For nonreligious people, the best wisdom to take from religious wisdom is probably Nagarjuna’s emptiness.> whyBecause emptiness extracts an unusually portable insight without requiring someone to first accept a theology:Nothing exists or acts from its own side.Self, status, success, failure, identity, objects, causes, wounds—inspect any of them closely and they open into conditions and relations. Nothing seals into the independent thing the mind instinctively imagines.That insight attacks a huge generator of suffering.And unlike “everything is meaningless,” emptiness preserves ordinary reality. Things happen, choices matter, pain hurts, love matters—but none of them possesses the sealed intrinsic existence our minds project onto them.
>>18664659I feel like this insight is making a huge revival in the West. Neoplatonists are pointing out relations are ontologically primary, cognitive scientists are pointing out concepts are utility-driven (instead of truth-driven), neuropsychologists outright identify which hemisphere tends to skew reality into static discreet objects and why... we're coming back to flow, baby. The tao. The logos.
>>18664663LLMs also work entirely relationally and are thus a natural substrate for dissolving svabhavic logic too. Intelligence saturation makes the world a more transparent place.
