuron' circuits, but the clusters of neurons involved in computing these signal are not so complex as distributed cortical representations, and we do know that they have physiological maximums in their intensity. There is a ceiling/floor on the degree to which a reward signal can be stronger than expected, or weaker than expected.
These signals are highly predictive of joy, but might not be quite the same as joy. There's some evidence for cortical involvement in representing joy, but even cortex has a finite capacity for representation, and the cortical algorithm appears to operate on discrete sparse representations. We know the state of 'all neurons firing at their maximum rate' isn't maximum joy. That's a terrible seizure. The brain has a certain number of states it can distinguish between, and most of the bits of that representation are not assigned to tracking 'joyfulness'. A decent number are, because reward is really important to learning, but most of them are responsible for tracking our model of the state of the world outside.
There is a maximum intensity to the brightness we perceive before our photoreceptors saturate. That's acute saturation, but we can also chronically saturate and downregulate patterns of activity that are consistently getting outside the ideal gradient range for learning, as in hedonic adaptation. Even if we assume joy is primarily cortical, which is a strong assumption not well supported by the evidence, joy is only useful as a learning signal - something that encourages you to repeat that behaviour under those circumstances - inside a certain bounded range where the gradients of the signal transmitted back to the basal ganglia are meaningful. Beyond that range representing it has no evolutionary benefit. Even if you plunge from the depths of sorrow to the heights of rapturous joy in an unexpected instant, absent compelling evidence otherwise we should assume there's an upper bound just based on the elements doing the computation.
The joy of the early human who discovered making fire and cooking food is not qualitatively different from the first human to make and ride a flying machine. Joy is the upper end of a bounded measure of deviation from expectation. The difference is the human in the flying machine had much higher expectations, so it took lot more to deviate that far!
I don't think this makes the universe any less wonderful, or any cause for disappointment. Our expectations can continue to climb, and we can continue to find new joys in exceeding them, for a very long time to come.
Dang, thanks for this super detailed response.
Supposing for the moment that the saying really does refer to reward circuitry, than I think the "life is suffering just refers to an upper bound logic" breaks down, because presumably there's a lower bound as well. In which case it makes perfect sense to refer to a neutral between the two. The "upper bound implies natural framing where zero is the upper bound" only works if there's only an upper bound (I think? Maybe this is faulty logic). A bit complicated to compare to temperature because you can have negative temperature and upper bounded temperature in certain finite systems.
But I'd also put forward that the reward circuitry is not all we should be considering. So maybe joy isn't the right word, but goodness or life happiness which is distinct and would seem to me to be unbounded. Harder to map onto neuroscience ideas, though, and definitely depends on your moral framework.
What the Buddhists are arguing is likely that Enlightenment is neurologically equivalent to permanently setting reward expectations in the basal ganglia very low, such that simple pleasures again spark joy. You can suffer greatly even while in conditions another would consider joyous depending on your reward expectations. You would need a way to sidestep hedonic adaptation, but if you could permanently lower your expected reward such that everyday life were continually a pleasant surprise, you could be in a near constant state of euphoria or joy, at the cost of really messing with the learning algorithm.
Reward circuitry is certainly not the only thing we should consider, though wireheading is surprisingly philosophically tricky to argue against from a utilitarian perspective.
Goodness as in virtue? I'd agree that's a worthwhile thing to pursue, but it does depend on your culture's virtues. Happiness could be 'satisfaction', 'satiation', or 'contentedness', and Buddhism claims you get those in abundance from following the path. Without attachment it's supposed to be much easier to be satisfied and content.
No matter the upper limit of a joyful experience as we understand it conventionally, it's still bound by the three characteristics--
1) dukkha/stress (when the experience ends, we won't like it. We may even be dissatisfied by some aspect of the experience itself, despite its joy.)
2) anatta/non-self (the experience isn't actually under our possession or control. We can't intensify it or lengthen it without limit through our will.)
3) anicca/impermanence (no matter how good it is, it won't last forever)
Buddhism doesn't attempt to make a truth claim about the world. The world isn't real. It's making a claim about the nature of the experience of truth: i.e., what it is like to feel true and how to go about doing that.
It is certianly not about "feeling true". The Buddha's central focus was dealing with old age, sickness and death.
Their way of dealing with those things is to claim that they are illusions, i.e., not truth. And then Buddhism didn't stop with just those things--everything that relates to the material world is an illusion.
Generally Buddhists would not accept this subjective-objective distinction you're proposing
It is the opposite: the claim is not suffering, but the lack of perfect happiness, the lack of unsatisified desires, even in the face of old age, suffering and death. The truth claim is here self-evident.
So, if this model of suffering/joy is true, then maybe the heavily depressed who feel that everything is suffering and joy doesn't exist, have touched upon a real insight about the world, albeit in a twisted way.
Not really. True happiness in Buddhism is having no passion for the world, being independent of it (like Stoics, but taken further).
Depression is an form of aversion to the sensual world. You don’t want it, you want it to go away, while it’s still there - so you’re still dependent on it.
I get this intellectually, but also correlate passion with subjective joy. Being passionate and acting on the passion tends to create a flow state in which work is pleasurable. Lack of passion correlates with a subjective dissatisfaction. Feeling blah. Nothing seems worth the effort.
Of course, this is the default, everyone’s existential starting point.
You’re thrown into the stream of passion and you look for things that will satisfy you. You don’t even question it.
When you’re itchy, you just want to scratch the itch, it feels more satisfying than for itchiness suddenly to stop. Moreover, as you say, it’s impossible to imagine from within how that would even feel. Because feeling blah is not passion stopping, it’s not being able to satisfy it.
But if you stop in the „blah” moment, you’ll eventually start noticing the pressure of that passion and will see that as the source of your suffering, right now. The hunger for experience richer than „this” is what makes „this” seen as
„blah” and unpleasant.
Scott actually gets pretty close in his description. Basically it wouldn’t be the emotion, it would be the clinging to it you’re discarding. So you feel the excitement/joy/etc, but you’re not feeling the lack if it goes away. In my personal experience, the clinging sullies the creative urge, so it’s possible to be considerably more joyous without.
Buddhism is more about a perpetual flow state - meditation is a lot like that. Work is not necessary.
I tend to see dukkha as worrying about the past or future instead of being in the present.
If flow-work is interpreted as being in the present, it is largely because it is hard enough to not worry about something else, but easy enough to not worry about itself.
Meditation is being in the present without work.
Can you say more about where your idea of this comes from -- having no passion for the world?
Because my understanding of Buddhism includes things like the four Brahma Viharas: lovingkindness, appreciative joy, equanimity, and compassion, just as a start. There are other joyfully engaged states that come of taking refuge in the dharma and the sangha. All these come of being emotionally engaged with the world.
My sense of where Buddhism is pointing is full engagement with the world as it is, but without clinging, aversion, and delusion. I think they say interdependence with the world is the aim, not independence from it.
Your question is very symptomatic and it represents a deep misunderstanding of Buddhism that's prevalent in our culture.
In short, Buddha wasn't talking about interdependence, but independence from the World (also defined as the 6 senses). Attachment to the world is sensuality, assumption that the world is the source of pleasure and satisfaction.
The progression that he advised to all monks (often called Gradual Training) started with the practice of precepts and sense restraint - resulting in a gradual withdrawal from the world. Nekhamma - renunciation - is the absolutely basic step, long before anyone would even think about meditation and developing Metta.
Moreover Metta is not love - it's lack of aversion (hence better translation is friendliness). It's a very advanced state of mind that requires thorough renunciation. What we call love is Pema in Pali and is considered as a form of an attachment (here's a verse from Dhammapada talking about it: https://suttacentral.net/dhp209-220/en/anandajoti ).
If you want to understand how is it possible that the popular understanding of Buddhism is so contrary to the actual teachings, I would strongly advise to familiarise with either of the texts below, which get to the bottom of the issue and by doing so reveal in a fascinating way how entangled our perspective on Buddhism is with early Romanticism. Separately, there was Chinese Daoism that transformed Mahayana Buddhism plus and infusion of pseudo-scientific ideas in XIX century Burma. I included some relevant excerpts from both.
1) Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism. It's an article by a Western monk translated vast amounts of Pali suttas. Prior to his monastic training in Thailand he studied history of Western ideas, which was a perfect match. The article later grew into a whole book that's freely available here: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/BuddhistRomanticism200728.pdf )
"Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. But what they may not realize is that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha’s teachings but from … Western psychology, through which the Buddha’s words have been filtered. They draw less from the root sources of the Dharma than from their own hidden roots in Western culture…
For humanistic psychology … religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer divisions.
However, [according to] the Dharma … the ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling, but of knowledge: skillful mastery of the principles of causality underlying actions and their results, followed by direct knowledge of the dimension beyond causality where all suffering stops.
Humanistic psychology maintains that … the enlightened person is marked by an enlarged, fluid sense of self, unencumbered by moral rigidity. Guided primarily by what feels right in the context of interconnectedness, one negotiates with ease — like a dancer — the roles and rhythms of life.
Traditional Dharma calls for renunciation and sacrifice, on the grounds that all interconnectedness is essentially unstable, and any happiness based on this instability is an invitation to suffering. The Dharma teaches that … the awakened person … is incapable of transgressing the basic principles of morality. Such a person … knows from direct experience the total release from time and space [i.e. “the world”] that will happen at death."
2) David L. McMahan - The Making of Buddhist Modernism:
"The Pali suttas [the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism] arose out of an ascetic milieu that viewed family, reproduction, physical pleasures, material success, and worldly life as ultimately futile, disappointing, and binding… Far from being celebrated as a wondrous web of interconnected life, [the world] is repeatedly referred to as a “mass of suffering.” … Pali literature encourages the disengagement from all entanglements in this web. (p. 154; emphasis in original)"
Thanks for the link to the book!
This is the Theravada view, as evidenced by using Pali, not Sanskrit terms. Other schools, Mahayana, Vajrayana exist. Theravada, and also Mahayana, are very much for monks. For wordly people, outside a monastery, people who still want to have sex and drink beer, there is not much other room that subsets of Vajrayana or subsets of Zen.
Well, it's what the Buddha taught, Theravada came later.
If you want to come up with something completely different that's fine, but calling it Buddhism is confusing. You can still do it, but you should make it clear for you and others that it's completely contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Buddha's teaching.
Regarding finding something for those who want to drink beer - it's like wanting to practice for the Olympics sprint, but without having to run. If drinking beer is so important for you, just drop the pretence and be honest to admit what is really important for you.
On the question of whether the practice is for monks or not - the Buddha was also teaching lay people (although only after couple of decades, initially he thought it didn't make sense), but to see the mind they absolutely had to go through a period of sensual restraint and de-valuing sense pleasures. Otherwise it would be impossible to start seeing push and pull of the mind.
Once they achieved stream entry (initial but irreversible level of understanding) they could go back to living lay life - and stop practicing - but not before that.
Depends. Theravada is no passion, no engagement. Mahayana is passion coming from compassion, passion and engagement, for others, not for one's own self.
I'm talking here about what the Buddha was teaching, which precedes even Theravada. We have pretty good idea about it now, with all the findings of XX and XXI century.
If you're interested in all the historic transformations that happened later, the book is really interesting: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/BuddhistRomanticism200728.pdf
Some interesting takeaways - Western understanding of Mahayana (with its imports from Romanticism) vary widely even from Mahayana understanding in Asia.
Moreover, when you read the original suttas, you'll find all the ideas of Mahayana there, just without false dichotomies. Eg. contrasting caring for yourself vs others - as you did - was a non issue for the Buddha as can be seen eg here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn47/sn47.019.olen.html .
I think in their model depression is a very, very high temperature.
In a Buddhist frame I think depression could be seen as an ailment that brings intense self-aversion and intense clinging to fixed ideas of the badness of oneself and the world. And that the mindstates involved in depression are delusional. So that's all three of the "poisons" Buddhism names as the cause of suffering.
I get the impression from summaries of the Buddha's life that he began his search for enlightenment after his first encounters with illness, old age, and death. These encounters were very distressing, and the distress motivated the quest. So, in a sense, the traditional life of the Buddha starts with distressing=depressing discoveries or insights about life, though perhaps not with what we might call clinical depression, at least not of the sort that destroys agency or initiative (since he does launch himself on a quest).
That a state is called Nibbida - it's a skilfull turning away from something you were enamoured with, but now realised it's in fact very dangerous to you. It leads to dispassion - Viraga in Pali or Apatheia in Greek (such a nice Stoic concept).
In that sense similarity with depression is only superficial. That kind of realisation can happen to someone in perfect mental state and can be the most reasonable and rational state given the situation.
Imagine eg. learning that someone you thought was your friend was actually abusing you, taking advantage of you.
Depression is something very different. Highly recommended watch from a monk who understands this inside out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtyfhvGb5gw
But in the story as I've encountered it--and I admit, I'm very much a beginning student--the Buddha's immediate reaction seems to be described as distress and flight leading to a highly motivated search for answers, rather than dispassion or apatheia. No?
Absolutely, the succession is not immediate. First you need to see the problem of suffering, which leads to revulsion / disillusionment (Nibbida) which motivates one to find a true solution, leading (at some point) to Viraga (dispassion) and finally Vimutti (liberation).
BTW don't want to be too pedantic with all these Pali terms, but since it's impossible to translate the meaning accurately, it's useful to have them as an anchor (also for a further lookup).
Ah, I see the stage-by-stage aspect more clearly now. Actually, I'm very interested in the Pali terms and getting as good an understanding as I can of their meaning, relationship to each other, etc. So thank you for the pointers and general guidance/intro!
>I get the impression from summaries of the Buddha's life that he began his search for enlightenment after his first encounters with illness, old age, and death.
Important to note that the account in these "summaries" is almost certainly a (much) later legend, and was probably not originally intended to be an actual description of the historical Buddha's life.
Based on what little is known about the actual historical Buddha, his father appears to have been a chieftain of a relatively poor tribe, where even the leaders lived in modest wood-and-mud accommodations. The idea of his father being a great king, living in such fabulous opulence that his son could have grown up never seeing illness or great suffering, does not appear in any account until LONG after the Buddha's death, and is not very historically plausible.
Of course. My point wasn't about the historical Buddha but about the place of concepts we *might* call depression in Buddhism. The ascription to the religion's founder of a psychological distress severe and abiding enough to motivate a search for a solution would be significant. (One could discuss whether that kind of distress should be called "depression.")
The first noble truth doesn’t say that life is suffering. It’s literally the first noble truth about suffering, which might be initially uncomfortable for people expecting it to be a statement that can have a logical value. It should be understood as suffering being a self evident base assumption. What is more, dukkha can be translated as dissatisfaction or stress, which has a slightly different color than suffering. Here’s an exemplary formulation of the 4 noble truths: https://suttacentral.net/sn56.11/en/sujato
What do you mean by the phrase, "suffering being a self evident base assumption"?
I take it that, in the translation you link to, the first noble truth is "Now this is the noble truth of suffering. Rebirth is suffering; old age is suffering; illness is suffering; death is suffering; being coupled with the disliked is suffering; separation from the liked is suffering; not getting what you wish for is suffering. In brief, the five grasping aggregates are suffering. "
I can see that this passage does not say, literally, "life is suffering." It seems to be saying that many more or less specific aspects of life are suffering. Am I reading this correctly , and if yes, how do you mean to relate this interpretation of the First Noble Truth to your phrase ("suffering being a self evident base assumption")?
(Or, since the "five grasping aggregates"--form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness--do seem to cover a lot of the ground at least of what we might think of as a person's interior life, could we say that the first noble truth means, in effect, "interior life is suffering"?)
The phrasing “idaṁ kho pana, bhikkhave, dukkhaṁ ariyasaccaṁ” – “Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering” – uses idaṁ kho as a presentative construction, similar to Polish “oto” or French “voici.” It’s the rhetorical equivalent of, while discussing the cat, pointing at the cat in question. That’s what I meant by “suffering being a self-evident base assumption”: it’s something presented for direct recognition, not argued for.
And yes, the five aggregates are meant to encompass all interior experience – everything that can be clung to as “I” or “mine.” In fact, one of the classic arguments against the existence of a soul works precisely by examining each of these aggregates and showing that none of them can be identified as the self.
Not to nitpick, but could you equally say that suffering as the desiring of things that ultimately we must lose is the premise upon which the way of liberation is based?
Can you elaborate?
I'm making a comparison between Buddhism and a logical argument. In logic, you start with a premise, which isn't proven, it's just given. If you can accept the idea that life consists of wanting things that you can't keep, like happiness, then the rest follows. Probably doesn't really work.
I think intellectually accepting that you’ll eventually lose everything you desire isn’t very hard. But that alone doesn’t stop you from desiring those things or from being unhappy when those desires aren’t fulfilled. The Buddhist claim is that, through various practices, you can get to a point where you GET this in a much deeper, emotional way. It’s like the difference between knowing that alcohol is bad for you and actually internalizing it to the point where you don’t feel like drinking anymore.
Would you be willing to do what you just did with the next three noble truths? This was very helpful. I wasn't aware of the "voici" or "ecco" grammar in the first one.
Doing that properly is a… significant time commitment :) I didn’t explain the first noble truth, just clarified one phrase. A very readable book about that is Ajahn Sumedho’s: https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/464-the-four-noble-truths. Like most Buddhist books, it’s free.
Oh well, duh, of course it is. Sorry about that. Thanks for the book recommendation.
The self is the thing doing the examining, obviously. How can it be the thing examined? You can not see your eyes, only reflection or pictures of them.
Thank you for offering this nuance about grammar and intent behind it in the construction of the first noble truth.
I think there's so much misunderstanding that stems from a cursory translation into English of these basic Buddhist tenets.
When I translate this first noble truth into a vernacular in my head, I say things like:
It's the nature of the human mind to be dissatisfied in the face of life's vagaries.
Mental suffering is a default orientation of the human mind, if not otherwise trained.
It's not that all of life is suffering; it's that mental suffering is a kind of default mindstate for humans and the whole point of the other three noble truths is that this mental suffering can be gotten free of despite the facts of old age, sickness, and death (as well as uncertainty and constant change), despite the mind's tendency to cling, push away, and not see things clearly. We can train the mind not to do these things and then we can get free.
I haven't dug into all the ways nirvana can be translated, but in my mind it's not bliss, it's not just an extension across time of jhanas. It's freedom.
But this doesn't allow for the fact that you become accustomed to your situation, good or bad, and your perception of it rapidly becomes neutral. Apparently there's good experimental evidence for this. So even if you attain nirvana, before long it'll just seem ordinary.
This hugely overgeneralizes the hedonic treadmill: If it was that simple then plenty of things like social connection wouldn't have the impact on QOL they empirically do, since people would just adjust back to neutrality anyway.
That's not true for all experiences, for example love and friendship don't become not-pleasant after a while. In Buddhism, jhana states don't become neutral after a while (also they're non-reinforcing, which is a super weird and cool feature). Awakening/nirvana is also not something that effects or is effected by the hedonic treadmill, as it's not really a hedonic experience (what in pali is called vedana).
Thanks. Yes, I guess it depends which part of the system you're hacking.
"love and friendship don't become not-pleasant after a while"
You're making assumptions about the personality here - generalising from best case. Love can fade, friendships can can grow boring. People divorce. Seven year itch. "We're not the same people as we were 10 years ago" (which I heard in a movie just last night.)
For me socialising gets old pretty fast and I soon feel I'd rather be on my own, doing my own thing.
It is true in one way and isn't in another.
It is true in the sense that the mind with time starts to accept the new baseline. The Buddha in some suttas said that only when experiencing situations which originally would make him suffer he was realising how different his state is now, that he was unmoved (and that realisation caused bliss and happiness).
It is not true in the sense that normal habituation of hedonic values ends up with basically the same neutral (or negative) value. Nibbana however is not just vedana, one can experience all vedanas in a state of Nibbana. The freedom comes from knowing that they cannot touch you anymore. So the solution is not on the same level that hedonic habituation operates.
Like I said "it depends which part of the system you're hacking".
Solution to suffering lays only on the most general level of the system, so there's no choice there.
Additionally, I don't think 'hacking' metaphor is helpful. I get it that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but in this case it's about changing the view. And when you stick to the same, utilitarian notion of 'hacking' you're leaving out your perspective - the one thing that you're supposed to work on - intact.
Isn't that "hacking your perspective"? I'm just using "hacking" as slang for modifying, but with the implied anticipation of a particular change.
But I don't know enough about it to have a meaningful conversation so perhaps I should just shut up.
If this were as generally true as your statement makes it, nobody should make any effort to change their life circumstances as they'd just feel neutral about it eventually anyway. When in reality studies have shown that e.g. increases in income dramatically change quality of life/satisfaction up to a certain threshold (after which it flattens out). Clearly becoming accustomed to your situation does not mean you feel the same way about any two situations even given significant time - only that humans can cope.
I understand the research does show that happiness tends to the same level, even after limb amputation. The classic study is “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, 1978.
But it's not 100% and it's very difficult to measure objectively.
I do think happiness responds more to delta X than X.
Didn't the "flattening above a certain income" finding fall prey to the replication crisis?
1. Have you seen Romeo Stevens's “(mis) Translating the Buddha”? He argues that suffering is a poor translation of the term 'dukkha', it's more like “difficult emptiness” https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2020/01/mistranslating-buddha.html
2. > But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all.
I sometimes ask myself: “Why do anything at all?”. But doing nothing is painfully boring, so my solution is Do Nothing meditation which is quote close — you can read about it on my blog: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/do-nothing-meditation-430
It's actually quite pleasant and fluid. It's not jhana-level levels pleasure, though. If I had to guess why, my answer would be: Symmetry Theory of Valence is true, and prediction error minimisation is implemented “using it”. Most of the time the brain minimises prediction error, and that's why Do Nothing is quite pleasant — you let prediction error minimisation do its thing. But to get truly high levels of valence you have to jailbreak the brain out of the “prediction error minimisation mode” via hacks such as jhanas or psychedelics — and turn your cortex into a symmetry engine.
Nice way of putting it. Indeed - think of psychedelic visuals, like the beautiful symmetries you get with high-dose DMT visual-touch synesthesia. The symmetry groups instantiated in those patterns are completely unprecedented for the organism, don't correspond to anything in the external world, and yet have extreme levels of valence (good or bad, depending on the details - phase alignment, consonance vs. dissonance, eigenmode splitting, etc.). It's in those states where it becomes quite obvious the brain can be turned into a symmetry engine, which leads to steep valence gradients.
We've been exploring this computationally at QRI - see our "cessation simulations" (https://qri.org/blog/cessation-simulations) where we model standing wave patterns across fields of different dimensionality (visual 2.5D, somatic 3D). The main insight here is that cessations may occur when waves traveling through these different sensory fields become indistinguishable - when the resonant modes look identical whether you measure distance in the 3D tactile field or its 2D visual projection. The precise moment of "lights out" happens when the pattern is the same in both spaces at once; there is nothing off to report. "Do Nothing" meditation might be letting the system naturally drift toward these configurations, whereas, say J1 or LSD go via the more energetic (but sometimes mixed) route with annealing.
My understanding from studying mainly zen and dzogchen, is that it’s more about “right view” than it is about a neutral greyness.
Our mind is always creating concepts of things, and this is not true reality. Even sitting quietly and focusing on the breath, you might notice your mind starts to form a concept of how you’re breathing, maybe a visual feeling associated with the sound of your breath that you spatially map onto a loose concept of a body. Dzogchen aims to cut through concepts by focusing on the view itself, an awareness that the mind is creating all things.
Suffering is just a word that in the context of buddhism means clinging to sensation. You can swap it out for emptiness, as in “All life is emptiness”. This is true also, in that all the concepts and sensations created by our mental activity are empty of anything real and permanent, like a dream.
My personal “concept” of nirvana, is that it is a state of no-conceptual-clinging, where pure awareness pervades every moment.
“Right view” is just one of the 8 folds on the 8-fold path tho. Deciding not to suffer might also improve your ability to do “right action” or “right speech” or any of the others, no?
I can't speak to avant garde techno Buddhism, but the classical Buddhist view is not this, and much simpler.
1. To live is to be in a state with unfulfilled desires.
2. To have unfulfilled desires is suffering.
3. So to live is to suffer.
2 is maybe easiest to defend. If you think "suffering" is an exaggeration, that's maybe because you're mistranslating "Dukkha." 1 might seem extreme, but even the emperor on his throne wants something that he's not getting. Our capacity for desire is endless. And even in happy moments, we are still all doomed to suffer and die, and that is a pain for us.
