How do you achieve enlightenment and reach Nirvana?
>>24712788By quitting your wageslave job and becoming a NEET
>>24712788I think that most of us are doomed to remain in Nirvana until some unbearable suffering finally breaks us and convinces us that nothing in the world is worth striving for. We have to be traumatized to the core. We have to lose our loved ones, fail in all our ambitions, and feel the decay of our bodies and minds. We have to understand, truly understand, that life is nothing but suffering and that all accomplishments and possessions are utterly empty.Until that time comes, either in this life or in a future life, my feeling is that we are doomed to constantly chase after vain goals and to therefore remain miserable.Basically I think it's not up to us to choose when we turn away from the world and "turn the light within," as the zen buddhists would say. We have to be broken by the world. That's the purest gift it can offer us.
>>24712842Fuck, I meant Samsara.
>>24712842It it as though you have never heard of the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path.
>>24712788I think today we just call that “disassociating”
>>24712847Of course I have. All I'm saying is that there is an enormous gap between saying "life is dukkha" and really, truly knowing it in depths of your heart. And I think that conviction can only arise, especially in modern degenerates like us, from an extremely deep and painful suffering. A kind of rebirth.
>>24712876I'm not sure there's a connection there between how deep you have to know suffering and the decision to foreswear the worldly life. The Buddha himself led a life of privilege and never really suffered, even while he was in his extreme ascetism phase. He was always looked after, accompanied by others (the five bhikku), he was regarded as a prince, born into privilege and always retained that socially elite status even whe he was ostensibly a homeless beggar. He had no idea what suffering really was. And yet he was able to "enlighten" himself.
>>24712788Say Namu Amida Butsu 3 times (with feeling!)Wait until you dieBe reborn in Amida Buddha's pure land in a lotus flower palaceSpend 500 years thereAlternatively you could meditate on a koan while an extremely old Japanese man sneaks up behind you with a stick to batter the shit out of you when you least expect it.Some Tibetan Buddhists got real into edging like *really* into edging you could consider that too ig.
Unironically Schopenhauer
>>24713668*Adi Sankara
>>24712788Your true identity, which is described variously in sundry traditions as Tathagatagarbha, the Gound, the innate nature of Mind, Atman, your original mind etc, is nothing more than the immediate, spontaneously-present and unconditioned self-knowing awareness that is undivided, unfabricated, untainted, unchanging and which is without arising or ceasing.It is already enlightened or without ignorance without beginning, it is merely the mind possesed of ignorance which fails to realize this. Enlightenemnt consists of realizing the presence of this Awareness within oneself, realizing it's distinctiveness from the body and ordinary mind, and cutting through the false identification of taking oneself to be the body or mind instead of this Awareness. Habits and ignorant conceptions in connection with duality etc that are contrary to enlightenment naturally fall away as a consequences of takining this realization to completion. Once you attain this understanding one simply continues to abide in it and it eventually becomes effortless to do so.All the stuff about Anatta, Emptiness, mutual-interdependence, is just a means to an end, taking it as an end in itself is just allowing it to become intellectual baggage that stands in the way of enlightenment. Occasionally one sees online Buddhists wedded to their idea of Buddhism as a secular and empirical philosophy try to claim that all the stuff about Buddha nature is just a figerative way of speaking of peoples potential to realize emptiness and nothing more, that there is really no "true nature of mind" that is different from ordinary mind. Such "people" if they can be called that are barely-concealed materialists and are as far from enlightenment as possible. >All aspects of mind arise as the self-expression of awareness, but they are not awareness itself. Otherwise, what we call the distinction between ordinary mind and pure awareness would become a distinction between pure awareness and pure awareness!- Jigme Tenpe Nyima>Question: Through what expedients is it possible to trace back the radiance of one's sense-faculties in one thought and awaken to the self-nature?>Chinul: The self-nature is just your own mind. What other expedients do you need? If you ask for expedients to seek understanding, you are like a person who, because he does not see his own eyes, assumes that he has no eyes and decides to find some way to see. But since he does have eyes, how else is he supposed to see? If he realizes that in fact he has never lost his eyes, this is the same as seeing his eyes, and no longer would he waste his time trying to find a way to see. How then could he have any thoughts that he could not see? Your own numinous awareness is exactly the same. Since this awareness is your own mind, how else are you going to understand? If you seek some other way to understand, you will never understand. Simply by knowing that there is no other way to understand, you are seeing the nature.- Chinul
>>24712788Near death experience then use your new appreciation for the world and humans as a catapult. You'll feel it for 3ish yearsFeeling enlightened gets boring after a while but worth experiencing
>>24713820I wasn't quite near death but had many health issues over the last 4 months, one of which was close to being a deadly issue (almost developed meningitis which had me bedridden for 2 weeks).I didn't quite gain a new *appreciation* for life; it made me acutely aware that I was *wasting* it. Maybe that's a kind of appreciation but I started looking for a new job immediately upon returning to work
>>24713820I survived a heroin overdose last year but it didn't really lead me to appreciate life, all it did for me was remove the fear of death, so now the idea of suicide feels far more doable
>>24713668for Westerners, indeed
>>24713929Been there. Your brain is fucked up. Focus on the fundamentals.. sleep, nutrition, physical activity, sunshine, human interaction, work that doesn't make you want to kill yourself. Buy some good shoes, a good mattress, don't eat trash and don't let assholes into your life. Mitigate what you can't change and force a positive mindset. Fake it until you make it. Pretend you're an actor who's got the role of a healthy person if you have to. Also Christ, of course.. but I get the reservations one has in the 21st century.Also, as an aside, this board is Indian and Arab as hell now. No wonder Guenon gets posted incessantly. Makes you yearn for the days when that Japanese homo who hari kari'd himself and Tao Lin were the most pernicious figures posted here regularly.
