>tfw delved too deep into buddhist concepts >plus have depersonalization disorder which makes me see these concepts very clearly since without the feeling of "self" they are easy to see
I wish I never seen it, I wish I never researched it, I wish I could go back. It's like I've seen how the magician does his tricks and I don't care for it anymore, the magic is lost. I feel like killing myself I don't see a reason to live, what's even the point? I'm just so apathetic I wish I didn't exist I hate the burden of existing.
I'd rather be a "suffering" normie than these "enlightened" people, what a boring way to live. If there's a god, if there's intelligence behind this world then there's no way you're just supposed to stop doing things, this world would have been made for us to enjoy as a human being, as a being that is captured by the illusion, that's the only thing that makes sense otherwise why would god make it? Now you may say there is no god and you might be right but I personally don't agree I think there is an intelligence behind everything and it didn't really intend for us to stop desires and ego etc. I feel like the illusion was the whole point in the first place. Buddhists have it wrong, they are denying life, but still once you've seen through it how can you go back?
Brody Miller
It sounds like you misunderstood something. The dharma is like a poisonous snake, or a blade of sharp grass; if wrongly grasped, it can harm you. The dharma is also something that doesn't live in the intellect, which is why you have to practice the entire eightfold path rather than just intellectualizing it
Adam Garcia
>there's no way you're just supposed to stop doing things Precisely. I have no idea if my concepts of buddhism are anything close to how it should all be so take this with a grain of salt: I think that tree the Buddha was sitting under rubbed off on him a little bit and helped him come to terms with mindfulness and living in the moment
Luke Cox
I think you misunderstand buddhism. They are not denying life, but understanding it. The same concept exists in almost every major religion. For example in the Abrahamic religions with the concept of original sin. The basic formula goes like this: 1. There is suffering inherent to Being 2. This suffering is caused by desire (or sin nature) 3. Therefore if you eliminate the desire (or sin nature), you can reduce unneccessary suffering 4. Therefore you should live a moral and self disciplined life. The concept is a way of living life more fully, and living a better life, not the negation or "denying" of life. To deny the root cause of human suffering is not the same as denying life, but to produce a fullness of life, uninhibited by selfish desire.
Jaxson Rogers
So say the buddhists, but I don't believe they have it right.
I believe the point of life is to live a normal life in the illusion but breaking out is also something you can do, though I think it's a negative thing and not the main intention behind reality, it's just one of the many paths of life.
God intended for all experiences, it has to be this, otherwise why isn't existence just endless bliss anyway? Why must you first achieve enlightenment? It makes no sense. Unless there is no god which would suck because I want someone to answer for this shit
Leo Barnes
But isn't desire what drives humans in this world?
Without it you would sit there and do nothing, that is life denying. No stories would be told, no art would be made, nothing would be done and life takes a very bland turn. Maybe you feel calm but fuck that shit, why wouldn't you want to live a life of desire?
Ethan Anderson
I think that Buddhism only sets out to show people the way to end suffering. It doesn't say that you "should" do that, and in fact they say that the enlightened person is as if on a field stretching in all directions, as opposed to being on a path. You can still have enjoyment, lots of pleasure - it's just that until your mind is pure, those pleasures will make you more greedy and unsatisfied, even if you get unlimited things. And many people aren't capable of becoming enlightened anyway. It's just that nobody actually wants to suffer, unless they're delusional
What is the point of stories and art though, it's it a way to cope with suffering?
Noah Kelly
This is partly true. In Judaism this is understood as the "yetzer hara" or "evil inclination". It's basically the natural impusles or desires of the body that without which we would cease to exist as a species. For example the sexual desire to reproduce, the desire to eat food, but also the desire to do things like pursue a career or create art. These all fall under "legitimate" uses of that desire, but it is also possible to twist the use of it in ways that lead to suffering and destruction. An immoderate or inordinate use of this desire leads to things which are almost universally abhorrent such as theft, rape, murder, adultery, drunkeness and so on. So the "noble path" of Buddhism or other religious "moral law" has in mind not merely the inner calm of a person (though this may be a byproduct) but mainly the proper way that one should live a life in order to maximize good (distinct from simple pleasure) and minimize evil and suffering.