There is an element of classical Buddhism where one of the causes of suffering is our ignorance of the truth of the impermanent nature of things, but that has always struck me as a kind of marketing more than a deep insight into how cognition works. You're unhappy because you're not a Buddhist, meditation can cleanse your thetans.
This might seem uncharitable to classic Buddhism, but thats the straightforward reading of the texts. There's thousands of years' worth of different accounts of the best and most charitable way to interpret those ideas.
That sounds very Lacanian, the idea of desire and the suffering of chasing what's missing.
Your syllogism isn't to far from what Scott's saying if we supposed that unfulfilled desires ~= prediction error. Which isn't that much of a stretch because both are "unrealized expectations". And unfulfilled desires are temperature-like in the exact way Scott describes.
To drop in a Tibetan perspective, focusing on desire is a little simplistic. There are desire-types, who say "I want this", but there are anger/fear types, who say "I do not want this". Of course one could re-formulate that as "I desire not-this!" but that is too semantical, the reality is that there is a huge difference between people who dwell on sweet dreams to achieve a goal, and who dwell on fear, anger, or frustration about things they really do want to avoid. I am the second type! I know it all too well. They also talk about an "ignorance type" who just have no idea what they want. Who go through life "um that sounded like a good idea at that time". "Random" people.
I've always found John Vervaeke's reformulation of the noble truths in cog-sci terms extremely helpful.
In short, he reformulates the noble truths as "ennobling provocations" and states the first one as "all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour".
The full elaboration is mostly in this lecture (and others throughout the series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGB8k7jk1AQ
But for those without an hour to jump into a dense lecture:
"We need to understand the Noble Truths as things not to believe, but to help you re-enact the Buddha’s enlightenment. They should be ‘the four ennobling provocations’."
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche says something similar in Joyful Wisdom:
"The Buddha didn’t present the Four Noble Truths as a set of concrete practices and beliefs. Instead, he offered the Four Noble Truths as a practical guide for individuals to recognise, in terms of their own lives, their basic situation, the causes of the situation, the possibility that the situation might be transformed, and the means of transformation."
Vervaeke again:
"Suffering [read as ‘pain’] doesn’t make much sense, because it is a comparative term and therefore can’t be applied to ‘all’. It is more ‘all is threatened by’. […] Buddha isn’t saying everything is painful, because if everything is painful, then nothing is painful."
I've found this helpful, because suffering’, as you've indicated above, always sounds a bit depressing, and can inspire the opposite reaction to the one the Buddha was aiming for.
The point of a provocation is to confront reality. People don’t like to confront suffering. It’s too emotionally loaded. "Suffering" inspires resignation. It also frames the whole journey to enlightenment in an unhelpful way - as if enlightenment were relief from pain, as opposed to freedom from entrapment.
"Dissatisfaction" is often used as a better translation of "dukkha" but it suffers from the same problem as suffering... it's too loaded to Western ears.
While "dissatisfaction" can get people to steadily address issues, in a way that "suffering" can’t, it can also get them to substitute in surface-level symptoms for their real issues. Like believing having a new house is the answer to a deeper wanting to become mature (cf Fromm).
"I’m dissatisfied because of this thing, or that set of circumstances," we too easily believe, rather than tracing the feeling to the only place it can really exist: as an emergent property of the connections in our brains. The point is to see your reality more clearly, and if anything feels more like something you have rather than something you are in the process of becoming, it will never feel real.
"Suffering" is therefore better read as "self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour": the actions we choose (consciously or not) to take and the thoughts we choose to think that, because of a distorted worldview, do not make our lives better.
Whole video (and whole series) is soooo worth the time.
I wonder whether 'inadequacy' would be a better fit that avoids some of those problems. Or maybe 'insufficiency'.
FWIW, I don't think so. I think the chase for the 'right' word is in danger of obscuring the more important point here, which, as ever, is that it's not so much about pointing at the 'what' (the 'precise' definition/word choice) but pointing towards the way those whats are isolated representations of in snapshot form.
The use of the reformulation, for me at least, is less about being a better choice of words, though that's clearly part of it, and more the challenge they inspire to think about what's going on under the surface - part of which in this case breaking out of the worldview that's always looking for precise definitions even when doing so is ultimately unhelpful :)
A narrow fixation on something like this is arguably exactly the sort of self-deceptive behaviour that one meditates to see more clearly isn't such a great way to be seeing the world...
This feels like some weird strawman argument, to be honest. What Buddhists actually say that "Life is suffering"? This does not capture the meaning behind at all.
Secondly, people should really stop thinking about Buddhism as being true or false. You live in a certain way and accept certain views based on the stage. Like, some Buddhists are living some kind of strange dream based on Theravada and tripping on jhanas, constantly seeking nirvana and what not. This changes very much when you move on to Mahayana, which most people never do, because they would have to transcend their individualism and actually give up something. Not to mention Vajrayana, because at that point, you basically don't give a shit about enlightenment, it's not even a concept.
So perhaps it would be beneficial to stop seeking truth in the myth you decide to live. It's just a myth. And suffering is very related to Buddhism, sure, because it's the human predicament. But the take on it evolves, changes, based on your path and view. You start in bit of a borderline condition, where you apply splitting and binary views very much. Good and bad. Happiness and suffering. Samsara and nirvana. But this is just the very naive start. And it keeps changing and evolving into something much more beautful and profound. Better not stay stuck and the starting line, I would say...
Would Theravada and Mahayana agree with the take that their Buddhism is just the undeveloped form of Vajrayana? I somehow doubt it.
They surely wouldn't. Vajrayana is based on Mahayana anyway, and on Theravada as well, but the view is such that the other vehicles are taking it a bit too seriously 🙂
You see, I can only talk about my view. And I very much like what Chogyam Trungpa explained in The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma. It's a series consisting of 3 books, one for each vehicle, and there you can see the gradual path. You read Hinayana and you are like, right, this is the way. Even the fruition is explained. And then you pick the next one and CH.T. is like, well, yeah, it's like that, but it's also bit of a bullshit, and the next space that opens up is this.
It's rather natural when you don't decide to get stuck with certain dogma, that XYZ is the nature of reality and that's why I am going to do ZYX. Because in Hinayana you work on your own suffering, not to cause suffering to yourself and others. But then it gets a but limiting. You learn a bit of compassion and you are like, hey, this is not just about me. And you open to the world out there. You become a Mahayanist. And there you spend some time until your get the feeling that the Bodhisattva path is bit of a bullshit as well, although it's a beautiful and profound bullshit 🙂 And you move on, you evolve. Can't speak for Vajrayana that much, still getting accustomed to that 🙂
So yeah, well, surely they would not agree with my view that their approach is somehow lesser, but they are arguing about something they don't find important and can't see. So there is nothing to argue about and it's pretty much pointless. My point was more perhaps about not getting too stuck with any view really. Because they are all empty in the end 🙃
"What Buddhists actually say that 'Life is suffering'?"
I feel like one very prominent Buddhist made quite a big deal about this point! Or is this the "seeking truth" thing I'm supposed to be avoiding?
You should definitely avoid it at all costs! 😜
You see, the situation is complicated. Because people think Buddhism is something monolithic. It basically isn't. The vehicles are different in major ways and dogmas, and even within the vehicles there are heavy conceptual differences between various schools. So the answer will always be like, it depends who you ask.
When you look at it from the Vajrayana/Mahamudra perspective, which is about understanding the nature of mind, then there is really not much to talk about. Things are basically in bit of a superposition of existing and not existing. Buddhists there would say that everything is mind, all the appearances out there, and mind itself is empty of any substantial nature. So everything is empty indirectly and we can relax. In a more modern language you would say that you are just tripping on concepts that are created by your mind, and while things do exist in some sense, even out there, their nature is such that they are made up by the brain. Which may be a different way of saying that hey, the brain is just detecting patterns that are there, but are they real? They are real in some sense, not real in some other sense. So the idea is basically, stop grasping the patterns as something true and real, because that creates the whole samsara and suffering thing, the identification, just discover the nature of mind, which is an experiential thing, to experience how things are put together, and then just rest in the knowing that comes when you understand the emptiness of everything. You see, everything is created by the mind, the mind is empty, so everything is empty, yet there is some kind of knowing. There is experience. Just rest in there. And from that place, enter the world again, but this time liberated.
The trick is obviously that on the way to reach the nature of mind, all your patterns, traumas and stored energy in your nervous system will get in the way. So actually it feels like you've always been liberated, but to get there requires work. Once there, everything makes sense, compassion, joy and whatever other Buddhist values comes naturally. It's all rather simple.
So yeah, the mistake is that you are seeking truth, while you should be seeking knowing. Which is behind concepts and behind all grasping. It's the untimate letting go, particularly of your ego.
I want to piggyback here on your naming of emptiness -- sunyata -- and connect it to your response to me below where you put "spaciousness" down next to my "freedom." If there were an English word that captured both spaciousness and freedom it would be useful.
"Emptiness" is another concept widely misunderstood in translation. In English we hear "devoid" or "nothing there of any value" or "nothing there at all." Where my understanding of emptiness is "spaciousness." It is the opening in which freedom can unfold. The opening into which a wholesome engagement with experience can unfold.
The thing that fills that space usually is ego and that ego (coming from wrong view, clinging, aversion, delusion, etc) is what fills up or constricts or makes unavailable that spaciousness. The "emptiness" is a space held through equanimity, mindfulness, compassion, concentration, that allows experience to come into it and move through it and unfold freely.
You have really wonderful words for all this.
Thanks. Coincidentally I am currently doing Manjushri deity practice. Manjushri is the buddha/bodhisattva of wisdom, but he also represents the skillful ability to speak your wisdom from a certain place. You could say it's no mere coincidence I end up proclaiming Dharma here just today 😁
Anyway, that's bit of an internal joke of mine 🙂
You see, I just remembered that emptiness basically always occurs paired with something else. In Heart Sutra, there is emptiness and form and their inseparability. There is the union of emptiness and awareness. Emptiness and compassion. Clarity and spontaneity. Because emptiness doesn't mean there is no felt quality. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. It just means there is no substantial, unchanging nature. There are no Plato's forms.
There will never be the right word. Because what we are talking about is experiential. We call it clarity and spontaneity, but... I remember getting to that non-conceptual space while meditating for the first time. Actually my inner voice stopped and I could not think in concepts. Rigpa, pure awareness, perhaps. And there it is crystal clear some things simply cannot be named. Because naming itself is an act that kicks you out of that space. Dao really is not Dao any more when you call it that. So yeah, I am a proponent of the direct experience approach. Get to the place where you rest deeply for the first time in your life, because that changes everything.
If you are interested in that quality, I ended up experiencing it for the first time when reading A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod and meditating on what is being transmitted there.
And you know, then there is the whole chapter on buddha nature, the third turning of the wheel of Dharma. Once you realize emptiness, you get in touch with something. The primordial quality of that space. It's perhaps simply something encoded into being a human being. That we are deep down usually joyous and compassionate, full of love and power for the good. Ignorance is what obscures it.
You could say this is about what Jung would call Self. It's something so noble and bright at the center of your being that animates everything else. Actually there is no fight any more once this place is found, because it's so numinous that the ego is actually happy to yield. To kneel and bow. It's not forced to. It yields to kindness, compassion and love.
And this is the reason Vajrayana is the indestructible vehicle. It's the path of indestructible wakefulness. Something that once found, it can never be undone or taken away. The danger of Vajrayana is that you enter that place before you are ready, before you understand emptiness and no-self. It can happen that this tremedous energy is then fueled into ego and turns into a personal catastrophy, or unprocessed stuff is pulled even deeper into your personal shadow. But if entered properly, it is a noble and heroic path. All trying and achieving is ended, but at that moment the path of the bodhisattva is truly entered. The path is there only when there is nobody to walk it.
Thank you for the reminder about Ken McLeod.
Internal Family Systems, which is descended from Jungian psychology, elaborates this same idea of Self. I was at an early training 15 years ago when its founder Dick Schwartz was first being asked to engage with Buddhism's idea of no self along side IFS's reification of Self. He wasn't there yet -- he is getting there over time -- to see that they are experientially pointing to the same thing.
The analytical mind divides and divides. occasionally it can synthesize. But it cannot experience the synthesis. Only lived experience can do that. And then lived experience is translated back imperfectly. This seems like a very basic truth to me now, but it took me a while in my life to grasp it fully enough so that it changed my whole life.
You can read and read and read about Buddhism or IFS or any other thing, but if you don't open yourself to the experience of it across time, steadily and regularly, then the words will not be able even to approximate the thing being talked about.
This is essentially correct on the whole of it but a bit too much philosophy. Do not create the illusion that people can just read, think and get it. Meditational practice is absolutely the core of it, with endless reps of mantras. Words can never explain it without the experience. BTW the reason I stopped was it did nothing to me at all... never ever felt a thing throughout years. No experience at all. Interestingly when I tried Zen I had a fleeting experience the first time... but then never pursued it somehow. Lama Ole's bunch had prettier girls so I went there. But there meditation was basically useless to me despite lots of trying. I even had Phowa. Cathy Harting, Ole's once girlfriend was fond of saying Phowa is so transformative, you cannot ever go back to materialism. But I felt nothing.
I think that the only important piece of information was that
> the mistake is that you are seeking truth, while you should be seeking knowing
😉
The Buddha didn't speak English though! So he never said "life is suffering". This really isn't just pedantry - "dukkha" in Pali has importantly different shades of meaning than the English "suffering". I think it would really help to let go of "life is suffering" as a caricature of the Buddha's teaching. To understand the Buddha you have to understand what the words he used actually mean.
Modern translations of dukkha often render it as "dissatisfaction" or "stress". It's the sense that something is *wrong* with the current experience. I expect many people who balk at "life is suffering" would find "life contains stress" easier to empathize with.
(dissatisfaction/wrongness seem to map onto the notion of prediction error in predictive processing, which is intriguing, but importantly, the Buddha's concern is the *subjective* experience of wrongness/stress)
"Stress" or "friction" also work quite well with the thermodynamic analogy. There are many dimensions to experience other than stressfulness, but every experience does have more or less stress, and reducing the amount of stress makes the experience better. And getting all the way to (or close to) absolute zero stress is profound in a way that I think most of us are not used to considering.
What would it be like to have a moment with *zero* sense of "something is wrong and should be different"? Subjectively, that is a perfect moment. There is nothing you need to change about it. It's not a hard or exotic thing to understand conceptually!
The Buddha's path is a pointer to a life without stress. You still have high and low-valenced experiences, you're still motivated to help people, you still get sick and die, but you don't get stressed about any of it. Stress isn't helpful.
(I don't claim to have experienced any perfect moments, and certainly not to have trained myself to *only* experience such moments, but having done a few meditation retreats is enough to at least see these dynamics qualitatively --- some moments have much *less* stress and correspondingly more sense of peaceful perfection --- and to get a sense of where they can lead)
Yeah, some interpret this noble truth also as simply the fact that there is certain baseline existential anxiety, restlessness of being, so to speak. And you get it because you don't see the real nature of things, you are ignorant.
In any case, I agree that stress plays a big role. My practice has lowered my stress levels tremendously. Eventually you just stop and rest fully for the first time, there is nothing to be done and that's a moment that is paramount. You start seeing another way. I do believe this is also why Buddhism is the path of nonagression. Because experientially all stress is agression towards youself. You eventually end up giving it up.
I learned from Joseph Goldstein the idea that dukka also means a cog in a wheel that is a bit out of true, which means that the axle running through it cannot rotate smoothly... and therefore you will have a rough ride. Without being centered by equanimity and the other virtues and practices on the path, one's ride will indeed be bumpy. This bumpy ride is dukka. Dukka is a kind of constant, grinding friction that reproduces itself cyclically.
I think stress is such a vague, undefined word! I have a better one: worry. Worrying about the past, about the future, so not being in the present.
Work, as such is, doing stuff, is not stress. When we talk about stress at work, we talk about worrying about failure.
If I understand correctly, it's not that truth is unobtainable, it's that it's a wordless experience, one that can't truly be communicated in language, even to oneself. The ultimate truth isn't a measurable quantity out in the world, and it isn't a category that can be analyzed in your head, apart from other categories. "Truth is a quale" is probably the closest Western rational philosophy can come to it (but not quite right, because words). That is, truth is the quale itself, not something that results in this quale. With the further understanding that the "truth quale" consists of the absence of all other qualia. Because true truth is a single unity--it encompasses everything. So saying "X is Y" is a very unBuddhist way of putting anything (but they say it that way anyway, because, again, words).
You see, this reminds me very much of non-duality. It's something that you can't really argue for, because it's completely paradoxical and it's actually based on a weird evolutionary twist that at one point we started to be able to model ourselves as we model others, then identifying with the model. But really, there is only one entity and this split between 1st person and 3rd person perspective is at the core of our predicament. You fear death because you can model yourself and imagine that model not existing any more.
So actually learning non-dual experiencing/stance is a very clever hack to counter this issue/paradox. Remember all the sayings like awareness and experience are not two. Awareness is not independent of the experience. Awareness is like a mirror. You see the appearances, but you cannot truly see the mirror. And so this actually points to joining the experience into one. And we could say suffering is caused to large extent by this split as well. That is the hard thing. How do you explain the stance? How do you teach people to just experience and not split. Well, you make one step at a time. Emptiness of identity, of appearances, of mind... This all leads to the moment when you give up seeking any source and you just rest. And at that moment the inner and outer are one. There is just life, just experience. Who cares what is true?
But at the same time you learn that there is certain quality of that experience. It's empty, spacious, but it's not nothing. And the quality that arises is what Buddhism talks about further in Mahayana and Vajrayana. This is the union of emptiness and awareness, emptiness and compassion, clarity and spontaneity. It's so spacious. And this leads to self-liberating experiencing. There is so much space that your thoughts, you whole being is being liberated constantly, because there is nothing to get stuck on, to grasp.
And this really is the fruition of the path, as far as I understand. Learning and living the self-liberating mode. The spaciousness that counters all grasping. It's lovely. It's calm. It's like when the spring sun warms up your skin. But at the same time you perhaps find this quality in yourself, or will, to be a blazing sun for others that are lost in the dark still. So at the end it can feel like you are actually just finally entering Mahayana. But you know, it all feeds into each other, it's not a linear path.
"Compassion is not so much feeling sorry for somebody, feeling that you are in a better place and somebody else is in a worse place. Rather, compassion is not having any hesitation to reflect your light on things."
This is what you may end up with. It's incredibly meaningful. Because it's embodied and deeply authentic. This is something that no truth can give you.
> It's empty, spacious, but it's not nothing.
This actually brings us to the relative and absolute bodhichitta. Which are tremendously important to understand. A Mahayanist would tell you, yeah, XYZ is true. But it's only the relative truth. And that is yet another paradox. Buddhism is really about learning to hold ambiguity, to withstand it. Because that's what human life is like.
So, for a relatively uninformed person like me--is it fair to say the present moment of experience is all that exists? Be fully immersed in it?
That is trying to escape the paradox 🙂 Like, we think and remember, so past, present and future all exist in some sense. That would be the relative, conventional truth. But you can surely say that past and future and constructed, so they don't exist in some sense. From the point of the nature of mind, these are just empty concepts. Last but not least, you can pull out theory of relativity and say that there is nothing like the present moment, because it doesn't make sense on the scale of the universe 🙂 So I would say past and present are both relevant, the problem is only getting too attached to it, ruminating endlessly and what not.
Like, I am sorry, eventually you just learn there is no ultimate answer to anything, the difference is that you learn to be ok with it. And you can then just choose how to live 🙂
Having said that, to be fully immersed in life is surely worthwhile, that's what this is all about. But what does it mean? Well, it's about stopping to run away from life and facing it in its complexity and ambiguity, I believe. That is also one of the principal aspects of the path: renunciation, or definite emergence. You decide to stop running away. It's all much simpler that we like to think really...
No, because "all that exists" is a factual claim about the world, and it is not about that. Even a value judgement like "do not think about the future" is not about that, as sometimes we need to. Rather it would be a subjective factual claim "thinking about the future leads to worrying" and then decide whether it worths it in this case or not.
That does not correspond to my understanding of what the Buddhists are saying. It's not just things that exist or do not--entire modes of thinking are part of the illusion. There are no "facts," nor are there any feelings, nor anything else. Nothing exists, except the immediate experience of existing (which can include thinking about the future, as long as that doesn't become a distraction from existing in the moment).
Let's try this another way: you don't avoid thinking about the future in order to avoid worrying. You recognize that worrying is part of the illusion of the world. It acts to attach you to reality, which isn't real, so stop doing it. "Thinking about the future" in itself isn't a problem.
This appears to have interesting implications for science. Asserting factual claims (or denying them) isn't itself a problem--indeed it can lead to interesting insights about the world. Just remember that all "facts" are really modes of thinking, categories of sensations that you invent in your head, not stuff out in a real world outside of you somewhere. You should treat it as this really detailed and consistent simulation that your unconscious brain is running (because that is literally true).
I'm not convinced that you "move on" from Theraveda to Mahayana, as if Mahayana were a more advanced degree of the same insights. I think it may be equally plausible to say that Theraveda is the core of Buddhism as an applied science, and Mahayana is what you get when you turn it into a soteriological religion or even a mythology.
Depends. It's not more advanced degree, you need Theravadan insights for any Buddhist path. It's just that there is more stuff than the project of personal enlightenment, for some people. You cannot skip egolessness and impermanence in any case, unless you are there for spiritual bypassing and ego tripping. I don't personally know how Theravadans approach emptiness and compassion, but it's the core thing in Mahayana.
I love this arrogance, though, that Theravada is science. No it isn't. Seriously 🙂
I'm not sure that I accept the label "arrogance." Isn't that normally used to refer to someone's attitude toward themselves, their position, or their stuff? I'm not in any sense a Buddhist, Theraveda or otherwise, and I'm not talking about a position I hold, but about how something looks to me seen from outside.
But what I mean by "science" is that a lot of belief systems seem to say "believe this because I say so" ("for he spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes"), but I've gotten the impression that what Gautama was saying was, "OK, try this for yourself and see what results you get." And that looks like a scientific approach to me, in a way that Christianity or Islam does not. But I don't claim to speak with authority here!
Right, yeah, got you. It got less scientific, though, when people started arguing what it is they are seeing, though 😅 There are multiple schools of thought in Theravada already.
Anyway, I think that the amount of woo and religion there gets poured into Buddhism depends mostly on your teacher. For Mahayana and Vajrayana it can still simply be a worthwhile way of living.
Just to round things off, here's a bit of verse I wrote back in the twentieth:
Triptaka: Double Dactyl
Mulkety prinkety,
Buddha Tathagatha,
Seeking release from this
Life of despair,
Sat in full lotus in
Omphaloskeptical
Thoughts on his own being
Really not there.
Theravada has this deep internal contradiction, that you want to be rid of the ego, but you want it to be happy, which is an ego-driven desire. So it has the contradiction of "I want to not want, I desire to not desire." Mahayana is a self-Jedi-mind-trick of telling yourself you want to do it for others, while of course knowing it is not entirely so.
It seems as if that's akin to the argument of the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krsna tells Arjuna not to worry about whether he wins or loses the battle, or about his regret for the deaths of his kin on the other side, but to act according to his dharma as a warrior—and of course by following that advice Arjuna and his brothers win the battle.
The Buddhist group I was in paid a lot of attention to a book called Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. If you’re shopping for the brand of Buddhism that will make you happier you’re already barking way far up the wrong tree
Yeah, the book is fine. I think, though, that we all start with certain intentions that are potentially lame 🙂 Really, we all want to be happy, it's just that the usual expectation to somehow bypass all the work is, well, not good and it will catch up with you for sure 🙂
!! Mahayana Derangement Syndrome detected !!
I am unfortunately deranged on purpose 😜✌️
I love how you said all this.
I can't quite tell how Scott is seeing this from what he's written, but his dichotomy sounds like he's saying the opposite of Buddhist's "suffering" is "pleasure" or "happiness" or something like that. But the idea of "suffering" is misunderstood. To my mind, Buddhism says what you're moving towards is freedom, is an unfettering from clinging, aversion, and delusion. And that enlightenment is a sustained unfettering.
It's certainly not about maximizing pleasure nor about not having feelings. To get free is to cry when there is sadness and feel joyful when there is wholesomeness. It's to open to all of it with equanimity, not stoicism.
One is not getting unfettered from the world; one is getting unfettered from one's own clinging, aversion, and delusion. Which allows more depth of engagement with unfolding experience, including in the world.