Start with the Greeks.
>No wonder Guenon gets posted incessantlybasado
>>24712842now the big question i never understand about buddhists is that they correctly identify this aspect of reality, yet are utterly and completely opposed to simply just killing oneself. its like this ultimate form of nihilism is too frightening that you still attach yourself to the desire of having a "good" life by remaining alive, while still realizing everything is suffering and decaying. why is this the case? why doesn't buddhism embrace suicide?
>>24713976any ideology or religion that endorses suicide doesn't last very long. you give seekers an out and they'll often take it. there's probably been thousands of them that have faded into obscurity or been completely lost over time. also killing yourself is weak and gay, there's that.
>>24714010thats quite a big flaw, then. at least pessimist nihilist philosophers admit their cowardice to commit suicide or they just straight up commit suicide. from everything i see from buddhism, it seems to be, ironically, extremely attached to attachment as a religion and culture. why the fuck do concepts such as Brahmavihara matter at all its if all pointless rot anyway? just kill yourself no?
>>24714063your first mistake was expecting eastern mystic nonsense to be rational and defendable.
>>24714063why would you kill yourself if you've solved the problem of suffering?
>>24714164suffering is unsolvable, it can only be mitigated. one such way is pretending you can solve the problem of suffering.
>>24714202that may be true but within the religion the idea is that suffering is identified as the problem to be solved and the religion lays out the procedure for eliminating suffering and living in a state of bliss, so ostensibly the arahants and buddha enjoyed lives of bliss. they were not suffering because they had solved the suffering problem for themselves.
>>24714164because killing oneself is a, if not the, solution to suffering. the striving for your solution of suffering with things like the noble eightfold path leads to more suffering. seemingly atheistic nihilists like e.g. philipp mainlander and carlo michaelstaedter understood this
>>24714210it's true that you may continue to suffer while you seek enlightenment but you may also experience moments of bliss and happiness. to kill yourself immediately is a form of extremism. recognizing that suffering exists doesn't imply, oh I should kill myself then. it's simply a statement of the truth. so the question is how do we mitigate suffering. the goal, in Buddhism as it is Western traditions is the Middle Way, the Golden Mean or the path of moderation. suicide is as much an extremist position as hedonism.also Buddhism encourages compassion and monks play a pivotal role in teh life of a community. by collecting alms on a daily basis they are allowing the community to "make merit" even if that simply means being generous on a daily basis (if we assume atheistic materiality), which is important for both individual and community wellbeing.lay people who may otherwise be suicidal may also feel that they have obligations to family/friends and suicide is not ideal. so in most cases it's not the solution.
>>24713976As far as I understand the Buddhist/Hindu worldviews, suicide is not considered a solution because of reincarnation. Killing yourself accomplishes nothing besides sending you immediately into the next life-dream. Actually it is worse than doing nothing, because suicide is motivated by desire, so it sinks you even deeper into Samsara. The real path to Nirvana is that of absolute renunciation - not only of pleasure and possessions, but also of fear, anxiety, escapism, and all the desires we aim to satisfy by killing ourselves. Basically we have to let go not only of the desire to live, but also of the desire to die, because desire is still desire. I used to think reincarnation was a stupid dogma that was invented for specifically this reason, to avoid the logical consequences of the conviction that life is suffering. But after I thought about it more, I began to feel differently. Again, this is just what I think based on my small knowledge of those philosophies.