Elijah Stewart
This is exactly what happened to be, started looking into Buddhist concepts while I had a weed problem and it fucked my head completely. I haven't touched reality or real emotion since. I don't hallucinate, I see and hear the same shit everyone else does but none of it is real life anymore. It happened when I was 22, I'm 26 now and haven't smoked weed since then.
William Garcia
NOT SELF IS NOT NO SELF
Aiden Nguyen
>God intended for all experiences I get what you’re conveying though I’m not sure it fully encompasses the whole of it. Denying your agency in it all is to deny the inherit divinity of your being.
Chase Ramirez
You've way misinterpreted. And mostly I think you're being edgy. "I read about something I think is obscure for smart enlightened people but for me it's like really easy to get because my brain is special. I'm a tortured genius. Woe is me"
Thats the part you're playing. Stoppit.
James Jones
Does OP have buddha-nature? Mu.
Leo James
Not at all
Depersonalization just made it undeniable to me, that's the point I was making, I can't go back. Not saying I'm smart at all.
Xavier Barnes
>What is the point of stories and art though, it's it a way to cope with suffering?
All the experiences of life make up a richness which is far more enjoyable to god than simply "non-suffering"
Robert Evans
I didn't misinterpret it, I just don't agree with it.
You can sit under a tree if you want but I'd rather exist with love and meaning in my life.
Jeremiah Perry
I think the point is that he he eventually stood up from under that tree, gave it his gratitude for providing shelter, and went on with his life from there.
Caleb Hernandez
The reason he got up from the tree was to share what he had learned with other people, to selflessly serve others. If that isn't love and meaning, then what is?
Hunter Nguyen
Yeah but I believe the whole point is to be fooled.
Plus it's not like I know how to reach enlightenment hardly anybody gets there, so now I'm stuck in this limbo mode and it really sucks, that's why I wish I could just be a normie again
Luke Williams
>I believe the whole point is to be fooled. Could you elaborate on this? What I think you're saying is that in order to enjoy life you have to fool yourself into being unconscious where you were previously made conscious. If that's the case I disagree, the solution is not to return to unconsciousness but to achieve a transcendent consciousness (aka more consciousness, not less). >now I'm stuck in this limbo mode This applies to almost everyone after they become an adult (children don't have the same acute degree of awareness that adults have). That's why there is a "path" to enlightenment, not a teleportation to it.
Bentley Roberts
You should research and practice CBT. If you're into Buddhist concepts you should know that thoughts can be seen and isolated and dissipated. Well, here's the thing. The sensations of depersonalization and the feeling of the illusion having been pulled away are just thoughts as well, they are particularly strong thoughts because they are rooted more directly in your experience than a passing memory or observation (which you will be more used to dealing with). Right now you are fixated on your moment to moment, day to day experience which suddenly feels very strange to you, you have "come awake" in what feels like a very upside down way, and like you say, you want to go back. The bad(?) news is that you can never go back, do you think an infant isn't terrified the moment it comes out of the womb? The good news is the cure is VERY simple, if you allow it to be: 1. Whenever a thought, panic, sensation or anything related directly to the despair if your experience manifests and/or comes to the front of your mind, first remind yourself "it's just a thought". 2. Immediately redirect your attention to a task, any task, you will have your best progress on this while at work because you can always return to the task at hand, but as you get better at it you can learn how to activate the really task driven level of your brain. 3. If you are disciplined in this you will slowly reintegrate your experience to the wavelength you used to know, with the knowledge of where you were still with you.
>t. had a terrible salvia trip, a mental breakdown at my work, saw life through a lens for 6 months, had no bearing or resonance with any of the real world, saw a doctor, saw a psychologist, worked methodically back to my healthy state on my own
Jayden Smith
I remember my first trip on 250 micrograms too.