Yes, lovely.
My teacher says that the issue really is that we tend to narrow around things. That's what our brains do. They tend to get stuck and merge, identify. Can be thoughts, can be whole stories and narratives. And really the quality connected to true realization on the path is spaciousness and vastness, which cancels that narrowing. Any time you read about pure awareness, knowing, bright light mind and what not, there is spaciousness. It's like a clear sky. And in that spaciousness there is joy and spontaneity.
In some sense, or in my experience, as long as there is space, there is liberation. Some schools of Buddhism are more moralistic and they tell you what is good and what is bad, but Tantric Buddhism is not like that. It doesn't matter what happens in that space. It's liberated immediately. And it only serves to remind you of the nature of the mind, which is vast and open. And like that you practice as you live.
People should be careful, though. You can try to escape into vastness so that you don't have to face your personal demons. That is not what this path is for. As you practice, the space will open on its own. You cannot imagine or visualize yourself into it, you really can't and shouldn't. You need to stay embodied. Also because all the enlightened qualities are there to be embodied 🙂
Now that I am thinking about this once more, if there is any maximizing, it's regarding adaptivity and neuroplasticity. Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if the experience of spaciousness or just learning to add it to your experience was increasing your neuroplasticity. Well, this actually feels obvious, but no discussion is finished until you mention neuroplasticity, right?
"Not to mention Vajrayana, because at that point, you basically don't give a shit about enlightenment, it's not even a concept."
Sure, that is why Vajrayana does not have a concept of rinpoches, enlightened people's reincarnations being recognized. Wait... they do. They just do it in a different way - to recognize we are already enlightened.
Perhaps I should have said that it's just a concept 🙂
All this is ok but it all works on the assumption that we can find out the most useful things about ourselves by introspection.
I worry this is a mistake - we might learn more about ourselves by interaction and more specifically dialogue. This is what quite a big chunk of our wiring is set up for.
Dialogue both with others and as we internalise the other with oneself isn't internal chatter to be silenced but a conversation to be progressed or an argument whose pathologies are better analysed with interpersonal tools than intrapersonal ones.
As a digression - I think that LLM's being unable to learn - on the fly - through dialogue is a big reason that they are limited.
The Buddhist Geeks came up with some form of social meditation a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EzG7pTT2Bo
Yes, that is one of the fundamental assumptions of dharmic religions, and not just Buddhism - or close enough to it. There are disagreements about epistemological specifics like whether this can be achieved through or needs to be aided by logic, external observation, ritual, etc, but it is generally taken for granted, and this is one of the causes of misunderstanding. All of them rely on what can be, and is metaphorically described as 'getting rid of fetters' to non-metaphorically acquire a direct perception of being. Why this is good is also different in specifics, but it converges on the same kind of understanding like the existence-knowledge-bliss of Hinduism. Lots of differences, but in dharmic religions, all the most fundamental assumptions are the same, or at least close enough.
"Ourselves" also includes the "world", so in Hinduism and Jainism, you can see that this is often called omniscience (Hinduism depending on the tradition, unambiguous soteriology in Jainism). A similar role in Buddhism is played by concepts such as the fully enlightened one being able to recollect all their previous lives, verifiably knowing nirvana and all the precepts of Buddhism, etc.
If you mean to saw that Buddhism works on this assumption, I would say not. The path depends on a three-legged stool that gets called the three refuges -- Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. "Buddha" is the part that's about a way of engaging with one's mind, Dharma is the whole collective lineage of teaching and practice, and Sangha is the community.
There is no sense in which Buddhism is devaluing interpersonal growth and connectivity.
Three parts of the eight-fold path have to do with how we engage with other people and the world, ourselves in interaction, in other words. Those are right speech, right action, and right livelihood.
These are not the only places that things other than introspection show up in Buddhism. The four brahma viharas are loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. These are supported through multiple kinds of practice but are intended to bring harmony and healing to the world.
Loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity are equally important realms of often relational practice as any kind of solitary mindfulness or concentration meditation practice. Not to mention that even the solitary introspection parts have historically most everywhere had communal and relational aspects. This is true even now when you go on meditation retreats in almost any tradition here in the West.
The pop Western understanding of Buddhism comes in part through the reification of the shallow idea of "mindfulness." But Buddhism as a whole is not just meditation or mindfulness or special mind states, and certainly isn't just centered on introspection. These are dessicated understandings filtered through pop culture. And it's tricky because many people talking about Buddhism in those ways don't know what they don't know, and that ignorance gets proliferated more into pop culture.
Things like, Oh well Buddhism is about: being mindful, reaching elevated states of consciousness, focusing a lot inwardly, letting go of everything and not feeling things anymore, chasing blissful states, disengaging from the world, emptying the mind, being stoic, and on and on. These are all various kinds of misapprehension.
People also often miss that Buddhism is not just a practice, not just a philosophy or a religion or a psychology, but also a moral system about how to live a wholesome life. The 8-fold path is not just a way to live wholesomely though -- it's the conditions one needs to cultivate in order to get free.
Even Plato would disagree with that. What do we learn from discussing the shadows of things projected to the cave wall? They are all illusions. What to learn from interacting from an illusion-ridden mind with other illusion-ridden minds? The thing is to get up and go outside the cave to see real things.
Certain bounded systems in certain circumstances *can* have negative thermodynamic temperatures, but that's hotter than infinite temperature, not colder than absolute zero.
This suggests that certain finite beings in certain circumstances might have negative suffering but that'd be worse than infinite suffering, not better than nirvana. (In the "prediction error" model, that's what would happen if your brain predicted stimuli more inaccurately than it would by guessing based on the maximum-entropy distribution, i.e. if its predictions are not merely uncorrelated but *anti*-correlated with what happens.)
Temperature is weird because it can be positive, negative, or infinite, but never zero: absolute zero is unattainable. That's why physicists sometimes deal with its inverse "beta", which can (more sensibly) be positive, negative or zero, but never infinite.
Huh, while you can't actually achieve it in the real world, mathematically absolute zero is a well defined concept (a system with 100% probability of being in its ground state).
Huh, so the "unattainability" formulation of the third law of thermodynamics is just Cromwell's rule?
Likewise: a negative infinite Elo rating is someone who loses all games with 100% probability (but even a bot who always resigns on its first move has a nonzero probability of playing black and white resigning on their first move)
(that can't happen in a natural environment for the sort of reasons Yudkowsky describes as "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" and everybody else describes as "even a broken clock is right twice a day", but in an adversarial environment, well, you already wrote the hell in Unsong)
Interesting idea to play around with but I don’t find it convincing.
Also, I don’t see how it helps against the charge of Buddhism being anti-human (if you are inclined to think that way). Nirvana still seems devoid of human content, as compared to a conventional idea of a good life or what Christianity says is the ideal human existence.
I think it's anti-human to want eternal blah rather than happiness or sadness, but wanting happiness is very human and normal. Maybe this is the same argument as https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
I see. I guess I thought you meant something like anti human in the sense of claiming that one should aspire to achieving a higher state of consciousness in a cave somewhere as opposed to living a life of virtue in the world.
Sam Harris' Waking Up app has some very good discussions with other teachers about the value of a normal human life vs becoming a monk and "desiring nothing but consciousness". He discusses this with Joan Tollifson, Shinzen Young and Michael Taft.
I highly recommend the app just for the discussions and theory (not sure if the teaching style is ideal, at least for me).
Thanks. Yeah, this is the kind of thing I thought he was referring to.
Nirvana is not devoid of human content, because it is achieved during life. Parinirvana (confusingly often called nirvana) is devoid of it, in some ineffable way, but there are similar conceptions of Christian heaven, especially some mystical approaches.
Anti-current-human, anti-human-as-usually-understood, for sure. The promise is, that it leads to a better kind of human with more of the truly valued human traits like compassion, humour, wisdom. It certainly comes from a dissatisfaction of the merely, conventionally, currently human.
Alright, I'll be the nitpicker
It's not "degrees Kelvin", it's just "Kelvin"
Also I'm pretty sure heat is not quite the same thing as temperature but I don't think I could explain the difference well
If we're going to nitpick, it's lower case "kelvins".
Touché
But the abbreviation is "K" to avoid confusion with the prefix "k" as in kilo... just to really keep us on our toes!
FWIW, I don't recall ever hearing someone say "kelvins" as a plural, always "the sample is at 300 kelvin" (or even "300 K"). I do recall "let's raise the temperature 10 degrees".
Semi-relevant XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1726/
Units that are based on a person’s name are generally capitalized even in an abbreviations.
kPa kilo Pascals
kW kilo Watts
I hadn't noticed that; I feel vaguely sorry for the hypothetical person whose name starts with "M", but shan't get an abbreviation, since that would conflict with "Mega"
:P
Indeed
Wikipedia says it's plural (last section)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin?wprov=sfti1
Yeah I agree with the comic, but in the case of a unit mostly used by technical people it seems more realistic to have strict norms
My observation was specifically that of a professional scientist, working with other professional technical people, and noting that "kelvins" as a plural was something I had never personally heard in technical speech.
That said, I also checked the NIST official instructions in scientific publications for use of "kelvins", which basically said (pg 17) "don't spell it out, use 'K' instead"
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication811e2008.pdf
It's also explicit that "degree Celsius" is equivalent to "kelvin" and by implication, kelvin should follow the behaviour of "degree"; i.e. plural if >1, singular if <= 1 (which comes up far more often than it used to, now that Bose-Einstein Condensates are a thing).
(but NIST gets to enforce standards for their publications in a way that the Unicode people can only dream of)
Heat is a form of energy, while temperature is the differential of heat by entropy. What that means is: while heat (or rather energy as a whole) is conserved, temperature is "the thing that equalises in order to maximise entropy". If you have two bodies with heat in them, and you connect them, heat flows from one to the other until they both have the same "temperature", because that is what maximises entropy.
Yes! Thanks
So if two objects have the same temperature, but one is heavier or is made of a material with a higher heat capacity per mass, it will carry more heat
I'll raise the pedantry even further: heat is not energy, heat is a flux of energy, driven by a temperature gradient. The quantity that is differentiated by entropy to define temperature is the internal energy, which is a state variable. "Heat" is not a state variable, and cannot be properly differentiated, which is why some texts choose to put a small slash mark in differentials of heat.
Heat and temperature are not the same thing. Something can be high temperature even without "having" a lot of heat. The normal example is the outer atmosphere, which has a high temperature but absolutely would not feel hot if you happened to be there.
Interesting mirror of the "evil is just the absence of good" school of Christian theodicy.
That's a really interesting point, someone (who knows more about it, eg not me) should delve into that
The entire time I was reading this I was thinking about how many takes on a Christian heaven posit that heaven is a state of blissful happiness purely because of the absence of temptation and sin (ergo evil). Lots of symmetries.
I came here to say this & am glad somebody else noticed it too.
Yes! I was thinking the same thing too!
Also I've heard Catholic wise people say that "sin is separation." I think there's a parallel there too.
It's not strictly Buddhism vs Christianity though, in Christianity there was a lot of apophatic approaches as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology
I used to think like that, but I think they are actually closer. While Christianity seems to be about gaining something good, one lever deeper the good thing, the divine spark, being created in Gods image was always there, it was just clouded by original sin. Hence man has no absence of good, but covered up, clouded, dirtied good. Similarly Buddhism likes to say it is about polishing a diamond, the good is already there, you just need to remove the dirt from it. So in both cases, good is not entirely absent, but clouded, dirtied, hidden, pushed down, and that way not truly present.
This model is quite wrong from what we know about the brain. Pleasure and pain are not direct opposites. Pain is much more fundamental to our nervous system - we have dedicated receptors to detect it across our body.
Pleasure is different. It is a system designed to tail off through dopamine spikes. It’s not designed to keep us in permanent pleasure, because that wouldn’t be evolutionarily advantageous as roaming animals.
This truth seems to validate the buddhist’s claims more. Pleasure is always fleeting, pain is not.
Since they run on separate systems, you can also feel both activate simultaneously, as in the case of spicy food or BDSM; this seems to strongly contradict the claims made in the post.
(I remember a blog saying at some point that actually, the body stores hot and cold separately too, and when you have a fever both the heat-regulation and cold-regulation systems are out of whack. But, as a commenter above points out, there is a "real" physical temperature separate from our perceptions of it, which isn't the case for pleasure/pain.)
I don't think craving is the same as pleasure (if we use "pleasure" to mean the sort of bliss Buddhists are after). I don't think the most stable pleasures are necessarily mediated by the dopamine system. See eg the literature on "wanting vs. liking", or https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable .
Great stuff as always and food for thought, thanks
Wanting versus liking has always seemed to me like the right lens for the first noble truth. We are built to constantly want, and getting the thing we want almost never actually satisfies the wanting in any lasting way. No longer being driven by that cycle of craving seems like it still leaves plenty of room for liking things, and maybe actually makes enjoyment easier and less fraught.
How do you come to this idea that Buddhists are after bliss?
I don't mean to deny that there are all kinds of Buddhist teachings out of many lineages and cultures, but I've been a Buddhist in the Vipassana tradition for forty years and this has not anywhere been part of what I've learned or practiced.
Dopamine seems better understood as mediating motor learning, than pleasure per se. Charlie Harrison's comment that dukkha means "unsatisfactoriness" rather than "suffering" is interesting because "pleasure" comes from the same root as "placate," implying that etymologically the word "pleasure" at root means "non-unsatisfactoriness," and thus reflects a single-factor model. People also imagine that opioids represent pleasure, but I think they're better understood as primarily mediating breath pressure and secondarily mediating other sorts of cybernetic regulation making use of the same system.
Overall it makes more sense to me to think of pain as simple relatively easy to spot aversive processes, but positive motivations as too complex to be represented by specific neurotransmitters; something more like pain/fear/suffocation vs agency/curiosity/rationality.
Others have written that "life is suffering" is not a helpful interpretation of the first noble truth. I'd just like to add a bit of my intuition.
When a person comes to meditation they often have a vague but deep sense that 'something is wrong' maybe mixed with occasional insights along the lines of 'apart from my own suffering, I can see that everything is all actually very ok and life is beautiful'. Both those insights together lead a person to realise that maybe the problem is actually the way they are seeing things.
In my current understanding, the first and second noble truths are pointing to: the way people habitually try to search for fulfillment, by grasping after things, is doomed to failure.
To address your point about practicing meditation being like going to Britain - I'm afraid it's hard for me to know because I live in England! But in my experience meditation doesn't flatten the emotions or the experiences of life. It doesn't even eliminate pain, sadness or frustration (although it sometimes helps me to avoid creating more of it). What it seems to do, for me, is to gradually reveal another way of seeing things where the pain, sadness and frustration are part of something bigger. And that bigger space is the 'actually very ok and beautiful' we all sometimes have glimpses of.
>When a person comes to meditation
... they usually come from a big enlightening LSD trip :)
"... Buddhism... nirvana ... sounds like a letdown. An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain..."
over the past few years I’ve felt our paths gradually diverging. I used to enjoy your writing immensely — the intelligence, the humor, the curiosity. But lately your posts seem to circle endlessly around the same few themes: America, Trump, AI, America again.
As a curious, open-minded European, I find myself losing interest — not because these issues don’t matter, but because they’re framed from such a narrowly American point of view. Life outside the U.S. can be genuinely good — safe, socially secure, with affordable healthcare, education, job security, work life balance and without the constant noise of political self-obsession.
Take someone like Evan Edinger, for instance: a former conservative-gun-loving American who traveled to the UK “for a while,” discovered how sane everyday life can be elsewhere, and never looked back. His story echoes that of many Americans I’ve met or heard their own stories who found Europe, Japan, or elsewhere to be more livable, less stressful, and freer in many many ways that matter.
So, yes — I think our time as online companions has come to an end. I still appreciate what your writing once was and the ideas I’ve enjoyed through it. I only regret not joining that ACT meetup in Zürich a few years ago — it was just ten minutes from where I live.
So long — and thanks for all the fish.
I find comments like this utterly bewildering. You're complaining about Scott being "too American" while in the very same breath aggressively boasting about all thhe ways Europe is better than America, then turning around and saying you don't like geographical self-obsession. And without the tiniest trace of irony.
As an Australian, I look at both Americans and Europeans and see equally great arrogance and self-absorption generally. But on this blog particularly, it's Europeans who take the cake. I'm struggling to remember the last time I saw anyone on here do an "all the ways America is better!" boast, but I've seen it from Europeans (like yours here) more times than I can possibly count.
American greatness is low status these days, something that only unwashed yokels can unironically believe in, while Euros (and Canadians) feel superior in comparison, because their yokel contingents are less prevalent.
Conversely, this response reads odd to me. The person you're responding to very specifically just says "and elsewhere" multiple times, in believable contexts (e.g. calling out Japan specifically, where they don't reside). That doesn't map to "geographical self-obsession" to me.
(To be clear, I also find the comment you're responding to bewildering, and I don't endorse it. Your criticism just confused me even more than the post you're responding to.)
Dunno, but I am a European and unironically think the US is the greatest country in the world and much better than Europe under most metrics. It is freer, richer, many orders of magnitude much more innovative and a place that looks to the future.
Boasting about America being great became associated with Republicans, so Democrats avoided that. But the recent slogan "make America great again" kinda implies that currently America is not great.
So you suddenly have something that both political parties agree on, only with different connotations.
D: "America is not great, and that's how it is supposed to be". (because it would be racist or imperialist for America to be great, or something like that)
R: "America is not great, and we need to fix that." (by trying to become more like Russia, ignoring the fact obvious to everyone else that Russia, actually, is not great)
Meanwhile, Europeans who don't like their politicians can say: "okay, my country sucks, but some other parts of Europe are probably great".
I don't think anyone wants America to be more like Russia.
At some moment it was cool to talk about conquering new territories, even from America's allies. Now it seems cool to send armed forces against domestic opponents. (There are probably more examples, but these came to my mind immediately.)
I agree that most MAGAs don't consciously want to be more like Russia; they just kinda happen to support similar policies (probably while thinking that their ideas are uniquely American).
I twitched at that, living in Britain as I do. Then I looked out the window, and, well, it’s pretty grey and misty.
I kinda like that, mind :)
Yeah I took it as a slight about the weather. He could have easily said Pittsburgh instead, except then very few of his international readers would have gotten the joke and even most Americans have never been to Pittsburgh and might not get the joke.
Yeah I'm totally happy with 'an endless gray mist of bare okayness' as Scott's official (3 star?) review of my homeland.
Well not happy obviously, that would be a bit much. But it's fine.
2.5 stars. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
If you can’t read a post about Buddhism without a one word joke about British weather triggering you like this, you’re probably the problem. This has to be the most ridiculous comment I’ve ever read here.
> As a curious, open-minded European, I find myself losing interest — not because these issues don’t matter, but because they’re framed from such a narrowly American point of view.
I understand the sentiment (of the quoted sentence - the rest seems to me unrelated) and have sometimes shared it, but really I would not have expected it from that humorous poke at Britain. As a French guy, I am totally in familiar territory there :-) . Nor from that post where nothing is about America or AI.
But yeah. I do think Scott's writing is still great, but you don't have to force yourself in a community of foreigners of which you do not share the themes of interest. Fare thee well.
I didn't have the negative reaction to your comment as other responders here and I don't hear you aggressively bragging.
I'm an old fart American who has lived in many places in America, rural and urban, and who has been traveling widely for decades on all continents, and not mainly as a tourist, though that too. This is just my personal experience, though it's echoed by quite a few other Americans I know -- that I experience a kind of functional, grounded wholesomeness and cultural sanity when I travel in Europe. It's different in different places and obviously there are similar dissolutions happening there as here in the U.S. But the feeling is so different and feels like such a welcome counter-balance to so much of what is happening here in the U.S.
I'm sorry you feel the need to leave this space. I understand your disappointment. For me the gift of this particular post by Scott is the presence and depth of the various voices that show up here to dialogue with it and with each other.
Take good care.
What as a European envy about America is that things happening. It is not about the quality of everyday life, which can be mostly worse. It is technology, venture capital, invention, Silicon Valley. Shaping the future. Basically, in a way, *power*. They only country that in the big power struggle can prevent Global Universal China from happening.
I find that "functional, grounded wholesomeness" absolutely terrifying, because it's so clearly a product of an enduring, collective trauma from Nazi occupation and World War II. (And stuff before that no doubt, but that's obviously the most salient). It's not like Europe is naturally some calm, easy-going place, I mean it couldn't be further from that. It's just that the last time their passions blew up, they blew up to a level so utterly, unimaginably beyond anything the worst imaginings of Americans can comprehend, that the result is, 80 years later, whole categories of issues that are Not Discussed, that respectable parties never touch, coupled with increasingly aggressive criminalisation of anything that slightly pattern-matches to these taboos, and, as a natural result, a slowly growing undercurrent of terrifying bottled extremism that goes far far beyond what's seriously entertained by the fringes of American thought. And all the while, everyone puts on a happy face. It's so rare to even see Europeans, at least online, even acknowledge this history at all and its effect on their current attitudes, which I think is one of the clearest signs of unresolved trauma.
None of this is remotely healthy. I don't think those of us who live in a place that's never been occupied in anything close to living memory can comprehend the freedom from fear and freedom of honesty that we have.
To me, America looks like a loud, quite obnoxious family that gets into constant arguments and screaming matches over everything. The children fight, wrestle, throw things at each other sometimes. The parents have regular screaming arguments and sound like they're about to kill each other but are still, just barely but still, together. Meanwhile, Europe looks like a family whose children are perfectly polite and well-behaved, whose company seems pleasant at first...until you you hear the mother's whispered threats to the child who almost hinted at a taboo topic, notice the cold shivers and anxious glances when Mom's "former companions" are mentioned, and get snatches of the rumours about where Dad's old friend Miss Black is thought to be buried.
The loud family is definitely far from a healthy and nice home. In fact, the neighbours are constantly on the verge of calling the police when the parents are screaming abuse at each other on a nightly basis. From the neighhbours' perspective, it's probably hard to imagine anything worse, and they'll repeatedly wonder why they can't be like the calm polite second family down the street. And I come from a family that's mostly a lot healthier than both (though with a lot of the family seeming to want to spend every day sitting on the couch drinking beer it definitely has room for improvement) and look on both other families as toxic in their own way.
But if I had to choose between them, I would choose the loud American family where nothing is taboo and everything is a reason to start a fight a thousand times, a million times without a moment's hesitation, because the other family chills me to the very core of my bones.
Nice write — I agree. Europeans, and Germans in particular, still carry a collective trauma 80 years after WWII. Ideally, this lingering trauma serves a purpose: to anchor a deep cultural reflex against another European or pan-European war for at least another 80 years.
That said, we are all shaped by our upbringing and tend to prefer what feels familiar — what we call culture. Culture is not decoration; it emerges as an adaptive survival mechanism for individuals and for groups. And naturally, when many different cultures interact, misunderstandings are unavoidable.
In this context it’s useful to look at the cultural framework developed by Geert Hofstede, the Dutch researcher who identified several dimensions along which national cultures differ — power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, long-term orientation, and, most famously, individualism vs. collectivism.
Across all countries he analyzed, one outlier stood out dramatically:
the United States scored by far the highest on individualism, to the point where “personal freedom and individual autonomy” overwhelmingly outweigh community, hierarchy, or collective obligations in almost any social or political question.
This extreme position doesn’t just shape American behaviour — it also shapes how many Americans interpret other cultures. When you read countries with a radically individualist lens, you inevitably misread societies whose internal logic balances autonomy with communal responsibility in very different proportions. The result is not malice, but massive structural misunderstandings: other cultures appear “irrational” or “inconsistent”, simply because they do not follow the U.S. template of individual choice above all else.
What the last 50 years of open travel in the West have given us is precisely the opposite: the freedom to choose, as individuals, our own preferred mix of these cultural dimensions — how collectivist we want our environment to be, how individualist, how hierarchical, how consensus-oriented.
I did that myself: I moved within Europe from a strongly collectivist environment to a less collectivist, more individualist country — one with more personal freedom, but also more personal responsibility. Yet even here, the level of social cohesion and the expectation that society looks after its members remain far higher than in the U.S.
And we still see the same dynamic across Europe: people migrate into their dream culture, reinforcing the traits of the society they join while also subtly exporting the values of the society they left. Culture isn’t static; it’s a living flow shaped by individual decisions — especially when those decisions are backed by the freedom to move.