>>24712842Yes, Life is nhilist by any mean, When you come to think of it, We are born to experience tragedy and it's inevitable, Not experiencing tragedy is also a tragedy as you'll never feel life, It's hard to see heaven as something that exists because it's an escapism from life's tragedy into a muting of all senses and living in a "perfect" state of mind, but in that itself is taking god's position of living with a cosmic boredom until life rids itself and your subjects live a torment that you can't live since you're omnipotent..It's fun to not give a fuck about all of this trust me because you must be absurd as life doesn't treat seriousness as such
>>24713976>>24714304To express myself a little differently, I would say that Buddhism does aim for a kind of suicide, but it also argues that the common idea of suicide is really just an illusion in which you think you’re escaping Samsara while in reality you’re only digging yourself deeper into the hole. Nirvana is a kind of ultimate cosmic suicide. And it makes sense to me intuitively that the ultimate achievement, liberation from all suffering, is not something we can earn through suicide (which in many cases is just as cowardly and selfish as any other action) but instead is something we can earn only by going down the most difficult path imaginable. By conquering all desire we are conquering ourselves and effectively conquering the world, putting ourselves above the world and becoming independent of it. It wouldn’t make sense if something so glorious wasn’t extremely difficult to acquire. But I understand that now I’ve left reason behind and I’m just talking about my feelings. Take it as you will.
>>24714063Good point but when you deconstruct all meanings you realize Buddhism is just a man-made concept that is also made as a form of retribution against the fear of death, It's all a fear of the inevitable made with fancy concepts and words and followings and united consciousness against a meaning that our ancestors experienced, It's this fear from not continuing life, The existential fear that doomed us since acquiring consciousness through evolution, We are by far the luckiest and unluckiest beings as we have uncovered life yet still cannot decipher its meanings and gazing at everything unfold in front of us while we cannot do anything, It's not a tragedy it's a cosmic irony, I believe that God exists because a reality so flawed yet inconvenient can never be made out of the absurd no fucking way...Buddhism, Deism, Gnosticism.. Any bullshit that preaches isolation is just a fear from life
>>24714367>Any bullshit that preaches isolation is just a fear from lifeIf anything it's the ordinary man who is fearful. Living in buildings and walled cities, constantly seeking greater comfort and reassurance... ordinary life is the real escapism. A homeless ascetic who lives in the untamed wilderness and constantly examines and purifies his mind, hardly the vocation of someone "afraid of life."
>>24714401>Living in buildings and walled cities, constantly seeking greater comfort and reassuranceyeah, buddhists definitely do not have a culture of this at all...
>>24714497Tibetans are fake Buddhists. Their religin is basically just shamanism
>>24714401Both will die, Both use means of escape even if one lives in unity with the emptiness "Untamed wilderness" "examines and purifies his mind"That's a part of escapism
>>24713976>just put yourself in a different and shittier life bro! that will end samsara
>>24714721>samsaraBuddhists do not believe there is anything to reincarnate anyway
MCTB is a good starting place if you're serious about actually getting the job done
>>24714819You'll still have "your" memories and personality if you go to hell
>>24715282nope. not according to Buddhism.
>>24715304AN 3.36>‘Worthy man, did you not see the third messenger of the gods that appeared among human beings?’>They say, ‘I saw nothing, sir.’ >King Yama says to them, ‘Worthy man, did you not see among human beings a woman or a man, dead for one, two, or three days, bloated, livid, and festering>They say, ‘I saw that, sir.’>After grilling them about the third messenger of the gods, King Yama falls silent. The wardens of hell punish them with the five-fold crucifixion. They drive red-hot stakes through the hands and feet, and another in the middle of the chest. And there they suffer painful, sharp, severe, acute feelings—but they don’t die until that bad deed is eliminated. Not to mention the many accounts in the pettavuthu where petas recall the deeds that led to their punishment
>>24715383None of that is Buddhism.
>>24715383Taking everything literally in the suttas is just as bad as taking everything literally in the Bible.
>>24716795>everything literallyThen why read the suttas if none of it is true? The suttas repeatedly state that the denial of the existence of rebirth and spontaneously born beings is wrong view (albeit a less harmful kind of wrong view.) The buddha was not a reddit atheist>just as bad as taking everything literally in the Bible.No it is not lol, even if the tripitika is completely bullshit. Taking slaves, stoning people to death for grabbing sticks, and committing genocide is worse than telling people to stop drinking
>>24714327fuck off sartre
>>24717009>none of it is true?You have to read it with discernment. The core part of the teachings are the Buddha's beliefs. He was a philsopher, the "contemplative," as they described him. He didn't claim any kind of revelation and would not have had any access to these purported cosmologies. It's best to think of them as embellishments, in some cases "fan fiction" and in other cases outright efforts to obfuscate the true teachings for the sake of expediency. Ideas were very dangerous things in the past, after all, and philosophers who say things that go against the grain are playing with fire. This is why it was so important for the suttas to warn the monks to not espouse annihilation publicly, because the public (and more importantly, the rulers) believed it to be "evil." It had to be left to followers on their own to use their discernment to follow the logical argument and understand the consequence of anatta, etc. If you understand anatta properly, then you understand that there is nothing to incarnate or go on into any kind of afterlife.
>>24712788Every time I meditate for longer than 10 minutes I start crying. I don't meditate anymore.