John Long
As an afterthought you should research some of what Joseph Goldstein has to say. He likens the wandering mind to a child in one lecture and explains how easy it really is to redirect it, just a gentle shift in attention.
Hunter Murphy
>Yeah but I believe the whole point is to be fooled. I don’t think being blinded to the truth is the whole point. Rising above it is.
In Judeo-Christianity the original sin of eating the forbidden fruit that gave us knowledge of good and evil sort of encapsulates that very notion. It’s too late now to undo that knowledge, you can only fool yourself or rise above it.
It really is difficult to achieve mindfulness while avoiding ignorance, the practice and teachings of buddhism are important in conveying that it is not impossible!
Alexander Barnes
>this whole thread
Did you skip the part about Middle Path or were the two pages of the book you were reading glued shut together or what
>[...]these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.
To put it into modern terms: you should totally play video games and smoke weed and jerk off to hentai and whatever else you enjoy in life - as long as you don't get addicted to those things and/or they don't impact you negatively.
One of the biggest and most common misconceptions is that Buddhists all have to live like Monks and only eat plain oatmeal and white rice and can't have fun or desire anything or own material possessions and whatever. That's not true. Desire is fine as long as you control, desire is actually good when harnessed properly. Only monks live like monks, and even then a lot of monks don't live like monks.
>you should totally play video games and smoke weed and jerk off to hentai and whatever else you enjoy in life - as long as you don't get addicted to those things and/or they don't impact you negatively. In what context is smoking weed and jerking off to hentai not harmful? That's pretty much definitionally indulgence to sense-pleasures which tends towards addiction (psychological, not physical), and erodes self control.
read some life-affirming philosophy instead to get the other side of the stick
read some spinoza and nietzsche; ethics from spinoza and the gay science from nietzsche
see how they workout for you. nietzsche in particular was an ardent critic of buddhism for the exact reason that you seem to be in despair over, so he might be your best shot
William Sanders
>tends towards addiction >tends
key word there, and even then you're pushing it. Also you conveniently left out the part about video games even though video games are BY DESIGN meant to be addictive?
Anything can be addictive, you can eat a candy bar one day and that leads you to becoming one of those 500 lbs fatties. You can open one loot crate in a video game and a few years later be thousands of dollars in debt. A good Buddhist - or a good person in general - knows when to say "well that was fun but that was enough I have other things to do"
The point of becoming a Buddhist is to live in the world full of desires and to be in control of those desires. Running away from desires and hiding from them is to live in a world of illusion in its own right.
Josiah Fisher
I still disagree. There are legitimate uses for media such as movies, books and video games that are beyond simple addictive pleasure. Desiring sexual pleasure for the sake of sexual pleasure or smoking weed just because it feels good are selfish ends. They are meaningless desires for the sake of desire. Food can be pleasant and it can be addictive, but there is a legitimate "good" use of food, and the same applies to procreational sex. I don't think that it is necessarily good to eliminate all desires, but rather to transcend desire, so that you base your decisions about how to live on what produces good rather than what produces pleasure. You make it sound as though the goal of Buddhism is to make people hedonists.
Elijah Johnson
>There are legitimate uses for media such as movies, books and video games that are beyond simple addictive pleasure.
No. It's entertainment. aka addictive pleasure, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as you don't let yourself get addicted.
>You make it sound as though the goal of Buddhism is to make people hedonists.
Absolutely not. Going back to your other post, >indulgence erodes self-control self-control only exists in situations where self-control can be practiced.
If you have a piece of cake even though it's not your birthday or whatever, that's fine. Nutritionally speaking, cake is next to poison but it makes people happy. Self-control is being "that was a great cake but good gosh there's no way I can eat more than one or two pieces"
Same with alcohol or whatever, self-control is enjoying yourself and your drink and the company of others at a bar or at dinner or whatever and knowing when you've had enough. Self-control is not avoiding all alcohol forever because you think one glass of wine with dinner is going to turn you into an alcoholic.