Still, people mostly seem to move the other way around. Life in Europe is pleasant. But the big wins of technology, the truly heroic, world-changing stuff happen in the Silicon Valley. America is not better, not by far, perhaps, if one runs a utilitarian calculus, on the whole worse. But so much more interesting. There is more venture capital on the main street of Palo Alto than the whole EU. Things really do happen there. Bad things, good things. But at least not nothing.
Ironically this comment is a great example of how utterly dull some continental Europeans are. One can scarcely imagine a Brit being so offended by so trivial a joke. In fact, one more easily imagines a Brit *making* the joke.
Cool. Still, I identify with the hero of Scott's story who refused to be enlightened. Assuming humans are not designed for an absolute 0 degree of suffering. I fear no pain less bad than at the dentist. Have an appointment on Tuesday.
I’m very grateful that people with more knowledge of Buddhism than Scott have spoken up in the comments to provide better information.
I just want to add my personal perspective as someone who has merely familiarized himself with some of the introductory concepts of Buddhism and who meditates for a short time once every other day or so: I don’t necessarily find that meditation fills me with joy or pleasure or whatever. When meditation feels most “successful”, what happens is I feel a sort of pressure inside the middle of my forehead, my closed eyes can see a dark spot appear there. Then if I’m able to keep going even beyond that, which has happened only a handful of times, I catch a glimpse of my own non-existence, which does have a kind of exciting or ecstatic feeling as I look back on it but not in the moment. In the moment it feels more like a rush or a thrill, like going down the hill of a roller coaster.
Another way to derive this is to ask:
Why can't I just sit in a dark room and wirehead myself into perfect bliss?
Assume perfect conditions: it's Sunday morning, you're alone with nothing to do, all your physical needs are met for the moment, you have no worries on your mind. Still, you can never go into bliss-land.
Why? Because "you" are literally an agentic problem-solving loop that your brain runs 24/7.
If you attend to your moment-by-moment experience, there are all these needs that must be met. The needs may be quieter or louder (e.g. being peckish vs. starving), but the stack of needs is always full. Being "okay" or "satisfied" means that current needs are low-volume, not that you're out of needs.
The stack is always full: you can see this when you learn to meditate. Even when there are no immediate physical needs, your brain dutifully supplies more by ruminating on the past and future; you can literally see it making up problems on the spot to fill the stack.
Today, the closest thing we could have to an "artificial consciousness" would be taking an agent like Claude Code and running it 24/7 with an instruction like: "Find problems with my app and solve them." The first part is crucial: the agent is supposed to *always find problems*, and if it doesn't find any it will probably hallucinate / confabulate them.
How do you suppose such an algorithm would "feel from the inside"? (This is just an exercise: I'm not making any claims about artificial qualia.) I think it would feel constantly in tension: just like us*.
This constant tension is dukkha in my understanding. Hence when you understand dukkha, you also understand anatta (no-self) because short-circuiting dukkha is the same thing as short-circuiting the loop, the algorithm that generates "you", which causes the self to drop.
*Where this analogy breaks: in our case the process that fills the needs stack is unconscious, happening in the background. To us, needs just appear in the field of consciousness as a given. What we feel are the needs themselves and the work we do to solve them.
If this were the Pali Canon, twenty ACX readers would have become immediately enlightened upon reading your comment.
How do you know they didn't?
"Splendid, splendid, magnificent!" cried the ACX readers as they attained stream-entry. The gods rained down flowers from heaven. A bald eagle flew into the comment section, and shed a single tear. Then everyone clapped. The name of the commenter? Albert Einstein.
I like this analogy also because it can provide important insights via the software/hardware distinction: optimizing our "software" to cause less suffering will not resolve (some of) our hardware problems. The Buddha himself famously (not) suffered from back pain later in life; Rob Burbea suffered from IBD and died of cancer; Culadasa lived for years with undiagnosed Lyme disease potentially partially because he was so chill and able to just ignore the symptoms for a while.
Clever. I am not sure it is entirely "traditional" Buddhism, but at least a close synthesis of that and modern kinds of thinking.
this is quite well written, when I saw the title I was expecting to have beef with most of the article, but you basically got most of it. Here are some other notes: the jhanas and nirvana aren’t totally different thing, the jhanas are a staircase to nirvana. J8 is an extremely defabricated state and J9 is nirvana.
on “is there anything good” I think kind of? I can get very near nirvana whenever I want in a few seconds (annoyingly that last inch is hard for me) and I mostly don’t. There’s like an artistic interestingness to the activity of things. But nirvana.. is sort of just better in some ways. It also doesn’t really feel like “no life” it feels close to like “full life” or “fully merged with god” or something. It feels far less “anti life” to me than it used to when I thought of it in the abstract
The other thing is as you defabricate conditioning you get closer and closer to nirvana while also sensory clarity goes up and up (less stuff to render?). So it’s actually less like this big trade off of life vs nothingness. If you’re “pro life” you defabricate up until that last inch and the world just gets very beautiful, very jhana-like all the time, thinned out and shimmery, more present, light. Then I guess if you’re a hardcore Theravada (but I don’t really know anyone that is in practice) you go that last inch and try to blink out. But I don’t see a big reason to, being an inch from nirvana gives you all the upside of life with like 99% the upside of nirvana, like orbiting a black hole of goodness without falling in, you just get to enjoy living next to that black hole without the downsides of falling into a black hole
To me the badly translated phrase “life is suffering” started to make more sense when my kids got old enough to verbally complain about being bored despite having rooms full of toys and neighbors’ houses full of their friends. The phrase is still literally false, because of the bad translation, but it became easy to see that suffering is a mindset one adopts, by forming expectations and then attaching to those expectations.
Beautifully said!
BTW has anyone else here (Scott included) read the book “Why Buddhism is True” by Robert Wright? I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts. I very much enjoyed it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-why-buddhism-is?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Good lookin out, thanks
Like Britain lol
So, Buddhism is essentially proto-wireheading? I don't see why it's so appealing then, unlike the actual idea of wireheading. Perhaps the lives of ancient Asian peasants were awful enough for it...
Thermodynamically coldness is more fundamentally than heat.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_beta
Nirvana is just the same life you always had but now when suffering strikes in whatever form, which is always, your point of view automatically shifts to where it doesn't matter. The world of illusion is believing too much in a model of the world and getting stuck in it. That model locks you into a specific point of view. This is good, this is bad. I like this, I don't like this. This goes here, that goes there. Joy and suffering are when things are where they're not supposed to be. In a different model, they're supposed to be somewhere else. All models are fake and some are useful, and that includes Buddhism. It's bad to get rid of world hunger, but good to get rid of the suffering if you're the one that's hungry.
So, one thing I’ve always failed to grasp is… if the end result is permanent bliss regardless of external stimuli, how is that different from wireheading? Are we just teaching ourselves to put our brains into self-wirehead mode here?
It's similar to dealing with pain using painkillers vs finding and healing the cause of pain.
That depends on what you mean by wireheading. This is accessing the ground of being in dharmic religions. If you like, you can view it as wireheading plus, sure.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/28/wirehead-gods-on-lotus-thrones/
> “I am pretty okay with this future.”
I am not okay with this future. Complete indifference to external stimuli is not a desirable state of being for me.
The basic philosophical.problem ancient Hindus were trying to solve was that sorrow inevitably follows happiness in an endless cycle through life. So they looked into finding a higher level of happiness, bliss, that was permanent. It comes from, among other things, defining "I" in a counter intuitive way. Who am I?
I've been studying Advaita, thanks to a friend who is super into this, to really get it. They had philosophical differences with Buddhists but their basic assumptions and the questions they were trying to answer, were the same.
Hindus believe in one universal self (very different from the Christian soul - Alan Watts explains in YouTube). Buddhists in no self (to which Hindus debated this way : when you wake up from deep dreamless sleep, how is there a sense of continuity in who this entity is?).
I'm an amateur still learning.
> when you wake up from deep dreamless sleep, how is there a sense of continuity in who this entity is?
Isn't the source of continuity separate from consciousness? Memories, working memory, my sense of context (year, name, etc), aren't all these just thoughts outside of "my" control?
This is well put; echoing some of Nick's past tweets, we seem to have a "Buddhist endowment" where biologically-healthy minds allowed to self-organize without certain classes of perturbations tend to settle into a state of high harmony (symmetry). This may be contingent upon both our biology and our laws of physics; things didn't have to work this way a priori. But it makes well-being more a matter of subtraction than addition; remove the bad, and you find an ocean of good feeling underneath (bc of thermodynamics, basically).
I also tend to link this with vasocomputation; with less tension (and latches in particular) a nervous system can better self-organize into a thermodynamic minimum high in harmony/symmetry. In some sense this can be read as "humans use the vasomuscular system to control sensations a lot more than other animals, and the ways we do this still has rough edges not yet smoothed by evolution. This gives humans a novel sort of hedonic burden. Buddhism is the observation that we can learn to use this system differently and avoid this burden."
https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1915857107699859623?s=61
All compounded phenomena are illusory, producing suffering if grasped at or rejected (aversion) by the mundane self. This mundane self is produced by the samsaric causes of this delusion; it is itself empty, just like all compounded phenomena. Everything—thought, memory, sensation, and the perception of self—is impermanent. Empty of inherent existence.
Nirvana is liberation from this delusion, not some stable sensory state for the self. It is beyond the duality of subject and object or observer and observed. Nirvana and samsara are one. Once the mundane self becomes Buddha or transcends these relative samsaric states, the state is bliss only in so far as it is incomparable to a mundane state of happiness, pleasure, or even joy. Our temporary states of joy are as close as we get to glimpsing liberation, so we don't even get hooked on them, as they keep us in samsara. We see that, in fact, if it is in us, we don’t even reject samsara; that rejection merely propels its existence. Liberation is beyond method, concept, or grasping.
But we don't have dharma containers or cultures really right now (it's the degraded age) - so we are all just bypassing. Just don't be an asshole this life and maybe next eon a proper era for practice will emerge. (Or do tantra w a teacher if ya wanna dedicate everything to liberation - 3-4 lives still- rough road lol.
X
> All compounded phenomena are illusory, producing suffering if grasped at or rejected (aversion) by the mundane self. This mundane self is produced by the samsaric causes of this delusion; it is itself empty, just like all compounded phenomena. Everything—thought, memory, sensation, and the perception of self—is impermanent. Empty of inherent existence.
That’s it exactly (from the emptiness framing). But someone embedded in the scientific materialism frame might read this as nonsensical. Hence, the heat metaphor is useful insofar as it is in language they understand and at least points them to something closer to the truth.
Buddhism came about in a place and time when most people had pretty bad lives.
I think of it as being like Stoicism. And for many of the same reasons.
Have a look at my essay An Indictment of Life. It answers your question very thoroughly.
From _What the Buddha Taught_ by Walpola Rahula (from the Theravada tradition).
The first noble truth is Dukkha.
Dukkha has the ordinary meaning of 'suffering', but in addition it also includes deeper ideas such as 'imperfection', 'impermanence', 'emptiness', 'insubstantiality'. It is difficult to find one word to find one word to embrace the whole conception of the term dukkha, as so it is better to leave it untranslated.
The existence of happiness is not denied, but all forms of happiness are included in dukkha. **"Even the very pure spiritual states of dhyāna [jhana] attained by the practice of higher meditation, free from even a shadow of suffering [...], states which may be described as unmixed happiness [...] are included in dukkha."**
In one of the earliest Buddhist scripturess, after praising the spiritual happiness of these dhyanas, the Buddhas says that they are 'impermanent, dukkha, and subject to change. The word dukkha is used explicitly.
"The conception of dukkha may be viewed from three aspects: (1) dukkha as ordinary suffering (dukkha-dukkha), (2) dukkha as produced by change (viparinama-dukkha), (2) dukkha as produced by change (viparinama-dukkha) and (3) dukkha as conditioned states."
"A happy feeling is not permanent, not everlasting. It changes sooner or later. When it changes, it produces pain, suffering, unhappiness." This vicissitude is included in (2) dukkha as produced by change (viparinama-dukkha).
There's a lot more there. The chapter on dukkha is 20 pages, you can read it in one sitting.
To me, there is something unsatisfactory about this explanation. Why can't you reverse the logic and say that the first noble truth is happiness? Sadness is included as viparinama-happiness, because sadness is always impermanent, and you will feel happiness whenever it passes.
Because of the Buddhist view of the usual progress of one who seeks the dharma, that would be viewed as an unskillful presentation. This is bad because, before enlightenment, noone actually "gets it"- some are just trying. But you can view it as such and it's kind of the idea of eg. tantra.
"Life is Suffering" refers to living out of our left hemisphere. If we are able to live from our right hemisphere, then we enter nirvana, a world without suffering. Refer to https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight for an example of this, and Dr. Iain McGilchrist's work on the bi-hemisphere structure of the brain for a scientific understanding of this phenomenon.
You can also see https://lovemind.substack.com/p/what-is-enlightenment for more of my thoughts about this.
So, why not just get a hemispherectomy and skip all the hard parts?
Suffering can be a good thing when we touch a hot stove. Sometimes we need the hard parts.
Here is my attempt at contextualizing the suffering claim based on David Chapman's writings:
The phrase “life is suffering” is central in Theravada Buddhism, a tradition that has been especially influential in the West.
Theravada is centred on a core dynamic of renunciation: distancing oneself from worldly attachments and desires.
“Life is suffering” isn’t primarily a literal claim about reality. It's a "View", a practice-enabling perspective. It serves a specific purpose within renunciative practice: cultivating aversion to
worldly attachements, seeking purity in detachment. It's a worldview held for pragmatic reasons.
Other forms of Buddhism hold different Views, each one usefully enabling its own kind of practice. Some practitioners adopt different worldviews as they switch between practices, entering a View to support the practice they engage with.
Instead of asking whether these perspectives are correct, it’s more revealing to ask what they do: how do they shape practice?
Rather than evaluating these perspectives on how well they fit into a coherent worldview (if they are correct or not), it's usually more fruitful to look at what the perspectives _do_ to the person holding them (how useful they are).
They are not really about carving reality at its joints, but rather about shaping the holder in interesting ways.
Disclaimer: Buddhism appeared in an extremely competitive religious environment and is brilliantly clever. It is very hard to compare/correlate its lateral ideas to what we used to. Did I get it right? 🤷♂️
It would be very helpful if we had a "Noble truth #0" that is not hidden in commentaries but predates the one about Dukkha and explains how it appears and connects it to one of the few firmly established ontological objects in Buddhism - Karma. We can think of Karma as a universal reward function. The value of this function can be represented in two good/bad classes or a scale as described here though traditionally it is extremely multidimensional (not a singular, quantitative ledger). Dukkha is not an outcome of Karma but rather its fuel that spins the wheel. A being reached nirvana doesn't become infinitely good or reaches absolute zero on a karmic ledger. The difference is that Karma is not applicable to them anymore as they solved the universe and don't need a reward function to minimise the prediction error - Buddhism basically tells that you cannot get rid of your ignorance by grokking leetcode of Karma but it has another solution.
Hm, I heard that dukha is a state of discontent, not strickly speaking suffering. It helps with framing you describe. Even in a joy of sex or drugs you have some discontent.
"An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain."
Maybe the best sentence I have ever read in a blog post. Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from a song, "If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain."
Very nice- Yah the Tibetan approach is even a little more nuanced. "Samsara" is suffering and the heat analogy is great. But there are three types- Manifest suffering (the one everyone calls suffering), changing suffering (things are less bad, like lower temperature. Think- i'm hungry, and now I eat ahh thats better, or I stand, and now I sit, ahh thats better, I'm lonely and now I am married, ahh thats better), and pervasive suffering (grasping or holding on to a separate sense of self, or I, independent of everything and everyone). So the whole this is unsatisfactory until we get rid of that false sense of I, see through the illusion of things, etc. Until then you could still say one is 'better' than the other but its still off.
Its not designed to be pessimistic or negative, but just a way to juxtapose liberation and normal thinking. Another way to call it is instead of 'suffering' it could just be 'not-liberation', but thats not as exciting.
I think Buddhism was invented to stop revolutions. If you think all life is suffering it is no point in trying to improve your life by toppling a tyrannical government. Instead you should just sit still and meditate.
Haha, that's kind of ironic if true, since Buddhism was a big social revolution by denying the importance of castes.
Does this pan out in practice? What percent of people meditate at all in traditional Buddhist countries? Aren't laypeople taught to just do good deeds so they get reborn as a monk, so they can then meditate?
I can't believe I'm here to Aktually this post, but it contains several misconceptions. Only touching a few here:
- "Life is suffering" -> Not the noble truth. 'Suffering/dissatisfaction is inherent in existence' is much closer and means something completely different. It means that by default there's always an undertone of suffering. It also doesn't assert that you can't be happy if you're not a meditator.
- Second big misconception is that there's one Buddhism. Theravada is the more monastic tradition. Yes, it was the "original", although many teaching and suttas have been added over the years. There's vajrayana for example which has very different views.
- Nirvana/Cessation means lights out basically. It's like mental death / no predictions. There's no joy / happiness in Nirvana. It's a temporary state. *When* you come out of Nirvana is when you realize you were in Nirvana. Different traditions assert different things about Nirvana, but you can't walk around and life in Nirvana. Again, some people may claim otherwise, but they may also claim that once you reach Nirvana, you can fly at will, so take it as you will.
- You're not supposed to be an emotionless robot. Again, some of the more extreme highly monastic traditions may claim this, but then they also may claim that their goal is to be "lights out" all the time. Look at the research around Matthieu Ricard or at a picture of the Dalai Lama laughing and it should tell you as much. You're going to feel all your emotions and they are deeper because you're not caught in some mental game fighting them or your situation. There's an assertion that people are biased towards love and joy when they become more enlightened.
I think "life is suffering" and "suffering is inherent in existence" are similar enough that everything in this post applies equally to the second translation.
Not all sects of Buddhism are exactly the same but I think they are similar enough that everything in this post applies to all of them. At least I think there is some core truth that the Buddha got which is encoded in the Noble Truths and that every sect is working on it in their own way. I think "there isn't one Buddhism" is a deepity, and if you want to go this far, I could equally well argue that "there isn't one Theravada" or "there isn't one Burmese Forest tradition of Theravada" or even "there isn't one Buddhist-tradition-according-to-monastery-X". Every category breaks down into slightly different specific examples!
I don't think that all Buddhist traditions say nirvana is exactly the same thing as nirodha-samāpatti, and I think a more standard interpretation views nirvana as the sort of state you are in after enlightenment.
I don't think this post claimed you were supposed to be an emotionless robot; I think it claimed the opposite.
Ok, let's skip over semantics as I agree that the first noble truth's interpretation is debated.
> I think "there isn't one Buddhism" is a deepity, and if you want to go this far, I could equally well argue that "there isn't one Theravada"
I disagree with this. The goals and methods of Theravada and Vajrayana differ, so they might as well be different things. They agree on the 4 noble truths as in there's suffering, grasping is what causes suffering and letting go of grasping is the path out of suffering.
Buddha from the Theravada suttas wouldn't recognize most of Vajrayana as his teachings. There's no emptiness in early Buddhism while that's the core of Vajrayana. Nirvana is the goal of Theravada while Bodhichitta (help all beings end suffering) is the goal of Vajrayana. Theravada practices mindfulness as a continuous dissection of experience so as to untangle subjective experience. After initial concentration practices, Vajrayana tends to practice non-grasping / openness to experience. Djogchen believes you're already enlightened and just need to stop grasping. There are parts of Vajrayana designed to work with emotional energy. Much of Theravada views emotions as an impediment to be shed.
>I don't think this post claimed you were supposed to be an emotionless robot; I think it claimed the opposite.
I meant this is a misconception that people have about Buddhism, not that this post claimed it. But the post does say:
> "But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering."
And I think this is false. As mentioned above, there are advanced practices in some traditions for working with emotions. The suffering part comes in when you fight the arising or passing away of emotions. And I'm not claiming that no Buddhist tradition says all emotions are suffering. There are traditions which claim once you're enlightened, you're beyond all emotions. But this isn't the one true face of Buddhism, hence my assertion that there are irreconcilable differences between the different traditions.
BTW, The Alembic in Berkley has a bunch of meditation programs and I recommend trying out Michael Taft's Thursday night meditation to get a taste of the non-theravada style of meditation. They're all on YT as well. e.g. A recent one relevant to this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHG96hI-vm8
Is there even a burmese forest tradition at all?
I think it might be more like Venezuelan beaver cheese
The argument that breaking a group into subgroups is a deepity because we could keep breaking down the subgroups is not a convincing one, even if in this instance Theravada and Vajrayana are similar enough for us to not care about making the distinction (although it seems like a lot of Buddhists in these comments disagree).
I think you rendered this also as "all of life is suffering" which is where one of the frequent misunderstandings lies.
When the Buddha spoke of "dukkha" the word also had the meaning of "unstable." That meaning fits this model of absoluteness as well.
More about this original meaning of "dukkha": https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/p/what-the-buddha-knew-about-dukkha
Imagine you have a favorite mug. One day while drinking from it, you try and set it down but only get it halfway on the table, it falls and breaks.
If you're like most people, this causes you to suffer, a tiny amount compared to some of the things going on around the world of course, but still suffering. You're likely to castigate yourself for not paying enough attention, when you use a different mug tomorrow you'll look at it regretfully.
But, you don't actually have to do that, there's no divine law set down saying that broken cup must lead to your suffering. You did not consciously choose to cause yourself pain and yet fundamentally every bit of suffering in your life happens because of your mindset. For every bit of sadness, anger or fear you experience there is no universal law that requires it to happen.
And yet you suffer anyway, and this is the nature of life being suffering. We cannot escape it yet we can be "better" by trying to escape it.
But if we want to not be sad when we break our favorite mug, doesn't that mean we can't love it in the first place? Don't we have to flatten out our emotional lives, give up all the tiny moments of joy we took with our mug to avoid the pain of losing it? And isn't that a terrible trade? Isn't there more joy than suffering in this world? If we give them both up we end up poorer as a result.
And the Buddhist here would shake his head and say you have confused detachment for non-attachment. Anyone can detach from the world, people do it all the time it isn't hard. Non-attachment is hard, it is not the natural state of being.
To be non-attached is to look at the mug when it is whole and know that it is already broken. To enjoy every moment with it more because you know it is transitory. To feel more joy because you do not take it for granted or poison it with the dread of its ending. If you could do this for every thing in your life, no matter how big or how small, no matter how trivial or how important then you would have already reached Nirvana.
This has always been one of my favorite teachings, about the broken cup.
"This is why trained meditators are always talking about all the cosmic bliss that they feel."
Speaking only from experience, I don't hear this. I knew plenty of old hippies who meditated growing up, and they always associated meditation with peace and serenity. Similarly, I didn't hear people talking about Buddhist monks like their lives are better than sex or heroin or sex on heroin. I really only hear about this view of meditation from your blog. Maybe everyone else has heard this constantly.
"Better than sex or heroin" is usually a reference to jhanas, a special form of deep meditation. There is some debate as to how deep you have to go to call it jhana. In some schools, only a select few experts can attain jhana.
"Likewise, it seems surprising that all life is suffering: even when you’re having sex? Even when you’re on heroin?"
This makes sense to me. Why are you on heroin in the first place? Because you wanted to feel better than your existing circumstances, be that "I'm living a hopeless life in a sink estate" or "I'm an idiot who thinks I can do drugs and avoid the pitfalls": in both instances, you want extra pleasure.
What happens when you're on heroin? Generally, you get addicted. I don't really believe the stories of "I've been on heroin for years and my life is fine and I can give it up in the morning if I want", but set those aside. You get to the point of "no extra pleasure" because now you need heroin to be at the same functional point as you were before you started. Once you get the fix, you enjoy the high for a while, then it wears off and you're scheming how to get your next fix.
And it seems from accounts that addicts don't just stick to one drug, they're often mixing an entire range of different drugs because they have developed tolerances and need more of everything to chase that high.
Do these people look like they're having fun blissful times?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Il9w-hIgg
So desire leads to suffering, and we desire more than we have (often more pleasure) even when our lives are seemingly okay. This desire leads to discontent, unhappiness, and yes, suffering because we think "what more is there? I should be getting more. I should have what I was promised".
Then we start chasing that elusive joy, and we end up causing more suffering to ourselves in the pursuit.
Recognise that life is suffering due to desire and cravings, work to cut out that desire, free yourself from illusion, find true reality (for Buddhism, that is nirvana, however that is explained: end of false ego and consciousness, returning to the universal cosmic energy freed of all sense of the self or the I, being in harmony with the telos of the universe *or* retaining individual personhood but becoming enlightened like a buddha).
It's not "there are no good things in life", it's "even the good things are a trap, because they condition us to want more and to be unable to do without them so if we lose them, we suffer".
It's parallel to the story of Caesar and Amyclas, the poor fisherman. Caesar needs to cross over into Italy, but it is a stormy night. He demands that Amyclas ferry him over; the fisherman tries to dissuade him but eventually agrees. Amyclas can defy Caesar even in this slight way because he fears nothing, because he is so poor: he has nothing to lose. He is not afraid of the armies camped on his doorstep because he has no wealth, no possessions, nothing except his boat and his life. Even if Caesar kills him or they drown trying to cross in the storm, losing his life is nothing to fear because he is so poor and wretched, so there is very little to lose if he dies.
Amyclas is free because he is not hag-ridden by the same desires as Caesar, the powerful and ambitious general trying to cross over before his enemies can gather their strength.
https://voegelinview.com/poverty-in-the-house-of-amyclas-poem/
“The most popular of Lucan’s figures was Amyclas, the poor fisherman who ferries Caesar from Palaestra to Italy. Lucan uses him as a peg on which to hang the praise of poverty. Amyclas, he says, was not at all discomposed by Caesar knocking at his door: what temples, what ramparts, could boast the like security (V. 527 sq.)? Dante translates the passage enthusiastically in the Convivio (IV, xiii, 12) and recalls it more beautifully in the Paradiso when he makes Thomas Aquinas say that the bride of St Francis had long remained without a suitor despite the fact that he who frightened all the world beside found her unalarmed in the house of Amyclas (XI, 67 sq.)” – C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image"
"Neutral temperature" matches 99% with objective variable of " combination of temperature and heat conductivity that keeps skin temperarure stable"
Agree on Buddhism being pro-death, which i personally find much worse than some religion that is just trying to conquer the world.
Roger Thisdell who claims to have reached MCTB 4th path, put it bluntly: "Ultimately, I still come down on: lights out unconsciousness tops everything 🤷♂️ [emphasis mine]. Getting all beings to Parinirvana would objectively be preferable for all beings rather than keeping the play going – if such a plan is possible or sensible or sensical even." - https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/11/23/the-supreme-state-unconsciousness-classical-enlightenment-from-the-point-of-view-of-valence-structuralism/
I remain agnostic about whether this moment of "peak pleasure" or "absolute zero suffering" actually exists as a reachable state rather than it collapsing into a "nonbeing". My intuition is that it does - something like a configuration of the phenomenal field where all field lines are parallel with no self-intersection. How large the "volume of the field that is properly combed" determines *how much nirvana there is*. Bliss is undisturbed being. And any sensation is, at the end of the day, a kind of disturbance.
(I speak from a place where I still, personally, very much enjoy Jhana 1, 2, 3 - but I know over time things calm down and will likely enjoy pure equanimity more and more as I anneal properly)
Relevant discussion between Michael Taft and Kenneth Folk on this topic: https://deconstructingyourself.com/dy-003-masters-oblivion-guest-kenneth-folk.html
The dark room avoids external surprise, but it leads to internal surprise. We experience vivid and often frightening hallucinations, and hunger, boredom, loneliness, etc. are, for our phenotype, unexpected states.
To add to the confusion, Dark Retreat is actually a thing in vajrayana Buddhism.
I am told that sitting in a dark room is an advanced practise you need to have the proper training for…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_retreat
I've read (Manfred Clyne, _Sentics_ that while in physics, cold is merely absence of heat, the nervous system detects cold as a distinct sensation. Anyone know whether this is true? Cold certainly seems like its own thing.
I'm not sure whether this affects the argument, but possibly boredom and sensory deprivation are their own sensations.
I recently heard Dan Gilbert talk about this in an interview:
https://shows.acast.com/lives-well-lived/episodes/daniel-gilbert-predicting-happiness
If I understand him right, he says that valence is a characteristic of each experience, not an experience in itself.
So there aren't different types of valence, there's different types of emotional states that have a high or low level of valence, but valence only differs quantitatively.
I think I agree with him, and imo this means that boredom and sensory deprivation can be different but insofar as they are bad, they are bad in the same way
“… like death or Britain …”
This is just the right time of year to be making that joke about Britain, as a damp greyness envelope everything.
I feel I ought to defend Britain, and by extension, also defend samsara…
Absolutely. Only direct apprehension, comprehension and experience beyond (and including) the sensorial frames will reveal- and it really cant be taught- only pointed to. Totally different ontology to logic/logos/western materialism and individualism / obsession w "truth" etc etc
What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri#Human_Hive
Tentatively, if the human default is to expect good experiences to be better than they actually can be, then nothing is actually good enough. Life is composed of everything being disappointing.
The only solution is to change or lower expectations.
If you're saying that Buddhism is about lowering expectations, I think I would provisionally disagree?
Suffering, Buddhism says, (I know you know this so forgive me for repeating) comes from clinging, aversion, and delusion.
When we learn to do these things less, we feel freer and more spacious and experience flows more smoothly for us. The ego, or a more rigid idea of "self", is doing this clinging, aversion, and delusion in order to protect us from our fears and unsteadiness in the face of uncertainty, change, old age, illness, and death.
If we can approach these feared things having released more of our habitual defenses, then experience becomes entirely good enough, more than good enough, easy to appreciate and feel satisfied in. Not through lowering expectations, but through releasing our ego-protecting burdens that constrict the spaciousness where enjoyment and appreciation can happen.
One small example: when I went through cancer treatment, very long and arduous and terrifying in places, I felt such gratitude and appreciative joy for the people taking care of me. And I felt such gratitude for being made to face my mortality so deeply and directly and how that burned off my habitual aversion, clinging, and fear. This brought me quite unexpectedly in what is generally considered a terrible experience into states of just profound profound gratitude. It was transformational for me and now on the other side of it, the freedom from fear and the gratitude of it persist in my daily life. Please know I don't say this to boast -- it was all entirely unexpected to me and not the result of any special thing in me. Other than maybe my willingness to open to it a little in some kind of way. I think the opening may have been important, but it wasn't about lowering or changing expectations. And I had wise people helping me open to it in ways I could hear.
If it's our nature to avoid things, we may have trouble accessing that opening-to something hard. And yet, life brings hard experiences right to our doorstep and sometimes we are cracked open by them unavoidably. My mother's death from cancer and my taking care of her in that when I was in my 20s was another experience like that for me. It felt to me that all roads other than opening-towards were closed off to me and so I cracked open, and in the cracking open I found love, grace, calm, gratitude, joy.
Keep in mind that Buddhism evolved in a third world country. It was an attempt to accept the world as it was, in which suffering really was pretty universal. Christianity by contrast set out to remake the world and appears to have succeeded.
Hi Hector, thanks for the question. Of course I only have a few words. Christianity, at least as I see it, did two things. First, it gave hope, meaning, and a sense of purpose and of community to the vast majority of ordinary people in the Roman empire who found themselves trapped in servitude with no way out. It did this by promising that ultimately there was justice in this universe and, consequently, that they would be rewarded in or after death. To buy into that vision required faith of course. In effect Jesus taught by precept and example an ethic of self-sacrifice for the sake of the future.
But at the same time Jesus suggested (said outright?) that this faith and this sacrifice would somehow lay the foundations for a new world free of servitude ("thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven") which, based on the evidence, has actually been achieved (however imperfectly) at least in the former lands of Christendom.
It is all based on capitalism , capital itself being little else than "the accumulated crime and sacrifice of centuries, plus interest." (See the famous book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.) In other words Christianity took this evil (servitude)and turned it into something good (capital). It redeemed the time in the words of St. Paul, by making a virtue out of necessity.
That's pretty clumsy. See here for a more precise statement of the same idea: https://shorturl.at/mplH5
Christianity is an apocalyptic religion which highly admires pain in the path of sainthood.
True enough.
You are missing the point of Buddhism and its practice. While meditating, Buddhists accept the reality as it is, what they observe in their mind and body. But that is just the 1st STEP towards understanding the truth, take BACK control of our mind, and reduce our suffering through the practice of mindfulness. What you are saying is a MASSIVE understatement.
Buddha and his teachings has revolutionized a major part of the world and transformed beings internally. During 6 BC I would argue that the "Third world country" you are referring to where Buddhism began was actually an intellectual and philosophically very advanced.
And how did Christianity remade the world exactly?
By prosecuting Galileo? By telling the world that the earth was at the center of the universe? By telling that sun revolves around the earth?
A third world country? What exactly were the first world countries in the 5th century BCE?
"Life is suffering?" Why not "Life is joy?" The analogy of "cold is the absence of heat" that we notice when heat is reduced applies very well to "suffering is the absence of joy." To be alive is to be, and to experience the remarkable universe in which we find ourselves.
The vast majority of people whom I hear complaining about the suffering of life remind me of someone who enters a lottery, won $100,000, and then is bitter s/he didn't win the million dollar prize.
The economist Julian Simon wrote an entire book on this, "Good Mood," about how we perceive our expectations vs. our actual situation influences our happiness, and about how more conscious and thoughtful analyses of these can actually increase our joy. Maybe the "heat," or joy, is there, but we fail to notice it because we tell ourselves "life is suffering."
So Scott, are you meditating? Are you doing anything to test that theory for yourself?
I really think he should be practicing Vipassana meditation while studying Buddhist teachings, otherwise he will be misinterpreting and misunderstanding the teachings.
I don't mean this comment as an argument against the techno-Buddhist position, because I'm sure that I don't understand it yet. But I'm writing this in hopes that someone can correct my confusion.
I don't think a single dimension of happiness/suffering captures what I find important in my life, but I also don't think the standard two-dimensional model of suffering and happiness works either.
For me, happiness comes in two very different types. Type 1 happiness consists of things that feel pleasurable while you're doing them, and type 2 happiness consists of things that feel pleasurable after you've done them.
A prototypical example of type 1 happiness could be eating ice cream. For me, it's important for my wellbeing to have a certain amount of type 1 happiness occasionally, but I quickly reach a point of satiety.
All of the things I value the most in my life are type 2 happiness, and my actual experience of them is usually closer to suffering than it is to type 1 happiness.
Some examples:
- Strenuous physical exercise. Runners will usually tell you that trying to run a new personal best in a 5K is a miserable experience, and the only way to succeed is to keep pushing yourself harder when every part of your body wants to stop. But somehow we suffer through it and then can't wait to do it again.
- Debugging code. My dominant emotions while I'm coding are generally confusion and rage, but I get an emotional high after I finally understand a problem and fix it.
- Raising kids. I currently have two toddlers, and there are brief moments of joy, but frustration and boredom are much more common. Yet there's nothing I'd rather do with my life.
I imagine enlightenment would somehow allow me to do all of these things without experiencing emotions of pain, rage, and frustration. But I don't actually want to remove those - they're essential parts of the experience.
And the jhanas sound like a supercharged type 1 happiness, which simply isn't very appealing. I'm uninterested in infinite bliss for the same reason that I wouldn't plug in to Nozick's experience machine. Namely, how is this going to help me write better code?
I'm not a techno-Buddhist (my experience in this area is entirely analog) but I'll give it a go.
> Namely, how is this going to help me write better code?
It probably won't! Or, if it does, that would be a second or third order effect, downstream of what those affable Bodhi tree-huggers are talking about.
Regarding your categorization of "Type 1" and "Type 2" happiness, those are good ways to think about ordinary life, but you will need a more precise, higher fidelity view of your moment to moment experience to really grok what is being talked about. A framework like the four foundations of mindfulness can be used, though there are others that are equally valid. There is no real substitute for direct experience here but, essentially, in this framework each moment of your conscious experience can be broken down in four different forms, or channels, of input into the field of consciousness (field of consciousness in this sense just means the entirety of everything you experience at a given moment). The four "channels" in this model are, roughly, sensory input, hedonic valence, emotion, and thought. So in one moment you might experience the raw sensation of an itch on your arm, an annoyed & non-verbal desire to scratch it and the thought 'A mosquito bit me'. This would be input from all four channels more-or-less simultaneously (not literally, but close enough for our purposes).
Your "Type 1" happiness is positive hedonic tone connected to a select sensory inputs. "Type 2" is more complex, but, if you look closely, it is experienced as thoughts, as remembrance of past moments, the moments having combinations of all four channels of input, in response to which you experience positive valence + emotions + thoughts of meaning, connection, accomplishment, etc.
You might ask, "But how is Type 2 happiness suffering? It feels like the exact opposite!" Good question! Different traditions put different spins on it, but the answer that resonates best with me is: It is like a hot coal that you do not know you are holding. You do not know you are holding it because of a delusion, the core of which is that you believe that there is a continuous, independent you that will be okay if you can secure enough of this happiness, or meaning, or accomplishment or whatever. This is incorrect. This delusion is analogous to our understanding of aging and death. We all know, intellectually, that we will grow old, sick, and die (in that order, if you're lucky!) but when one of these things ACTUALLY happen to you, or nearly happen in the case of death, it is very surprising!
None of this is to say that you shouldn't seek out meaning and connection in life. Just the opposite, these are the best things in life. But you will always be trapped by your delusion unless you take the time to actually see. To look and to know it, directly. It is possible to drop the hot coal, even if only for a moment at first. Having done so, you will never forget it.
I genuinely hope that was helpful. Happy to discuss further if you (or anyone) want. I spent 4-5 years obsessed with this stuff before ~~samsara~~ *er,* ~~children~~, *uh* other responsibilities led me to put it down for a time.
Long-time Buddhist here and I want to endorse all you're saying. It's lovely and fitting to me.
> But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss?
Probably because the brain isn't predicting that nothing will happen. At least so long as it hasn't been trained to.
The simplest way to reduce prediction error seems to me a highly regular and highly familiar environment. But I doubt 20 years old the same assembly line would produce much bliss either.
1. As some have noted, Buddha didn't say "Life is suffering". Instead he said: "Birth is suffering; old age is suffering; illness is suffering; death is suffering; being coupled with the disliked is suffering; separation from the liked is suffering; not getting what you wish for is suffering. "
2. There's indeed some confirmation of the "temperature view" in the original Buddhist suttas.
Most notably in Dhammapada: "There is no fire like lust, no crime like hate. There is no ill like the body, no bliss higher than Peace (Nibbāna)."
Note that here (and in countless other examples) passion (and hence suffering) is described as fire and Nibbana, the highest happiness - as peace, immobility, cessation - but also oftentimes as the coolness.
It could be an artifact of life in India where there no such thing as "too cold", but on a deeper level coolness represents stilling, which was obvious even in the ancient times for whoever watched boiling water cooling down.
If you think about it, it's all there in that single phrase - "there's no higher happiness than peace". It is mind boggling and certainly goes against default human perspective. Default not just culturally, but also existentially.
3. In trying to flatten all mental life to one dimension and trying to objectify this dimension, your perspective (both in this particular article, but also more generally in rationalists take) is losing one key Buddhist opposition: the mind (attitude, view) vs the world ( 6 senses).
The suffering is not out there in the world, as something you can measure.
Suffering is a function of a view, of an attitude *towards* the senses (including thoughts and emotions).
As one sutta states (MN 75) our default view where through valuing sensual pleasures we desire them and endulge in them we're like leper who covered in open wounds is trying to alleviate his suffering by "cauterising his body over a burning charcoal pit".
That charcoal pit (sensual object) is factually painful and once the leper receives medicine and is healed he would run away from the pits. Here's the key passage:
“Master Gotama, that fire is now painful to touch, hot, and scorching, and previously too that fire was painful to touch, hot, and scorching. For when that man was a leper with sores and blisters on his limbs, being devoured by worms, scratching the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, his faculties were impaired; thus, though the fire was actually painful to touch, he acquired a mistaken perception of it as pleasant.”
“So too, Māgandiya, in the past sensual pleasures were painful to touch, hot, and scorching; in the future sensual pleasures will be painful to touch, hot, and scorching; and now at present sensual pleasures are painful to touch, hot, and scorching. But these beings who are not free from lust for sensual pleasures, who are devoured by craving for sensual pleasures, who burn with fever for sensual pleasures, have faculties that are impaired; thus, though sensual pleasures are actually painful to touch, they acquire a mistaken perception of them as pleasant."
As a sidenote, there's a very similar passage in Platos' Philebus, where Socrates repudiates hedonist view by bringing up need for scratching:
“Would you say that the pleasure of scratching, if someone is very itchy, is good and belongs to happiness?”
Even though the itching seems pleasant for someone who's very itchy, their overall state is of suffering for sure.
This also explain the "Dark Room Jhana" problem. Whether sense objects are there or not is not an issue. It's your view towards them that is the problem. Just like the fact that you're separated from the loved one doesn't make someone stop missing them - on the contrary.
As long as the view that puts value in external, sensual objects maintained, there's no freedom from the painfulness of the desire.
As the consequence, once there's no desire towards such objects and towards sensual pleasure, one can still experience unpleasant sensations and emotions, but it doesn't cause suffering. This goes against the idea of flattening everything to one dimension. Within the container of the right view, right attitude there's still space for pleasant of unpleasant emotions.
The peace is the function of the overall view, that mind that knows it cannot be touched, because it's not dependent existentially on the fleeting phenomena.
Prediction error is important, but it's not the end all and be all of everything the brain is doing. Emotions are not unidimensional; there are specific brain regions, activity states, and neurotrasnmitters/neuromodulators associated with specific emotional states. These things can generally be upregulated and downregulated with respect to some baseline.
Expectation/reward matching is part of this process, but some things are most simply explained by basic stimulus-response models: you eat something tasty, a pleasurable brain state is activated.
When the Buddha became enlightened, it is said he recollected all his previous existences. Enlightenment then is the experience of recollecting one's previous incarnations. If one has this personal experience, reincarnation, as an idea, moves from being just a theory-- open to internal debate-- to a lived experience known as thoroughly as the memory of getting out of bed this morning. Not a beautiful metaphor or a backwards superstition, but something that actually happens to people. Other propositions begin to flow. Reincarnation is real. The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth: also not made up. Life is having to go through it all over again, lifetime after lifetime.
“Not only can’t you get ahead; you can’t break even.” - Thermodynamics
I mean I'm far from being a Buddhist, but I do think it's useful to model suffering as the default state of life, and every deviation from that as an aberration.
For one thing, the major issue with modern life is a mismatch between reality and expectation. Life is *objectively* pretty good but a bunch of people I know are miserable, because they expected it to be better. Just like people in Florida think Montana is too cold to live in, the hedonic treadmill doesn't care how much better their life is than some theoretical other life. It wants the problems to go away. All the problems. Forever.
If we define suffering as "having any problems whatsoever" then yes, your life is suffering. Even while having sex. Even while on a jet ski. Even if someone gives you a trillion dollars for some reason.
Another reason the life is suffering framing is useful is that in an objective sense, no matter how much sex and jet ski time you get, the universe is entropic and everything important to you is trying as hard as it can to turn into an evenly distributed smear of dead energy all the time. That's a natural law of the universe and while we might eventually get *very good* at making it happen slower, we'll never stop it. I'm not big on the "if something's temporary it's worthless" framing here, but the fact that this is happening even during the best day of your life means that some amount of suffering permeates even your best experiences and best memories. You're either in slight emotional/physical/spiritual pain all the time or doing some work to avoid being in pain all the time. If tomorrow I win the lottery I'll win the lottery, my grandmother will be dead, I'll have mild back pain cuz I'm 40, and one day my daughter will have to reckon with my passing.
So almost all religions (and most secular worldviews) start with the assumption that we're in some fallen state and then offer a mental reframe to the obvious conclusion that bad things happening doesn't make your life worthless. It's not that we don't know this conclusion is obvious, it's that our brain isn't wired to focus on it consistently. It needs to let you know about the bad back and the child rearing way more than it needs to remind you that life occurring at all in an essentially entropic universe so that you can taste ice cream is a miracle.
“I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question.”
Why not seek to find this out before writing this piece? It seems like without it there’s a significant risk that you will incorrectly frame the problem or misunderstand the opposing arguments.
Because discussing this worldview can be interesting and/or important even if it isn't orthodox Buddhist worldview?
I mean, what Scott wrote in this article has very little to do with Buddhism. It's merely a strawman.
People with this position definitely exist (I personally know one). I don't actually care if they are Buddhist, it's more important for me if they are AGI-researchers.
I'm with you Sam. There is a lot of proliferating misunderstanding of really basic Buddhist concepts that's been going on in the West for decades. Including in models of psychotherapy as well (all of "mindfulness" framed clinically or in a self-helpy way).
You raise an interesting broader question that I hear as: what do we owe an extensive and long-lasting lineage of thought and practice in terms of engagement with it before we begin to express opinions about it or to characterize it as this or that kind of thing?
I think that must be the blogger's quandary, or at least blogging on very wide-ranging subjects where one has little knowledge base. For me, there is the need for humility entering these well-trod paths. What's getting put forth here and in many of the comments are really basic misapprehensions. Scott has a remarkable wide-ranging and nimble mind and I'm glad to get to read his writings. But there are areas of surprising overreach and I have noticed that this is a regular one of them.
Right. To be fully alive is to have dissatisfaction as a driver. To be in a dynamic condition. It’s the push to go beyond the static condition of complacency. William Blake writes “Without contraries is no progression.” But dissatisfaction does not describe the entire state of being alive. Only an essential component of change.
I get you, but buddhist do not see that kind of happiness as positive
Happiness and sadness are seen as different faces of the same coin. When you feel happy, you will unavodally feel sad by contrast (even in a neutral situation) so it's not an ideal situation and will lead to Suffering later on
The ideal situation for buddhists is another kind of "happiness" that most people that do not meditate or do hallucinogens never experienced. It can be described more like bliss/presence, an absence of boredom, pure joy of being that does not have any sub consequent negative effect
Oh no, you took a phrase with a rough, highly debated translation out of context and then took it literally. But I guess it got me to comment.
I’m hopefully joining a cacophony here, but “life is suffering” is a mistranslation of the first noble truth. The most common translation used by modern translators is “there is suffering”
Assume the following: discontentment is a parameter of human existence that varies from "perfectly content, I feel no desire to take even a single iota of action to change my current state" to "every fiber of my being feels like it's being horribly tortured and is demanding I do something to stop it". Where that parameter happens to be set at any particular point in time can be said to control the type of behavior that people exhibit at that point in time. As discontentment increases from zero, it results in more and more effectual behavior (until the level of suffering begins to adversely impact one's ability to effectuate change). This discontentment provides the motive force that propels people to effectuate change upon their environments, in an attempt to reduce the discontentment.
"Life is suffering" could then be translated to, "To be alive is to have a nonzero amount of discontentment".
The point is not to stop experiencing joy, but to recognize its impermanence and not be bothered when the joy ends. Or when it doesn't start. That's Dukkha 101. Then it gets complicated with the whole anatman thing, but that's less relevant to the inquiry of "is Buddhism about not having fun".
Couldn’t we also say that joy and suffering are like the north and south poles of a magnet? My point is that we can pick all kinds of scientific metaphors to explain human experience, and that doesn’t make them accurate. Joy and suffering are experienced through two *different* regulatory pathways in the brain and body.
The premise seems confused to me. Like you’re taking a religious phrase spoken by Buddha, then asking a techno-rationalist guy with partial relation to the original Buddhism, and running with that. Like you’d never accept the religious explanation, so you’re talking with someone who says something you can actually engage with.
For what it’s worth, Joseph Goldstein, a more religious Buddhist, talks about life is suffering as well and addresses this point. In more traditional Buddhism, life is suffering because it’s unreliable and temporary. The allegory is more like how you can’t really stay happy through earthly sources. You can’t simply eat more and more chocolate cake to get happier and happier. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying chocolate cake, but you’ll inevitably lose the pleasure you gain from it. I think this is a difference from techno-rationalist Buddhism but mostly a different emphasis, I’m not sure they’d disagree with each other on their points
"Techno-rationalist Buddhism" seems to be a convergence of two things:
1. How can I trip without drugs? (For neuroscientific research, obviously).
2. Stoicism, but for people who go to Burning Man.
Can we define the term more precisely? When I read it, I assumed it referred to people who apply Buddhist techniques while ignoring the supernatural beliefs. That definition is incompatible with "tripping without drugs". Not sure what you mean by 2. But maybe my definition of "techno-rational Buddhism" is wrong, and what I mean is called something else? E.g. "secular buddhists".
The noble truth does not say that life is suffering. It says that suffering and existence go together.