>live on what produces good rather than what produces pleasure Pleasure is not suffering. Unchecked desire is suffering.
I don't know how else to explain this really.... video games?
You're playing an online video game, obviously your desire is to win, but in this instance you don't win.
Buddhism is accepting the loss and to learn from it and to appreciate the other players' skills and to be thankful that people on your team were trying their best. To give into your desires in that context is to be one of those people who shoves their head through a wall and throws their controller through a glass window and to send angry messages to everyone in the match because they didn't win the video game.
Pleasure is fine, desires are fine. Letting them rule your life is not.
Jayden King
Why would you pursue a desire that has no benefit to pursuing it other than providing self indulgent pleasure? The only reason you are pursuing them is because you are already the slave of desire. What other reason could there be? The purpose of life is to avoid the very meaninglessness that these desires bring, which causes undue suffering. I would only use alcohol to the extent that there is a medicinal benefit toward doing so. Why do anything at all, if no good comes of it? Not sure how you can say that all media is entertainment, I suppose you've never read an educational book, watched a documentary, or played a simulation game. I think we have come to a point where we simply disagree on the matter.
Liam Brown
>Why would you pursue a desire that has no benefit to pursuing it other than providing self indulgent pleasure?
Because it lets you practice self-control - which is the whole point of the middle path.
>The only reason you are pursuing them is because you are already the slave of desire. That's not what being a slave to something is, and even your term "pursue" is biased loaded language.
>Not sure how you can say that all media is entertainment, I suppose you've never read an educational book, watched a documentary, or played a simulation game. Those exist but they make up a minority of media as a whole, and even then those forms of media aren't inherently good either there's plenty of documentaries and books that are full of distorted facts or flat-out lies that only serve to fuel people's anger and ignorance and prejudices. That's besides the point though.
Kevin Price
This user is correct. If shooting from the hip a bit. Desire is the enemy of inner peace. Life without desire is not for everyone. Life without pleasure is awful. Pleasure and inner peace get along like fast friends.
OP And you too, if you're not OP. You've got the wrong idea about desire. I lived a life of inner peace and free from desire for years until I chose the path of desire. When I had no desire I still did things, ate good food, had fun with friends, and all sorts of things. I ate because I was hungry. I obtained good food because I could. I enjoyed pleasure because it made happy. I went out with friends because they invited me and we enjoy each others company. When the power went out and I had to sit and sweat in the dark, that was okay too.
You may not understand as much as you think you do. That is not an attack or judgement, but as an encouragement to continue to question what you think you know. >. I haven't touched reality or real emotion since. This seems like the core issue that OP is wrestling with. My advice would be to find an anchor. Figure out the one thing in existence that is most important to you and focus on that. When everything you encounter is seen in terms of its relation to what is important, they become much more real and "distracting".
And I completely understand the idea that the universe was created to be enjoyed. It's the path I agree with. I hope you enjoy yours.
David Turner
I'm not OP
Elijah Hughes
Not that person. While the Buddha said that monks should abstain from going to music/dance performances, and I agree that most media is made to reinforce or increase sensual desires, I think that media can also in many cases help people expose their own suffering by providing them with new experiences that can help balance the mind when it's wandered off, or characters in media/friends you play video games with/seeing creativity in general can evoke goodwill and compassion, and decrease the rumination on ideas about yourself that might otherwise be doing. As you seem to be saying, the middle path is about using your own discernment to know how much and what kind of effort you need to apply.
Jacob Myers
There's a point where you can't go back, but don't kill yourself.. It's a bummer no matter how irrelevant/ abstract life is. Just because our emotions are chemical reactions doesn't mean you are above them. Go be a normalfag that exercises and has a girlfriend and talks about tv like a retard
Ethan Watson
I like this guy on youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=ydjItioz7jI He kind of seems like a Christian that learned a lot from eastern teachings and integrated it with his own beliefs. Might be helpful for people here because of his Christian origins.