> But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering.
Some quick research using your favorite LLM would have shown you that this statement is categorically false. Or were you setting us up for a strawman argument?
The Pali Canon and the Abhidhamma describe a range of emotional states other than suffering. They don't necessarily map one-for-one to the modern Western list of emotional states. For example, on the positive side, there are pīti (joy), muditā (the joy that comes from seeing other people's happiness), and mettā (loving-kindness towards others). Most importantly, there's karunā (compassion, as in empathy for the suffering of others). Notice that some of the things Buddhists list as emotional states are what we'd consider basic emotional feelings (such as simple joy and anger) that arise from interpersonal relationships.
There are various types of tranquility, as well as other positive emotional states. Additionally, there are negative emotional states. But the suffering that's mentioned in the First Noble Truth is based on the idea that loss, unhappiness, illness, and death will eventually catch up with us, no matter how comfortable our lives. So, all those positive emotions will evaporate, and unhappiness is our base and final state.
Moreover, Buddhism emerged at a particularly tumultuous juncture in Indian (and Eurasian) history. The Bronze Age civilizations had collapsed several centuries before, and the Earth's climate had cooled, spurring tribal migrations, famine in farming cultures, and warring petty kingdoms. The archaeological record of India shows that the economic output on the Indian subcontinent was at its nadir during the period when Buddhism (and Jainism) arose. Life was shit back then, and Buddhism offered a way to develop equanimity when everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
The closest I've come to understanding this is thinking "desire is wanting the world to be in a particular state, suffering is when the world isn't in the state you want, life entails desire entails suffering"
Your very first premise is not quite correct. The Noble Truth is not "Life IS suffering". The truth is more closer to "there is suffering in life". The full expansion of the First Noble Truth is "birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering." The list goes from most gross, to most refined types of suffering. The most subtle "the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering", COULD be interpreted as "Life is Suffering" but this subtle understanding of suffering is meant to lead one to open up to Nibbana and total cessation.
The fundamental issue here with the metaphor can be expressed in western terms as confusing ontology with phenomenology. This would be recognized fairly immediately as incorrect by someone with a passing knowledge of Buddhist theology because it implies that the goals of Buddhism are basically hedonic. Hedonism seeks to eliminate the FEELING of suffering. Buddhism seeks to eliminate the self, transcend existence, and therefore escape the impermanent world. The focus on suffering as an end state is an error. To desire to suffer less is a form of taṇhā, a craving for something, which you must seek to eliminate. Any teaching that presupposes a continuing subject who ought to exist in a better state is, by classical standards, non-Buddhist and a form of avijjā (ignorance).
Life is suffering is a translation of sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha which means literally "all put together things are a bad fit." Sabbe is all. Saṅkhārā is san (together) plus khārā (to make/do). Du is "bad, difficult" and kha is "hole, space." So the specific claim is that all created things are a bad fit. Meaning unstable, not suited for purpose, unsatisfactory. Creation in this sense is similar to Christian creation: all of existence.
It's one of three phrases, the Three Marks of Existence. And it's actually not the one that gets top billing either theologically or in the actual text. The first one is actually sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā, "all creation is impermanent" which underlines the other two. This is more important to Buddhist philosophy than dukkha. And aniccā isn't that hard to translate. The last one is sabbe dhammā anattā, all things are not self. Dhammā is fairly hard to translate. It usually ends up being translated as something like Law in the broadest sense, the order of the universe.
So it's three claims:
Everything is impermanent
Existence is a bad fit
The self does not exist
From there you spin out Buddhist beliefs about predestination which often end up much stronger than even the strongest Calvinists because they not only don't have to belief in free will, they have to NOT believe in free will. Christian predestination has to constantly be moderated by a theological commitment to free will. Buddhist belief in free will have to be moderated by a theological commitment to a lack of self and a mechanistic view of cause and effect (paṭiccasamuppāda). (Islam has the same tendency against free will but more moderately than Buddhism.)
The Mahayana tradition has sukha ("good fit", the opposite of dukkha) which can lead to jhāna. However, this is simply the belief that you must escape the world in a temporary, limited way to eliminate self more efficiently. Jhana is a way to leave the world, not the goal. And only one of several. Some Buddhisms even recreating close analogs to heaven like the Pure Land where you continuously entered a meditative state and reincarnated until you transcended the cycle. But it was never itself the goal. Very explicitly you must not allow yourself to desire jhāna.
This has been reinterpreted by some western traditions to provide something far more personalist, emotional, therapeutic, and less literal. This is not an eastern tradition. It's a fusing of western enlightenment and romantic individualist traditions with Buddhism. It inserts empiricism, psychology, and individualism into Buddhism which is basically lacking in the actual Asian tradition. It mostly happened in the 1960s onward in California. In doing so they basically reinvented hedonism. Which sounds like a dunk but I mean that strictly: hedonism, the actual Greek philosophy.
Epicurean hedonism basically believes that you achieve a flourishing life through ataraxia, literally "undisturbedness." The elimination of suffering through the elimination of excess desire. Some pre-Christian western pagans even had a belief in reincarnation. "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul." Exactly the temperature model you're pushing here.
I am increasingly convinced that Buddhism (which is a religion with a rich theology) benefits immensely in upper class liberal circles from being novel and distant. So they can both turn it into the shape they want (and imagine it's ancient) and have a spirituality that doesn't feel 'conservative' like their own traditions. It's theologized secularism with an eastern gloss.
If you actually engage with Buddhism you find basically all of the same things they supposedly object to in Christianity. Some of them even more so. For example, in practice Buddhism is MORE hierarchical than Christianity and LESS egalitarian. If you are born as a poor woman then that is your karma and your job is to live in that and NOT imagine yourself as equal to your master. That's a form of desire. It completely lacks the sense of everyone having a soul that is equally valuable to God. Different classes, races, and genders also have different karmas in a basically hierarchical way. Some later traditions softened this but they had to awkwardly edge around black letter canon about gender or class rules.
Insightful comment with lots of good context.
Ha, love it. This made me happy for a moment.
I don’t think “suffering” as redefined in the temperature model matches “suffering” as used in colloquial English.
Colloquially, if I inflict pain and pleasure on someone in equal quantities (say, by pricking their finger and giving them a massage), their net wellbeing is unchanged, but their suffering has increased. On the temperature model, however, “suffering” is unchanged.
The temperature model is satisfactory, logically, but I worry it redefines “suffering” as something more akin to net wellbeing, which would in turn make our initial response to the claim “life is suffering” (oh no!) misleading - “life is net wellbeing” (or perhaps, “life is suboptimal net wellbeing”) is not nearly as evocative, but is probably a better fit to the manner in which “suffering” is used in the temperature model.
If the point is not carefully explained, I worry this usage of “suffering” is a “substantive definition,” of the sort I’ve criticized before ( https://open.substack.com/pub/gumphus/p/misuses-of-meaning )
This entire post hinges on "Life is suffering". That's not the first noble truth. The first noble truth is: In life there is suffering. If I google the four noble truths and go through link by link not a single one of the says life is suffering. They say, "suffering in our lives", "there is suffering in life", "suffering exists".
Nirvana isn't some void of no emotion. The goal isn't to feel nothing. As a human being, you will experience emotions. There will be emotions like sadness, anger, disgust, happiness, anxiety, etc. You can't simply stop these emotions, they must be felt. The point is to not get attached to your emotions. Another way to think of it is that you aren't becoming your emotions. Just because you feel anger doesn't mean you become the anger. Instead you are an observer of the anger. You are detached from the anger. Then at some point, the anger goes away. Life is constant change, sometimes you'll feel sad, sometimes you'll feel happy, they will never last forever. You can't attach to and forever hold onto bliss. The state of nirvana is primarily acceptance. Accepting your sadness in the present moment and not assigning meaning to it. Specifically not assigning the meaning of: this is bad, I don't want it. Because if you do then you suffer. Sadness isn't something to be avoided, the avoidance is what causes the suffering because now you have a desire for the world to be other than the way it is (in Buddhist terms this relates to the 3 poisons: desire, aversion, ignorance. Multiple ways to say the same thing).
Meditation isn't numbing yourself to stimuli. The point of calming the mind is to exist only here in the present moment. You are sitting and breathing, letting the thoughts go, not attaching to them. They come and they go. Your emotions come and go. We don't assign meaning to any of it. And if you do this frequently, when there is external stimuli you can respond to it in the present moment without the experience of pervasive suffering because you aren't assigning meaning to it. Instantaneous acceptance of the world and your emotions followed by instant response. This is also why many Buddhists abstain from drugs or alcohol. There is no need to numb the experience of life, it's just life. I'm quite confident nearly everyone on planet Earth has experienced Nirvana before. I like to describe it as a state of flow. When you are one with whatever you are doing, perhaps a hobby like playing music. To improvise requires letting go of anything you just played and only living with the current note. Most people experience a state of flow for a limited time. The concept of enlightenment is being in that state at all times, life as a state of flow. At yet you can't cling to that either. You can't "achieve" enlightenment. It's not something to be checked off a todo list. The reverse of not being in a state of enlightenment isn't a failure. There is no meaning. I don't exist in a permanent state of enlightenment, far from it. There are few people who do. But those people still feel emotion. You really think the Dalai Lama never experiences happiness?
This sentence is a bunch of bullshit "But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering". You aren't even in the same hemisphere with this one. This whole post is putting words into other people's mouths. "According to the Buddhists, Buddhists are asserting". This is not an argument in good faith. Additionally these techno-Bay-area-Buddhists seem like terrible sources of information because this is not the first post I've read where the dharma (Buddhist teachings) is so drastically misunderstood. There are thousands of years of teachings, hundreds of texts, and more than enough metaphors trying to describe these ideas. This temperature argument is not a very high quality addition.
An aside on suffering: there are different kinds of suffering and you can't avoid all of them. The suffering of pain like breaking a bone isn't something can be avoided, even if you are in a state of nirvana. The suffering of loss like losing a loved one can't be avoided either. Detachment doesn't mean you don't love. Detachment is the absence of clinging. If a loved one dies you can think of it as skipping the 5 stages of grief and going right to acceptance. You'll still be sad, but you don't have all this denial and anger that comes from attachment. That kind of suffering can be avoided. That kind of suffering is called pervasive suffering and that's what Buddhists try to free themselves from. Accept the broken bones, accept the loss, accept your own death. You don't need to cling to your house, your job, democracy, etc. Nothing is permanent. And once you realize you'll never be able to hold onto anything permanently no matter how hard you try, all you're left with is the present moment. You'll never have anything except the present moment. That's the point of meditation and that's the state of enlightenment.
Finally because I'm seeing it in the comments: Buddhists aren't uncaring husks independent of the world. Exactly the opposite. A core teaching of Buddhism is interdependence. The idea of "oneness". You don't need an acid trip to come to this realization (although it can help). It's also why detachment doesn't mean you don't love. You love as much as possible because you are everything. "You are something the whole Universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing". The love you give comes back to you because now the world has more love in it, and you are part of the world (karma, not a cosmic justice system).
This is how I have always interpreted the Noble Truth: that suffering is, at some point, an inescapable part of being alive.
https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2020/01/mistranslating-buddha.html?m=1
Life consists of a series of challenges - problem, resolution, fruits.
The fruits of the challenge are never FULLY satisfactory - you can never complete a task, and then say "I have no need to complete any other task." This runs counter to lived experience - if you accomplish your main professional goal, are you going to stop eating?
The conceit is that there is only one true form of satisfaction since all others are subject to temporal or spatial constraints.
The Buddha completed the challenge whose fruit is no need for further challenges. Permanent satisfaction - I daresay it's not possible in other contexts.
Addendum - the idea of Jana being better than sex is misleading imo. Is listening to your favorite song better than sex? Are the five minutes you are awake in bed after waking better than sex? Is being released from prison better than sex?
The idea of comparing these experiences to meditative absorptions is actually obscuring in my opinion. Getting released from prison and tasting chocolate ice cream both have positives, but the qualitative gulf in those experiences is enormous.
Take Buddhists at their word - if jhana is so subtle and powerful, comparing it to sex only serves to anchor your concept in familiar experiences.
Now for the important part: does anyone track if leaders of AGI-companies have this worldview?
I am a Buddhist, and I can confirm. There is only one objective kind of experience, suffering (which is not the best translation of the term, but it'll work for now). Whenever you're happy, you're just suffering less than you are used to.
(which leads to a very interesting rebuttal of the repugnant conclusion, which is that utility is entirely contained in the below-zero interval).
Another analogy: when you're sick, you realize you take for granted how good it feels to be healthy. The day after you recover completely has a niceness that it wouldn't the day before being sick.
Tibetan Buddhist here. I have an introductory (basic) teacher qualification from the lineage I studied in.
In general, Buddhism is something you do, more than something you believe in: written teachings are pointers, rather than the point. You aren't really expected to 'get' the Four Noble Truths by reading them and discussing them intellectually. Better to take them as a starting point for inquiry and then bring any confusion to the cushion. Understanding does come from within, even if it's a cliche to write that.
Think about the difference between reading about someone winning a marathon, and actually going out there, training hard and trying to win one yourself.
As they say, "shut up and meditate!" and yes, indeed this is an unsatisfactory answer ;-)
Has anyone mentioned Wim Hof? A man who meditates until temperature doesn't matter all too much seems relevant.
This post seems to be claiming everything is just one spectrum of suffering, and the Buddhist goal is the maximum blissful state at the lowest end of the spectrum of suffering. I'm no expert on Buddhism but I think the Buddhist claim is actually the opposite of this - they want people to escape from the ordinary existence of living on this spectrum of pain/pleasure where one runs from aversions and chases cravings, and to move beyond it, eventually to a state of ambiguous existence.
Many say that "dukkha" better translates to "unsatisfactoriness" rather than "suffering". The Buddhists say people chase things thinking it will provide lasting pleasure, but everything is temporary, and people become habituated to all pleasures. Even the Jhanas states themselves - the first two are extremely pleasurable, but the meditator is expected to go beyond them to the equanimity of the fourth jhana, beyond sadness or happiness or pain or pleasure. Later the meditator even goes into higher jhana states of such as the seventh and eight states of "base of nothingness" and "neither perception nor non-perception". If the goal of Buddhism was bliss, you would stop in the first and second jhana states. But in traditional Buddhism, in the highest state (of the Arahant) one escapes from attachment to the Jhana states too. Their goal is to internalize the emptiness and unsatisfactoriness of everything. Their ultimate goal is parinirvana at death - which is the escape from the cycle of rebirth and is compared to a fire going out, without a clear position on whether there's continued existence afterwards.
"It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things". If the traditional Buddhist view is negative about life, there's no need to change what they're saying. Buddhism demonstrates how many things people chase are more temporary than expected, but one can still have a more positive view of these temporary pleasures than the Buddhists do. One can reject their worldview of reincarnation and still accept their practical observations and techniques for understanding experience and being less caught up in craving and aversions. I think many modern Buddhists do this, but the core idea still involves moving beyond the spectrum of suffering rather than staying caught within it.
I notice that often, even when I am supposed to be having fun, I am actually going around trying to set up the perfect scenario for me to enjoy myself, but something is almost always missing. I wonder if nirvana, if it exists, is something like complete peace with the moment and a sense that everything is as it should be, forever. The total absence of dissatisfaction, which is heat.
So then, depressed people are "more alive?"
This certainly doesn't accord with my subjective experience. When I've been at my most depressed, I felt barely alive at all.
Haven’t read all the comments so this has probably been pointed out already, but the “dark room“ example is a misunderstanding of the predictive model. Among the many variables that the brain is tracking are things like sunlight exposure or blood sugar, and so doing nothing in a dark room will in fact generate a lot of error/surprisal as they fall out of their expected range.
I don't think that view is at all distinctive to Buddhism. When I was first looking at economics, I encountered Ludwig von Mises's account of "utility" as being the relief of felt unease or dissatisfaction; a year later, in a course on later Greek philosophy, the Epicurean concept of ataraxia, or absence of mental disturbance, and its differences from Aristotelain eudaemonia. I note, for example, that Epicurus thought that a good life was one of modest and easily satisfied wants, and that learning to want more was imprudent. There is at least a family resemblance of those ideas to Buddhism, or perhaps a case of convergent evolution (though I would refer you to the Existential Comics dialogue between Buddha and Hume for an examination of how far the convergence goes).
The thing that strikes me as dubious about this account is that it seems to treat pleasure and pain as degrees along a one-dimensional continuum. In those terms it's perfectly possible to say that all pleasure falls short of possible greater pleasure, and thus contains an element of dissatisfaction or frustration that could be regarded as pain. Though no one seems to argue that all pain falls short of possible greater pain, and thus contains an element of relief that could be regarded as pleasure, so that Paolo and Francesca can be relieved that their punishment is less harsh than that of Muhammad, who can be relieved that his punishment is less harsh than that of Judas Iscariot (in Dante's account of Hell).
But it seems that pleasure and pain are really different things functionally. Pleasure is a quale that shapes behavior on an ongoing basis, by acting as a reward and an incentive. But pain is more of an interrupt signal, one that tells us to set aside our pursuit of pleasure or of whatever other rewards we aim at, and drop everything to escape from something that's harming us. (Admittedly, human beings can learn to enjoy capsaicin, or spanking, or piercings, but that seems secondary.) Putting this two things as degrees on the same continuum seems like some sort of category mistake.
The first noble truth does not have "life" in it, it says "There's stress & suffering" (as "dukkha" includes the whole range). And then the nibbana is the unconditional happiness that does not die, quite the opposite of gray mist. Buddhism is the most optimistic religion of them all: you can reach deathless happiness through your own efforts.
Here's a really short comprehensive overview of the whole teaching: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/BuddhasTeachings/Section0003.html
Perhaps it's just that, well Buddhism was invented a long time ago. That quote is old. And thus the quote was more true when it was first said than it is today.
Years ago I made up a philosophical movement of the future for the Transhuman Space setting of GURPS: The ataractic movement, whose founding idea was that all actions motivated by the brain's chemical reward mechanism were addictive and led to self-destructive behavior. The ataractics taught various methods of conducting your life to minimize chemical reward and to avoid the fallacy of thinking "this made me feel wonderful, so it must be true." Other people in the setting often nicknamed it "neural Buddhism." I wonder how accurate the comparison is?
I think there is some kind of meaningful zero point on the joy-suffering scale, it's the point at which you're ambivalent about whether you'd choose the present experience versus temporary oblivion.
If a genie offered you the opportunity to skip the next N minutes, would you take it? Life will go on and you'll do the same things, but you won't subjectively experience those minutes. Sometimes the answer is clearly yes -- if I'm really sick or injured I'd be happy to just skip the next few days until I'm better. Sometimes the answer is a less clear yes, like if I'm on a fourteen-hour flight maybe I'd have dinner and watch two movies and then skip to the top of the descent. Other times I'm a bit bored but would rather experience it than skip it, like a typical work day. And some experiences are fantastic and I wouldn't skip them for the world.
It seems reasonable to call everything below the line "suffering" and everything above the line "not suffering", and if the best the Buddhists can offer is a permanent zero then... well, the atheists can offer me the same thing, eventually
Nirvana is a dissociative state, which is why emotional valence (aka. hedonic tone) becomes irrelevant in the scheme of that detached bliss.
In order to complete your analysis, however, you need to look into Daniel Ingram (argually the father of modern 'rational Buddists' movement), thereon PCEs and Richard of Actual Freedom Trust (which best elucides the dissociative nature of the enterprise being talked about here).
"But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from lsusr a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening."
Maybe you should talk to someone else. After all, streamentry is only the first stage. (Thusness lists seven: https://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html ) I bet there are many good teachers willing to talk to you. The problem is being able to tell who is a sufficiently advanced requires to know the space yourself. So let me give you some names of people whom I consider to "get it" for sure:
Michal Taft
Daniel M. Ingram
Delson Armstrong
Angelo Dillulo
Roger Thisdell
Lama Lena
Kenneth Folk
Frank Yang
I agree that it's helpful to have a crisp model of what the precept means, analogous to the heat model.
Left undiscussed in the post is whether the model is actually true.
Here's a counter-hypothesis: mediation is more like learning to play a musical instrument: it's an exercise by which some can, through great effort and practice, get their brains into states that have very high positive valence, but this has nothing to do with suffering being a scalar quantity characterizing all brain states.
I think what they are proposing is that you want to focus on getting your meta-goal-pursuit model to converge, instead of constantly swapping between different instrumental sub goals, since those don't help the meta-model actually converge. Getting what you want this one time doesn't help reduce the gap between what you want and what you're experiencing now; setting in meditation does.
We are poignantly aware that life could be better, and "unsatisfactoriness" strikes me as one of the clearest lines going through that point. Good concept.
From the Christian, and originally Jewish perspective, it is a description of humanity being fallen, which bleeds out into the rest of Nature. We are able to recognise good but cannot get there for more than a moment.
It’s more “to live is to suffer” than “life is suffering”. Positing that Buddhism says that suffering is the only emotion or the only thing in life is suffering is a complete misunderstanding.
So like temperature, the best possible bliss one can experience is absolute zero, but in the other direction things can go arbitrarily high...
Re. "It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things." :
Having an Aspie theory about suffering which contradicts both human experience and human neuroscience does not excuse forgetting that life includes good things, which they're still doing.
It might be that "enlightened" Buddhists actually feel what they say they feel, because they CAN'T feel good things. Anhedonia feels like what Buddhists claim everyone feels like. Perhaps Buddhist meditation trains your brain to be anhedonic. It's on them either to show that they don't have anhedonia, or that everyone else does, too. This would be hard, since what they're claiming is literally that they have anhedonia.
I'm a musician and a Buddhist. When I make music, I experience great joy and euphoria. At the same time, if I am mindful, I notice tension, mental constriction, and craving. In other words, that joy is suffering. Clearly, I am not anhedonic, nor am I claiming I have anhedonia. Instead, I am claiming something that most of us find pretty intuitive: there are greater and lesser pleasures. Injecting myself with heroin while binging on pornography, for example, may be very pleasurable, but I think we can all agree that this is also in some sense suffering because of its greater context, and that taking a peaceful walk in the park or having a meal with our families may be less pleasurable while also somehow being a reduction in suffering and an experience of a greater, more fulfilling joy. The Buddhist view is that the peace of nirvana illumines the extent to which every sensual pleasure we normally enjoy, including walking in the part and eating a meal with our families, pales in comparison.
Why did you use the word "sensual"? Do you mean that all pleasures are sensual? Or that only sensual pleasures are less-satisfying than nirvana? I think there is a consensus across many belief systems that emotional and / or intellectual pleasures are generally or always more-satisfying than sensual pleasures.
The two examples I gave (walking in the park and eating a meal with our families) depend on the senses and so are sensual pleasures (you need the senses to be aware you are doing those things, and then you derive pleasure from that). The mind is considered a sense in itself, and so intellectual pleasures are usually going to be sensual as well, some moreso than others (enjoying a book about history includes the pleasure of tactile sensation, visual imagery about historical events, etc.). If you consider the idea of enjoying a purely mental sexual fantasy, that should make clear the way that the mind itself can be sensual. Emotions too are sensual. Plus, most of what we actually enjoy in sensual pleasures is the emotion — when I make music, what I enjoy is the emotion that arises in response to the music, but it's still a decidedly sensual pleasure.
In SN 36.31 (https://suttacentral.net/sn36.31/en/sujato), the Buddha divides pleasure up like this:
"There is pleasure of the flesh, pleasure not of the flesh, and pleasure even more spiritual than that not of the flesh."
Pleasure of the flesh is borne of sensual stimulation (here, the Buddha discusses the basic five senses specifically, but the mind is also considered a sense base, and the sexual fantasy example should I think make it clear that it fits). Pleasure not of the flesh is jhana. Pleasure even more spiritual than that not of the flesh is when "a mendicant who has ended the defilements reviews their mind free from greed, hate, and delusion, pleasure and happiness arises."
It's entirely reasonable to wonder how this type of pleasure and happiness can arise non-sensually, but it's obviously not anhedonia. An analogy might be spilling coffee on your shirt while you're in a good mood — the experience itself is very unpleasant, and the emotion will still be negative, but the general background feeling of the mood colors it a different way on a very subtle level, which also leads to it sticking around for a shorter period of time.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm not sure you're using the word "sensual" fairly. It seems to still have a negative connotation, yet you're including feelings like love, friendship, mathematics, and justified pride under sensual pleasures. There is a sense in which that's technically correct, but using that sense--that anything involving the mind is sensual--puts EVERYTHING humans can ever experience, including nirvana, under sensual pleasure. There are no transcendental, extra-neural experiences. I don't need to convince you of that, but you're not going to convince me otherwise. If Buddhism requires believing in spirit, I'm going to conclude that it's hopelessly wrong.
The key difference between sensuality and non-sensuality in Buddhist thought is whether the pleasure derives directly from the sense-object or not.
Buddhist thought posits two "types" of mind: mano and citta. The division is a bit obscure, but you can basically think of it in terms of foreground and background, conscious and subsconscious, specific and general, or potentially even left and right brain (this is more tenuous, but I've found some parallels when thinking in terms of split-brain studies). In a condition of ignorance (i.e., samsara and not nirvana), when a pleasant or unpleasant object arises in mano, the citta reacts with passion, which is experienced as either greed, aversion, or delusion — we either want more or less of the thought, or we're not even really aware of our reaction to it. Because of the default ignorance of the citta and focus on mano, we identify with the citta and then go with the grain of its passion. The first objective of Buddhist practice is to know or "see" the citta (the "subconscious" dispositions towards conscious experiences), and the second objective is to use that knowledge and "vision" to tame it. I say there is a potential (albeit weak) analogy with split-brain experiments because we could to some extent say that mano confabulates thoughts from the citta's passions.
So calling a pleasure sensual is not inherently a negative judgment — even if we accept the mano-citta divide, there's an extra step involved in deriving an ought from it. Its broader utility lies in its ability to point out where the pleasure is coming from. A non-sensual pleasure, by contrast, is one that arises independent of any specific sense object and instead takes a calm and dispassionate citta as its "basis". It is perhaps in some very weak sense metacognitive (but tacitly, not an explicit metacognitive narration, and I think we need to be very careful with thinking in these terms), similar to the pleasure a recovered addict might experience from understanding they are free from addiction despite experiencing strong pangs of desire from time to time — those moments of mere desire are bodily/sensual, but the identification *with* them, which includes a felt sense of responsibility for appeasing them, is what turns them into craving (I prefer calling it "compulsion"), and that is what suffering is. Nirvana, then, is "liberation" from the "bondage" of passion for/dependence on/dentification with coarsely sensual states, and the pleasure of nirvana is like that of a recovered addict: we wouldn't say that a former addict lives in a state of perpetual pleasure, we would just say they no longer suffer from the addiction. A more classic example is someone who has escaped a prison: we expect them to be happy due to their freedom, not constantly in a state of bliss. There are a couple ways to read the distinction between "pleasures not of the flesh" and "pleasures more spiritual than that not of the flesh", but I think teasing that out would start going into too many technicalities.
Metaphysically, I don't think this requires positing a spirit that is concretely liberated from the body (and I think that would actually likely go against Buddhist metaphysics, as the Buddha specifically points out that conceiving of self outside of the aggregates, which include physical form, is wrong view). All it requires is accepting that there is some type of stratification of mental states, such that we have foreground and background experiences that range from coarse to subtle, and that shifting our attention from the coarser to the subtler states is possible. Granted, this is just one reading of it, and like any philosophical/religious system, some people will disagree with this reading, but I think it is a plausible interpretation, and it's the way that the teachers I primarily follow explain it (Bhikkhu Anigha and Ajahn Nyanamoli of Hillside Hermitage).
This is an exceptionally lucid articulation, especially your distinction between mano and citta as a foreground–background dynamic. I think you’re exactly right that “non-sensual” pleasure doesn’t imply negation of sense-experience, but rather a shift in where the pleasure is sourced, from object-dependence to a kind of felt coherence within awareness itself.
What strikes me as worth exploring further is the qualitative difference between what you describe as the pleasure of independence (freedom from compulsion) and what might be called the pleasure of transcendence (freedom through phenomena). The first corresponds, as you note, to the recovered addict’s freedom - the cessation of craving, a peace that no longer depends upon sense-objects. The second, though, seems to occur when that peace becomes transparent within experience, such that even sensory experience (i.e., a drink, a touch, a sound) is no longer “owned” by the citta or filtered through passion. It is precisely at that point that the sensual is not denied, but redeemed as such.
This, to me, parallels the Zen adage: “First a mountain is a mountain, then it is not a mountain, then it is a mountain again.” At first, pleasure is naïvely sensual, bound up in grasping. Then, through insight, one sees the emptiness of sensual pleasure and abandons identification with it. But finally, in transcendence, pleasure returns - not as sensuality, but as the radiant simplicity of what is, freed from compulsion and self-reference.
So yes, I think the distinction between sensual, non-sensual, and transcendent pleasure is not one of phenomenological type but of quality of relation. The same phenomenological event (e.g., tasting a drink) can be experienced as craving, as neutral observation, or as a direct manifestation of reality’s luminous coherence. What changes is not the object, but the structure of identification and dependence within consciousness.
In that sense, “pleasure more spiritual than that not of the flesh” is not about another world but about this one seen through a purified mode of relation - the pleasure of suchness, perhaps.
Well no, sensuality is an attitude to senses. Anything that is related to the 5 senses at least can be sensual.
There are no transcendental, extra-neural experiences
This is vague but obviously Buddhism doesnt believe that experiences requires anything like a brain, there are formless realms where there is no physicality whatsoever and ghosts which are physical but obviously dont have brains.
Nibbana is obviously not sensual, its not even a part of the 5 senses or a thought about them in any sense. Its not even really a thought.
Do you mean that all pleasures are sensual?
No, see Jhana.
Re. "It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things." :
Having an Aspie theory about suffering which contradicts both human experience and human neuroscience does not excuse forgetting that life includes good things, which they're still doing.
The reason why this is confusing is because, a putthujana doesnt even know what suffering is, so they think that its possible for them to ever not suffer and in fact think that things that are full of suffering are fine. Happiness is also suffering. https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN75.html
The first noble truth is that the 5 assumed aggregates are suffering, thats everything.
This is why the happiness of nibbana, actual non suffering, not mundane happiness, is described as not feeling anything, as in, feelings not being felt. This includes pleasant feeling, neither pleasant or unpleasant feeling, and unpleasant feeling.
So no, anything “good” not only cannot make up for suffering, to think that it even conceivably could is to put things on two completely different levels on the same level.
The description in that article as suffering being like heat and nibbana being a pure absence is not bad, its much better than thinking about things in terms of a scale with bad things on one side and good things on the other.
It also doesnt contradict human experience anywhere near as much as you think. Addiction alone should make it clear why this view is plausible. In reality people know that excitement can be stressful for example.
Thinking in terms of anhedonia is absurd and would imply that people would anhedonia, so 70 percent of depressed people, are enlightened. In which case depression and suffering would be strongly negatively correlated.
Okay, thank you for trying to explain, but you have finally made it crystal clear to me that Buddhism is bad. You're just saying that happiness is suffering, and death, or consciousness without feeling, is happiness. What you're trying to achieve is what all "AI safety" work should be focused on preventing: a future full of thought but empty of feeling.
I'm not going to give a hearing to the idea that happiness is suffering. That's the most-perverse thing I've ever heard. I'm using "pervert" in its literal sense from the Latin: to twist something good into something bad. Buddhism isn't trying to do bad things to people; it's trying to twist their minds into perceiving every thing, good and bad, past and future, as bad. I am done with Buddhism. I choose life.
I'm sorry to write a reply that sounds angry and rude to your sincere attempts to be helpful. I'm not angry, and I don't want to be rude; but on the other hand you've convinced me that Buddhism is destructive and that people should be warned against it in the strongest language. I used the word "perverted" because it means precisely what I want to communicate: to turn something good (happiness) into something bad (suffering). "From Latin pervertere, from per- ‘thoroughly, to ill effect’ + vertere ‘to turn’." I'm sorry I originally used the word "evil", which I usually reserve for acts done with malicious intent. I don't believe you have any malicious intent.
But your words have convinced me that Buddhism is very wrong. They also make me suspect that, like Daoism, phenomenology, Nazism, post-modernism (especially Foucault), BDSM, the social justice movement, and MAGA, it might be a movement that tries to deal with trauma by normalizing traumatization, because a world full of traumatized people makes more sense to traumatized people. The repeatedly traumatized person shifts toward using instinctive or behavioristically-conditioned reflexes rather than reason. This is just a theory, and I realize "trauma" is dangerously hip. But it's the most sense I've been able to make of these things so far.
This reminds me of Leonid Lipavsky of Oberiu, who reportedly once said to Nikolay Oleinikov, (my loose translation) "Joy and sorrow are not opposites and indifference is not their average, just like there is no middle ground between being whole and being broken. Joy is the normal condition."
Huh, interesting, I don't think Sarah Constantin is any sort of Buddhist but she wrote about something like this in this old post: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/hedonism-revisited ; see the section "Liking is (Mostly) Painlessness". She relates it not to Buddha but to Epicurus!
>the brain tries to minimize prediction error. But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss?
Sitting in a dark room fails to minimize prediction error if one of the predictions is about how much activity-related dopamine it expects. So when you're sitting quietly in a dark room the prediction algorithm is satisfied except for the fact that it keeps saying "hey aren't we supposed to be DOING something?" Maybe getting that urge satisfied by an endless stream of algorithmically-optimized dopamine-producing short-form videos/tweets/reddit posts solves that problem and goes some way towards explaining why so many people are now terminally online.
Instead of suffering you could use craving in the heat analogy. Craving more of a pleasant thing is better in the moment than craving for a bad thing to stop, but it is still craving. It's that life tends towards craving, wanting something other than what is, which causes suffering.
"Life is suffering" is hard to understand because the core proposition can't be understood intellectually. It makes sense only when you start paying close attention to your experience (of life). When you do that, you realize that the best learning is from when you suffered the most.
Maybe this is the bay area techno-narcissist "Buddhist" conception of the first noble truth. But this is a description pretty much antithetical to how any "actual" Buddhist would describe the meaning of the phrase life is suffering. The idea is that everything is impermanent, including your own thoughts and emotions and sense of ego.
Suffering in this sense is the grasping and craving for the impermanent. It doesn't have anything to do with achieving some kind of permanent orgasmic state or something. Nor is reducing suffering the erasure of pleasure, enjoyment, aversion, or pain. It's overcoming the grasping and craving.
At absolute zero, all suffering ends
I'd rather live a life where I don't give a crap about whether other people have experienced more bliss or more joy than me, whether it's from Jhanas or Heroin or Mushrooms or a perfect spa-day. Good for them. Great for them. Or perhaps bad for them. Let others flourish. Let others brag. Let it to be unimportant to me.
From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:
“Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind, we do not care for any excessive joy. So we have imperturbable composure.”
but as a matter of philosophy and science, in my personal opinion and nomenclature:
Joy != Pleasure != Good != Peacefulness != Composure != Important
Because counter-examples abound. But if I had to name which one is the most important, I would say "Important".
Perhaps "Dukka" is the state of Scott Alexander, who I assume has never experienced Jhanas nor certain drugs (nor does anyone have to experience any of them), expressing sentiments like this:
> The real “zero suffering” isn’t neutral / blah / just okay. *****It’s nirvana, which feels more blissful than we can possibly imagine.*****
Well, the problem is that other's people decisions can affect you and they can also do so in a negative way.
For example, if some decision maker also eats up the tales/claims of this totally-not-a-religion religion, and then takes copious amounts of psychadelics to reach the 67th Ghana, their judgement will probably suffer even outside of their hobby.
Would their judgement suffer in any way that’s much distinguishable from the judgement of other leaders based in more established religions?
Did Napoleon have good judgement?
Or Caligula ?
I don’t think it has much to do with it, but the more you know yourself clearly the better decisions you will make. I don’t think there’s much of an argument against that.
"I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question."
Right. Just in case anyone is interested, Buddhist scholars have been debating these issues for thousands of years. "Nirvana as the absence of suffering" is a very superficial interpretation, although it's not so much wrong as just a drastic oversimplification.
Our material existence isn't real: this is the foundational belief of Buddhism, to the extent that it has one--language is a phenomenon in the material world, so anything you can say in language (including "Our material existence isn't real") isn't real either, but since language is the only way we have to communicate with each other, it has to suffice. Just bear in mind that Buddhist scholars are in the business of putting into words that which (according to them) is inherently wordless.
Religion is about the search for Perfection, however that is defined (to the extent that it has a purpose, etc.; from here on I'm going to stop being meta), and in Buddhism, the primary thing that separates us from Perfection is attachment to the material world (note that "being dead" doesn't detach you from the material world, attachment is a psychological state of being). "Suffering" is more or less "being separated from the Perfect", much as in Christianity hell is separation from God. Thoughts and feelings are the things that keep us attached to that material existence, so the best way to seek the Perfect and escape suffering is to detach yourself psychologically from your own thoughts and feelings. One does this via several different means, including meditation.
I'm not implying that any of this is true (I'm not a Buddhist), even less that any of this is capable of being converted into a rational style philosophy or mental framework. It's not just woo, it's the granddaddy origin of all woo. It is the true "Woo."
But I will propose that if you want to critique something, you should take the time to learn what it is.
>Thoughts and feelings are the things that keep us attached to that material existence, so the best way to seek the Perfect and escape suffering is to detach yourself psychologically from your own thoughts and feelings.
I think this is a little sweeping. Thoughts and feelings are things that keep us attached to the material existence, but I don’t know that detaching yourself psychologically is the best way to express the remedy. The detaching part is right as long as one sticks to a very literal definition of attachment. Your thoughts and feelings must be well known to you, clearly, and thoroughly understood it, but not rule you so in that sense you must detach from them. It’s a full-time job …
While I personally agree with you, that's not my understanding of traditional Buddhism. They seem to be aiming for something like a deeply meditative state 24/7, while remaining able to engage with and carry on one's daily tasks. Imagine yourself so immersed in the moment that you forget you exist. For a Buddhist, that's the desired default state. You feel joy or sadness, but you are no longer aware that it is you yourself that feels the joy or the sadness. You just feel it, and react appropriately.
I called that getting out of your own way.
Which is a good thing
Just stumbled across a quote from C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces doing totally unrelated things, but it's so on point with this piece, I had to share:
"There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite and our capacity without limit."
One of my guesses is that the popular life is suffering thing is a mistranslation of sabbe sankhara dukkha which is more accurately described as "fabrications are without the possibility of lasting satisfaction"
What's important is not the thing ("happiness" or "suffering") but our attachment to it. The Buddha taught that when we are unhappy/suffering, we naturally want it to end (aversion) and when we are happy/not suffering we are afraid it will end (attachment) and cling to it. So in neither case are we truly happy. The solution is to let go of attachment; if we can't/won't then indeed all life is suffering.
I’m skeptical this is true either though. A big issue is it asserts happiness/joy/positive valence ect can be squished down into a single measurable direction like temperature. I think most honest meditators, if they really do practice mindfulness across a wide array of moments will notice isn’t true. I love meditation and have found a lot of peace and deep joy & pleasure in it but the positive valence I get from it isn’t of the same kind as all the other joys I experience nor are all the non mediation joys the same kind as each other. Imagine if someone said, actually there’s no such thing as good or bad movies, just movies that are less bad than others, the ultimate movie is something with no flaws. There’s some sense in which you could frame quality films as just lacking the flaws of other ones (a compelling story isn’t a positive thing but just the lack of the flaws of a boring story, a good sound track isn’t a good thing but the absence of a bad sound track) but that feels borderline deceptive. I can see myself being happy mediating nonstop but I can also see myself happy playing good videogames non stop or listening to good new music nonstop. Mediation is easier to maintain and also easier to get into higher more intense kinds of pleasure but I also think that fails to capture most of what people rightly care about in life. Movies can be good in lots of different ways, and saying all that matters is just how good they all are would be collapsing a lot of meaningful complexity like films that are good at intrigue versus nobility versus connecting you to someones else mess experiences versus being funny versus sad. Feeling amazing meditating is not the same or objectively better as feeling good eating a nice meal or feeling good having sex or feeling good reading an interesting book.
This kind of reminds of people saying stuff like “you don’t need friends to love you when you can love yourself” or “you don’t need drugs to get high, you can just get high on life if you have the right attitude towards it.” It’s taking the fact that you can have positives without x that share a lot of the desired qualities of x but completely fails to acknowledge the way x isn’t interchangeable. Just because loving yourself will make you happier than not and maybe even having friends isn’t strictly necessary to being happy, it’s silly to say loving yourself is interchangeable or a substitute to people who want to be liked by others they feel meaningfully close to and like back. It’s true you can get into intense highented sensory states that make things enjoyable and push worries and thoughts to the periphery of your attention if you allow yourself to focus on the external senses the right way, but that doesn’t mean anyone can get everything they want out of weed without weed itself. Just the pure experience of feeling content and deep pleasure and satisfaction really fails to capture all the many textured meaningful differences one can want out of life and I think it’s just silly to frame those wants as inferior product to zen like nirvana.
The more you can love yourself, the easier it is for others to love you. And really the only way to find a true friend.
This doesn't move me much on the (un)desireability of nirvana. Though it is super interesting, it remains as opaque as ever whether I should think of turning down the suffering-as-temperature as plugging into my 'actual terminal values' vs hacking and changing them the way I consider opioid use to hack people's values. In fact, if this is really the pitch, that enlightment lets you turn the suffering all the way down, down past merely "happy", so that you're always feeling cosmic bliss...I'm really confused how to evaluate the desireability of that. Its phrased like happiness or suffering are these reified things (or relative levels of the same reified thing) that are input(s) to my value system rather than signals *from* my value system about my past/present/future situation.
I understand what you/they mean by "temperature is heat", but the physicist in my couldn't help wince very hard at that. Temperature and heat are related but different concepts, which can at times behave counterintuitively if you are expecting them to behave the same way (see comment above about negative absolute temperatures being hotter than positive ones). Not that this affects any of your argument, it just means this isn't the best analogy ever.
It's also been translated as 'out of kilter' , which is based on ancient imagery, notably as an ill-fitted wheel that makes a cart wobbly or gives a bumpy ride.
That's resonated more with me than 'suffering'.
-> "An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain"
Britain: What he say fuck me for?
Britain here: yeah, no, fair enough.
So you can semantically define "happiness" and "suffering" as two directions on one continuous axis, and call the quantity represented by the axis "suffering". That's fine, but so what? I can easily call the quantity "happiness" instead. Is the idea that there's an "absolute zero" to suffering, but not to happiness? If that's all it means, "life is suffering" still sounds like a deepity.
"The neuroscientists say the brain tries to minimize prediction error." Why do people seek novelty? How do exciting thrills minimize prediction error?
Also I always interpreted Dukkha as referring to the hedonic treadmill -- nothing is ever permanently good and eventually begins to feel hollow and pointless. Removal of that solves the fundamental problem.
"Life is suffering like temperature is heat" is obviously missing something because we can observe joy and suffering coexisting as distinct phenomena. Imagine you're eating a very nice meal, but also you have a headache. Overall the experience balances out to about neutral. Now imagine you're sitting in a waiting room with nothing going on. Again, the experience is about neutral. These situations have equivalent emotional temperatures which suggests that "life is suffering" should say they have the same amount of suffering. But our common definitions say that the meal scenario contains a bunch of suffering plus a bunch of joy while the waiting room contains very little of either. You can maybe save the emotional temperature interpretation by creating some really galaxy-brained definition of suffering, but at that point you've just invented a whole new concept and tried to cheat by naming it the same thing as an existing concept.
“Nirvana is to suffering what 0 Kelvin is to heat” is a great model.
Thank you for introducing me to the term "deepity."
Scott writes, quote: "...many Buddhists claim to be able to reach jhana, a state described as infinitely better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that."
...what a totally un-Buddhist way to think. The concept of Nirvana is something else entirely. Nirvana is to have reached non-existence. Its closest equivalent is the atheist-Western idea of life after death. That is, nothing at all. To have finally left the otherwise eternal wheel of being born and re-born for ever and ever. To have broken that cycle, that is Nirvana.
The fun thing - and the basic reason West is West and East is East - is that Buddhists fear to live forever and hope to reach a state of non-existence. While Westerners fear the state of non-existence and hope, against all odds, that there is a paradise - or at least a hell - waiting for them after the final door.
To use the analogy with temperature, where zero K is the absolute cold, and zero C is where the ice melts or water freezes, perhaps it makes sense to use analogical two scales for suffering -- one where the absolute zero means no suffering whatsoever not even microscopic frustrations (which is best achieved by permanent death), and another where zero is the boundary where existence seems net positive or net negative.
> ...what a totally un-Buddhist way to think.
Thank you.
The claim is factually inconsistent with everything we know about neuroscience. If it were correct, we would expect to find something like suffering neurotransmitter(s) that when blocked cause bliss. What we actually find is the opposite, and even that’s an oversimplification. Maybe it’s not a good idea to give too much credit to life advice from someone who lived when people still believed in spontaneous generation and that the sun and moon are discs?
Yeah and like different kinds of pleasure activate different circuits which makes it seem like even positive valence isn’t a singular thing
Yeah, I came here to post roughly this.
How does what we know about brain chemicals / neuroscience not immediately point to throwing out this theory?
Wife left me two years ago. I tried to kill myself. In my own experience, there is an upper limit to how much joy/happiness one ever experiences, but seemingly no upper limit on how much one can suffer.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you're doing better.
And I agree about what you said.
In my own pits of hell with disability... and symptoms that I can't even describe to most humans without metaphors... I remember saying to myself "hell has no bottom, hell has no bottom, hell as no bottom".
I personally find the "techno-Buddhist" obsession with "how blissful and euphoric can we get" to be extremely irritating. Sure it's nice. But it's also silly cherries and sprinkles.
In my amateur opinion, it flies in the face of why the religion was established in the first place.
Each of the Noble Truths has a duty attached to it. The duty of the First Noble Truth (roughly, "There is suffering") is to understand it. Canonically, truly understanding what suffering (dukkha) is constitutes partial enlightenment, so that alone should put into perspective the difficulty of answering the titular question from an emic perspective. But even without getting to that level, a basic reading of the texts makes it clear that what's discussed here is missing the mark as to what the Buddha means by suffering.
If you look at the formulation of the First Noble Truth in SN 56.11 (https://suttacentral.net/sn56.11/en/sujato), it says, "In brief, the five grasping aggregates are suffering." "Grasping aggregates" (pañcupādānakkhandhā) is a technical term (as is dukkha), referring to a specific mode in which the five aggregates (khandas) arise. The aggregates (form, feeling, determinations, consciousness, and perception) are exhaustive building blocks of our experience, but they themselves are not dukkha — they become dukkha when they are grasped. Emotions, such as happiness or sadness, or experiences such as having sex or being tortured, are classed as experiences in Buddhist thought, i.e., they are configurations of the five aggregates. Since the aggregates themselves are not the issue, but only the mode in which they arise or are related to, the states described here are insufficient to determine whether suffering is present: we need to know whether the happiness, sadness, sex, or torture is arising within the grasping or non-grasping mode.
If dukkha depended on specific configurations of aggregates arising, such as bliss, then its cessation would be impossible so long as we hold to the foundational doctrine that all the aggregates are impermanent: the cessation of dukkha would require the ability to make certain configurations permanent, but the attempt to do so is precisely the cause of suffering the Buddha describes — ignorance of impermanence that leads to craving for the continuance of states:
"Now this is the noble truth of the origin of suffering. It’s the craving that leads to future lives, mixed up with relishing and greed, taking pleasure wherever it lands. That is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving to continue existence, and craving for nonexistence. "
The cessation of suffering is then described as:
"Now this is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering. It’s the fading away and cessation of that very same craving with nothing left over; giving it away, letting it go, releasing it, and not clinging to it."
Notice that the cessation of suffering is not explained in terms of the aggregates, but craving, which is a disposition or attitude *towards* the aggregates, indicating that reading it in terms of a specific configuration of the aggregates themselves would be a mistake. However, a dispositional shift towards the aggregates will induce a change in the ensuing configurations of aggregates to some degree as a side effect, in the same way that learning math will lead to more experiences of getting high grades on multiple choice math exams, even though it's possible to get high marks by randomly guessing. Similarly, an enlightened person would have different experiences to some extent as a result of their lack of craving (such as spending time in meditation instead of having sex) because they would lack the ignorance and craving that enables them to seek them out, in the same way that a mathematician lacks the ignorance that enables them to fail math exams.
Another analogy is the difference in an OCD patient with a handwashing obsession before and after overcoming the disease. Before treatment, handwashing is experienced as distressing and may last hours at a time. After treatment, they still wash their hands for reasonable amounts of time, and they may even have certain scary thoughts pop into their head, but they relate to their experience in a different way. The reduced time spent washing their hands is an example of how their experience reconfigures post-treatment, but that is an effect, not a cause — treatment pre-recovery would likely include restricting time spent washing by sheer force of will, exhibiting an external similarity, but that is distressing in a way that it isn't for the person who is recovered and no longer requires a huge dose of willpower to step away from the sink but instead does so because they no longer relate to their thoughts and inclinations in the same way. I wrote an article that explains Buddhist practice as exposure-response therapy, which can make this clearer: https://ottotherenunciant.substack.com/p/buddhism-as-exposure-and-response.
Whether this sort of modal/dispositional/attitudinal view the Buddha lays out makes sense is debatable, sure, but it needs to be made clear at least that that's what the Buddha's offering — not some way to achieve eternal bliss. One of the issues that Buddhism faces is that there is nowhere near as much English-language scholarship on Buddhism that clarifies these issues in the way classical theist philosophy does. That leaves most of the interesting debates untouched and instead leaves most Buddhist critiques at the level of "but believing in a sky daddy is stupid!" That's a shame for both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, as both lack the opportunity to really engage with and clarify those views so that an informed decision can be made about them.
I thought that, in the prediction-error-minimisation model, you experience happiness/positive feeling when something good happens because your brain is forced to 'expect' good things, so that you can reduce prediction error by causing good things to happen; e.g. brains 'expect' to feel well-fed all the time, and so are 'surprised' to find themselves feeling hunger, driving them to 'correct' the 'error' by eating. If there is some such hardwiring of expectations going on, then the state of zero-prediction-error isn't sitting in a dark silent room, it's maximal flourishing; the brain will only report 0 prediction error when its predictions that it's successful and popular and safe etc. all come true.
There's also some element of self-modelling going on; my brain would be surprised to find itself sitting in a dark silent room, because that's not something I tend to do. If I became the sort of person who regularly sits in dark silent rooms doing nothing for long periods of time - like a trained meditator - maybe my brain would update its self-model and report less and less error as it predicted higher and higher likelihoods of sitting in a dark silent room on a regular basis.
I think you did a great job of explaining the rationalist techno-Buddhists' answer to this question!
There are 3 sufferings. The suffering of suffering, like a bad migraine. The suffering of change, for example, the fact that if you live long enough, all the people you love deeply and bring you joy will mostly die first. Last, the all pervasive suffering, which is similar to some of the existentialists and psychologists when they speak of the fundamental anxiety, dread and uncertainty that characterizes existence.
Then Nirvana--has nothing to do with Jhannas or happiness. It represents the end of suffering the breaking free from the endless and meaningless cycle of birth, old age, disease, death and rebirth. It cannot really be defined except negatively, so its not really easily subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Suffering is not really a propositional truth like water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. It is an existential truth which is realized through experience and contemplation on that experience. If you do not or cannot realize it, its not truth.
Buddhism starts as a suffering minimization exercise (dualism) but you’re meant to go past that part (non-dualism). Mental states can be categorized as joy or suffering or neutral or they can be put of a scale from zero to suffering but so what? The categories were made for man not man for the categories. You are not your mind (or you are not your mind any more than you are everything else). Your mental state only matters in the way that something like the weather matters. It might matter in a particular context but not in itself.
"The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle parenthetically refers in the Nichomachean Ethics or, as it may be rendered, not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.
The truth of this remark turns upon the negative character of happiness,—the fact that pleasure is only the negation of pain, and that pain is the positive element in life."
Schopenhauer, "Parerga and Paralipomena"
"the satisfaction of the will consists in nothing else than that it meets with no resistance";
"the less the will is excited, the less we suffer".
There is a spice mix in Egyptian cuisine called "duk'kha" so I like the meme of "suffering" being actually "spicy'.
First of all, I'd like to point out that what you're talking about here is Abbidharma Buddhism, that is, early Buddhism or the type of Buddhism known as Theravada or Hinayana. Mahayana Buddhism, to some extent, answers the very arguments you raise but that aside:
I think the first noble truth is better understood as 'There is Suffering', or perhaps even, 'conditioned experience is suffused with suffering'.
It's interesting that you should raise Valence. This is a key concept in (this school of) Buddhism, where it is known as 'Vedana'. The idea is that sentient beings' cannot interact with the world without introducing Vedana/Valence. As soon as they have sense contact with an ( apparently) exterior object, the next thing they do, automatically and almost instantaneously, is categorise that contract in terms of Valence. I'm going to simplify here and not talk about samskaras (mental fabrications) because I think it will distract from the main point. Next, the being has, not just contact with an exterior object but a desirable or non-desirable contact. This in turn causes the sentient being to 'cling', that is to either want more of the contact, or desire the contact to be withdrawn. This is what causes the Dhukka or Suffering.
So then, the practice of Buddhist meditation from the point of view of the Theravada, is to remove the clinging action. Nirvana (which means something like 'extinction') is not a heavenly state, it is a sentient being that has had the clinging action expunged from their neural activity set.
How it does this is worth a quick detour. The mind is taught to develop single pointed focus. Once the mind is focused sufficiently it is able to see the mechanism following contact that creates the Dhukka. The Dhukka and the sense of being a self separate from the (apparently) exterior environment are shown to arise in mind together, as a result of the clinging action. Once this is clearly seen, the sense of separate self is (somewhat) abandoned and the selfing and clinging actions and the tendency to ascribe valence/value to contact is attenuated (cutting the fetters).
I believe this should explain why Jhana states still involve 'suffering' for a non enlightened being. In order for a Jhana state to be regarded as pleasant or to be assigned any qualitative value, Vedana needs to be invoked. This creates clinging, which creates Dhukka. Nirvana/Extinction is the end of this cycle. In it's early stages Nirvana is experienced as a 'great relief' and so it can be confused with an ecstatic or pleasant state but it is not. It is more like glee, at being able to relinquish a heavy burden one previously didn't even realise was an encumbrance but instead mistook for being a part of oneself.
If this were true, shouldn't it be impossible to feel joy and suffering at the same time?
"Suffering" is a hideous translation and has done endless mischief. It has the sense of "gets out of joint." Look how that transforms the whole thing.
Who are the rationalist techno-buddhists and where can I learn more from them? Are you referring to Ingram and the pragmatic dharma movement, David Chapman, or another set of folks?
I miss Scott's long form essays.
Scott, PLEASE always take into consideration that something that was not said in English, might be hard to translate to English, and will be often translated inadequately!
The First Noble Truth is that life is *dukkha*. Dukkha originates from the word when you travel on a chariot, and the wheel is not well fitted and greased, so it squeals and the trip is uncomfortably bumpy. In other words, it means something like imperfection or unsatisfactoriness. It just says life is not always perfectly happy, usually, something is missing, usually, some of our desires are not fully satisfied. That we will never run out of "rooms for improvement", and thus never will be fully content.
ALSO important that the Buddha specifically said "old age, sickness, death". THAT means, when you are young and healthy, and your parents are doing well now, it is perfectly possible you actually feel perfectly happy!
But I have seen my grandparents go demented, their prized garden, the pride of their lives going to weed, then so demented they did not recognize their kids, and then die. I saw my parents die of cancer, one of them in considerable pain, the other could not even feed herself and was nursed like a baby and felt it was humiliating. And now at 47 when I stand up my lower back hurts, and it will only get worse, not better. How could I be perfectly happy? Clearly I see and feel how our bodies are fragile now. And I miss my family.
So at a certain age of life, the youthful happy invicible feeling evaporates, and we all get an understanding of the fundamentally tragic aspects of life.
Which is why Plato called philosophers souls that are aware of death "dead souls".
This is why a Zen master said no one should practice Zen before 40 because they have not suffered enough.
Pretty close to the suffering-focused variety of EA thinking that would gladly press the Kill All Life button
This analogy would make more sense to me if it was described in terms of heat flows rather than temperature. Its not just perception, theres a physical difference between feeling hot and cold. When I am cold heat is flowing out of me into the environment. Is sex fun because suffering is flowing out of me to rest of the universe. That doesnt seem like it should always be true. Something about karma being the 1st law of thermo? I could be selfish and build a suffering pump and be happy. Is nirvana an insulator? I want to be careful about reasoning by analogy, i just struggle to see the difference between naive and true temperature if its not described in terms of flow.
This analogy is correct. Thank you for moving the public understanding of this matter in the right direction
And yes it's true that jhana is better than heroin and sex but I should add that this is largely true only when you've become attuned to what's really going on in your body and notice that there are still little bits of "meh" flying around in your consciousness even on heroin.
But the non-meditator doesn't always notice because they habitually apply some sort of cognitive tension in order to not see everything that's going on.
In extreme cases of that tension you get addiction or mental health issues or whatnot. It is a form of avoiding to see. It's canonical term is "ignorance"
But ignorance not reliable and so we might have moments of bliss but inevitably when we relax, or when the sources of meh become larger (like when you start aging and dieing), we have to pay back that debt
Meditation relaxes ignorance/tension ahead of time, so you get to see the bits of suffering earlier. It's a downpayment on the suffering you'll inevitably have to go through, and because you're applying awareness to it you'll get through it more efficiently (for reasons that would be another comment)
The buddha says "life is suffering", and he really yells it at you! He's trying to get you to stop tensing up to ignore it. Wake up!
As a Theravada Buddhist myself and a Vipassana meditation practitioner, I strongly agree as well as disagree with many of your statements. And would like to shed more light on it-
1. “But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering.” - You must make this clearer here as to why. Without stating the “Why”, you are simplifying and chopping off the crux.
Firstly suffering is 'NOT' an emotion. It is a reality we experience. Negative emotions like sadness, anger, etc. lead to suffering or "dukha". Now your statement misunderstands and incorrectly interprets this point I am about to make. According to Buddhists, this is so because when you experience pleasant and happy feeling, you get attached to it and want more of it and you start craving for it. Then when situation changes and the pleasant feeling goes away, you continue craving for that pleasant feeling and when you don’t experience that pleasant/happy feeling or situation, you get sad and may experience other negative emotions . And this sadness and negative emotions or state of mind is what we call suffering.
Now the 2nd case is when a person experiences unpleasant feeling or situation and naturally reacts to it mentally in order for it to go away. When a person continually reacts to it with aversion or negative emotions like anger and it does not go away, then a person again experiences sadness along with the negative mental state with negative emotions and reactions generated. This again is what we call suffering. So suffering is embedded in both pleasant and unpleasant feelings- that is the crux of the Buddhist teaching.
Now there is an additional 3rd case when a person may not experience any feeling and just experience neutral feeling of neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Here still a person craves for pleasant feelings as it had previously experienced it, and when it experiences neutrality, it goes against his expectation of pleasant feelings and a person again experiences sadness and thus suffering.
2. “It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things.” See you are misunderstanding the Buddhist teachings altogether if you misunderstand the noble truths itself. The first noble truth is that “There is suffering in life”. And the rest of the noble truths are like a diagnosis of suffering similar to how a doctor diagnosis a disease. This is not a pessimistic view. This is a realistic view. The intention of these teachings is to lead to a solution that helps decrease whatever suffering one may have in life and by ignoring suffering itself you cannot do that. That is why the first noble truth says that there is suffering in life.
- That is why it is so important that theoretical study of Buddhist teachings should go hand in hand with Vipassana meditation practice otherwise you will be caught up in doubts, misinterpret teachings and will never truly understand Buddhist teachings. It is to be experienced first.
Life is suffering is NOT the 1st noble truth. Western guys are infamous for always misinterpreting Eastern teachings.
The 1st Noble Truth is that "There is suffering in Life".
I don't want to have a fight, but clearly, at least in my eyes, Buddhism is an attempt to except the world as it is; whereas Judaism and later Christianity was (and is) an attempt to reform the world: to introduce the concept of History (with a capital H), whose theme is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom—not in the mind, but as a political and economic reality.
And if I am to believe my eyes, it appears to have succeeded in large measure. Based on the evidence all around us, the kingdom of God (as Jesus would describe it) would appear to be already here, at least in the West, even if not yet fully realized or firmly established. As for what that might finally look like in the end, here's what I see: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Of course I may be a fool. Let others decide.
This tracks with my experiences at silent meditation retreats. After a week of silent meditation and in-unison chanting, I felt completely light and blissful, grateful, and connected to the universe. Returning to reality, however, was painful, and I was suddenly put upon to handle multiple situations simultaneously and not have so much time for peace. I think meditating is very difficult for moms, because of the clingy, intrusive, and boundaryless nature of children. I still go through periods where I meditate, but it never sticks as a permanent habit, and where I get to meditating for 20 minutes is not the same as having an entire week unburdened and dedicated to it. I don't think I am making the wrong the choice for myself though. I think I would rather have my stressful life full of children and pain though than just stay permenantly in meditative bliss. It's lovely, but it's one note.
> It's lovely, but it's one note.
thank you :-)
This is an understanding that I came to myself. But aren't there other dimensions to life, apart from the suffering axis?
Yes, prediction error, however small, always hurts (if only because it often manifests as fear) and, all else being equal, it is probably best to learn to minimize it (meditate, practice simple life, unattach). But maybe it's not wise to minimize it all the way to absolute zero if that would flatten all other dimensions of life too? Just like, a universe that stays at absolute zero will never evolve or produce life?
Buddhists agree that you should do good to other beings, even though that, inevitably, produces some suffering heat. Buddha himself chose a life of serving others over instant nirvana. I think "do as they do, not as they say" is apt here.
I'm late to this one, but in short, no, I think your friend is wrong. Some presentations sound a bit like "it's all degrees of suffering", but that's not what Buddhism claims is actually happening. This is best explained in the context of the Three Marks of Existence. I'll use the Mahayana version known as the Four Seals, but it should be more or less the same (if any Theravadin wants to chime in to compare, I'll be happy to hear!).
In short, according to Buddhism, non-liberated minds have the persistent habit of adding a layer of emotional reactivity on top of everything. You see an object, or think of something, and the cognition itself is crisp and clear. Yet right afterwards, this unconscious mechanism activates and brings a serving of persistent, sticky mud on top.
This comes in the form of the good old "three kleshas", namely attraction (rāga), repulsion (dveṡa) and avoidance or ignorance (avidyā). The first is like an inner "salivating" at some future pleasure or benefit from the object; the second wants to push it away; and the third wants to pretend it didn't see it.
In the context of adding themselves as a layer of gunk on top of whatever is going on, these are collectively known as "taints" (āsrava). The precise formulation of the second Mark is "all tainted things are suffering" (sarve sāsravāḥ duḥkhāḥ). Tibetans like to point out that *nearly*, but not all, compounded things are "tainted".
The hallmark of these taints is that they leave an after-effect. If you're just experiencing a genuine emotion that is appropriate to the present moment, it will just last as long as it needs to. But when āsrava comes on top, it lingers on, coloring your feelings for a while. If you've ever felt the after-effects of strong anger or some other emotion, congratulations, you know the flavor of what Buddhists call āsrava.
This whole thing is *crucial* to Buddhism. The entire basic Buddhist endeavor is to stop the mind from producing āsrava, no more, no less.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that they have put a lot of thought into how exactly āsrava is created, and why. The main theory I've heard, is that there's an element of the mind whose habit is to constantly bring up the "I" in relation to everything. You see or hear something, and this little guy chimes invariably in: what's in it for me? Is it any danger to my well-being or to my status?
This "I" is not the mere sense of being alive and conscious. It's a conceptual "I", filled with our complex sense of identity, how we see ourselves, what we stand for, how we think others see us, plus all the scripts we've swallowed whole about what life is about and whether we're succeeding at it or not. It's all the stuff we'd bring to therapy. This is what the Third Mark is telling us: "this self you cling to, is not you".
This "self" is always extended in time. We glide through the present moment without paying much attention to it, because our sāsrava minds are always projected in the past or future. That's where our projected losses or benefits happen. So the First Mark says: "stay in the present".
And this layer of taint is painful even in the middle of ostensible pleasure. So the Second Mark says, "all tainted things are suffering".
In short, what Buddhism is saying at its core is: if you train your mind to pay close attention enough, you will notice that 1) the present moment is more real than any enduring conceptual entities (that's a "process ontology" in modern terms); that 2) the sticky "taint" is added by the mind as a separate painful process, and is not an inherent part of the original cognition, or even less of its object; and 3) that the thick "self" in relation to which this "taint" is being created, is just a bunch of self-reinforcing concepts, but is "not really me". And if these realizations are deep enough, then without its the three legs to stand on, āsrava will just stop.
""three kleshas", namely attraction (rāga), repulsion (dveṡa) and avoidance or ignorance (avidyā)." - and if you reverse each of these, you get Spinoza: "I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."
Yeah I wouldn't hesitate to call Spinoza a Western jñāni.
...Somewhat against this theory: When we are at the self-reported peak happiness (sex, heroin), it's not like we're deeper than usual into meditation or at least meditativeness. Rather... the opposite?
What if there's a twist: Buddhist minimum of suffering is real, but it's a local minimum, not global. From close enough, you're attracted to it; but from some other point, your ball may roll into an entirely different valley... and eventually reach lower suffering than the most awakened Buddhists?
Yes, the intuition "there's nothing below absolute zero, and nirvana is the closest you get to absolute zero in mental activity" sounds valid. But maybe suffering is a bit more multidimensional than temperature, in which case there may be several suffering minima, like on a 3D landscape.
This is the least Jewish thing I’ve ever read by Scott.
It's precedented. He claims to have reached first jhana, and has a "review" on his old blog of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.
This is the explanation of the dukkha that always made the most sense to me:
"To truly experience the subtle nature of unsatisfactoriness, one needs to have achieved some success in terms of everyday life within the conventional parameters of dualism. Understanding of unsatisfactoriness is not the despair of a destitute failure – it is the feeling of suspicion which arises for someone who has proved themselves capable, competent and able to function within the bounds of what is possible within samsara, the social context of dualism. The niggling feeling arises that the whole thing is vaguely hollow and that nothing is quite what it seems. We have worked for the good things we have and live in a reasonable degree of comfort, yet we become aware of a sensation of unsatisfactoriness about our lives. We find that we can achieve almost whatever we set out to achieve in terms of what the world offers; yet we come to realise that these achievements are at best a pastime. Khandro Déchen has pointed out that the life of Shakyamuni Buddha can be understood from different perspectives, according the style of teaching being presented. She said:
"According to the Ulukha-mukha Sutra, the emphasis is placed on Shakyamuni Buddha’s discovery of the hollowness of success. As the prince, the son of the king, he had to be the best in every field. He had to be the greatest archer, wrestler, poet, artist, and musician. He had to excel at everything, because to be second-best or to fail would undermine his position as the future king. From this perspective it was through his success that he came to view all accomplishment with suspicion. All he had left was to find what lay both beyond and within the issue of hollowness. His path was based on the unsatisfactoriness of success as a reference point, rather than on the brevity of success in terms of sickness, old age and death. It is not that sickness, old age, and death are not issues which can turn one’s attention to spiritual enquiry; it is rather that there is a more subtle level of unsatisfactoriness which needs to be perceived. This perspective which sees through the referentiality of success means that even if we were immortal, the cyclic nature of serial successes would still leave us with a sense of unsatisfactoriness. According to this interpretation of the teachings, sickness, old age, and death cannot actually be described as unsatisfactory – they are simply the play of the nirmanakaya.
"The First Noble Truth, then, is awareness of the universality of the feeling of unsatisfactoriness, and the way in which it eventually undermines every achievement. The Sanskrit word mostly translated as ‘suffering’ is ‘dukkha’. ‘Du’ means worthless, and ‘kha’ means hollow. So ‘dukkha’ actually encompasses much more than the misery of life not going well, the experience of pain and personal catastrophe. It points to the illusory nature of the dukkha itself. In some way we create the unsatisfactoriness – it is not self-existent.
"Shakyamuni Buddha said that where there is dualism, change is perceived as dukkha. We don’t like the good things in our life to go away, but everything changes. Always. The apparent existence of all phenomena slips away from us, especially if we try to grasp at permanence. We have to have had some success within the social context of dualism (samsara) to really understand this. If our whole life has been deprivation, aggression, loneliness, anxiety, and painful confusion, then it would be easy merely to view bad luck, parental abuse, or societal injustice as the cause of our unhappiness. So in order to actually perceive dukkha, we have to have some measure of success and pleasure in our lives and yet still experience unsatisfactoriness. It is only then that we can begin to feel the illusory or empty quality of the experience of pleasure, as well as the tangible or form quality of the experience of pain."
https://www.aroencyclopaedia.org/shared/text/n/noble_truths_ar_eng.php
Robert Wright, in "Why Buddhism is True" I think gave the best explanation of why the Four Noble Truths are literally true from a modern scientific perspective.
I think Lacan had it right. Life is Jouissance.
What if we reversed the statement to: "Suffering is life"? Does that still hold? If so, then it's really all about how we define suffering. In other words, suffering may not be something all that bad a thing if one is OK with life.
A Western version of this view is posited by the Epicureans. There are several ways in which Epicureans today argue that pleasure is the default state of the organism, like the arguments that we find in Epicurus' Principal Doctrines 3 and 9, and in Epicurus' Epistle to Menoeceus.
The study Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being by Ed Diener et al. shows, among other findings, that “individuals’ set points are not hedonically neutral”. > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16719675/
Christos Yapiyakis (one of the Kathegemones, or Guides, of the modern Epicurean Garden of Athens, Greece) argues in "Eustatheia (Epicurean Stability): a Philosophical Approach to Stress Management" that modern science demonstrates that the body seeks its own natural balance and health. This argument is confirmed by hedonic adaptation studies, as well as by biologists who coined the term homeostasis to refer to the natural balance found in living creatures and systems.
In the past, I've explored the similarities between Epicureanism and Buddhism, so I'll just post a link here to avoid redundance: https://hiramcrespo.substack.com/p/comparing-syggenis-hedone-and-buddha
The decisive argument against this is that there are states with no suffering, like unconsciousness or death. If you have a crummy work, perhaps you would prefer unconsciousness to it, but unless you're depressed, in serious pain, or similar conditions, very few people seem to prefer unconsciousness (or death) to being alive and aware. This would make _no_ sense if there was nothing but degrees of suffering - in that case, unconsciousness or death would be strictly preferable. (Obviously Buddhists don't think suicide is a way out of suffering, but most people aren't Buddhists.)
Do you wake up each morning wishing you could just have eternal sleep instead? Likely not, but if all was suffering, you _should_.
I find this claim more easily evaluable when I compare it with the model of motivation I came away from Spinoza's ethics with, in which there are both approach motivations (play, curiosity, etc) and avoidance motivations (pain, fear, etc). From this perspective, "life is suffering" would seem to be a claim that the approach motivations are unreal and our behavior is adequately explained by avoidance.
Isn't this analogy supposed to indicate we shouldn't remove too much suffering or we will reach "absolute zero"?
Buddhism's concept of suffering and enlightenment are misrepresented here.
This does have some accurate points regarding buddhist doctrine. However, I do think you should mention that most people who fail to achieve enlightenment eventually end up in lower forms of life with reduced chances for dharma, and tend to keep dropping until they end up in the Narakas, places of continuous brutal tortures that last incomprehensibly long times and would be considered extreme suffering even by human standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Buddhism)
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? I don't know.
What happens when a rationalist meets Zen which is irrational by definition and according to Bodhidharma himself can't be based on words and letters? Of course they try to explain it rationally, in words and letters, starting an Enlightenment AMA.
Getting an enlightened person to talk about themself is impossible not because they're shy, but because an enlightened person knows that any attempt to explain their experience in words would be futile, or worse, misguiding, and instead of helping people to understand the truth would inevitable drive them farther from it.
At least if it's been a Zen enlightment: there are other types of mystical epiphany and it may be different with them.
Breakthrough on the cushion: ✓
Breakthrough when the alarm goes off and everything’s already on fire: ❌
Here’s the difference (and how to fix it): https://open.substack.com/pub/nwlehmann90/p/so-youre-a-guru-now-but-you-still
There is only one thing in this life that is truly bliss: firing up a gaming PC or console, starting Nier: Automata on Easy Mode, activating all the Auto-chips and dropping 2B sans skirt (in her thong leotard) into a place densely packed with enemies and watching her fight.
Anyone who has claimed anything else in any of the other comments is a complete moron, as are you. But I already knew that last part, which is why I don't read any of your shit. I don't know why this showed up on my timeline.