Wouldn’t the end of suffering also mean the end of awareness? Thinking of it in Judeo/Christian terms—in the “spirit world” a third of the hosts of heaven are currently suffering—cast out. It seems as though the dream of eternal bliss is either undeliverable, or deception. It certainly fails any test of reason or logic when “souls” are suffering in the heavens as we speak.
The end of suffering would mean the end of awareness. One cannot experience bliss unless able to experience discomfort. In life (even afterlife) there would have to be darkness in order to comprehend the light. If eternal existence in the heavens is all bliss, it would mean there is no light or dark contrast to raise awareness. It would be the end of awareness, which awareness only happens if there is polarity. Yin, and yang, front, back, up, down, light, dark—life and death.
Imagine if it was all pure white forever and ever? No contrast. Bland. The only form of awareness is the awareness of form, the whole cloth—and it’s a two sided one.
When it’s lights out it is like a dreamless sleep where you never wake up. How would you know then you’ve been led with a carrot by controlling men who never, ever, have to show you results—ever?
Whatever one may think will happen, the awareness of existence is polarity—without it there would be nothing at all. In other words; life now, as you and your families live so beautifully, is the best game going in the universe. This is heaven—it is also hell. But when you break on through to the other side—resorption back into the cosmic whole. Think, where do chicken pox go after they’ve run their course?
Christian ego is a useful illusion to perpetuate a great game, for there truly could only be one “soul” and that is consciousness, the cosmic background of all existence of a single organism.
If there is life beyond mortal living it is in one, contradictory free thought process—meaning ultimately it is all one thing. And as Hindu philosophy has solved the problem of evil—everything that happens, happens to god, and it is everything—there is nothing that is not god. There are no victims here, no one to blame but its yearning to placate the boredom of infinite living.
If there were a Christian heaven, the most difficult, eternal task would then be; how to unremember all the friends and family that didn’t make it. The end of suffering? Oh no! Just the beginning…
TheCommonAtheist 
For the Buddhist, the end of suffering would come with the end of desire.
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The realization that you already have all that there is. Maybe then, the only real philosophical question would be wether to commit suicide or not—is the game worth the candle?
Maybe a second question—is it serious?
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It would be absurd to commit suicide.
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I agree. But Albert Camus may disagree with you.
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Camus agrees with me. In the myth of sisyphus, he says exactly this. Life is absurd and to continue to live is to revolt
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Dear Jim,
Judging by the content of the monochrome image at the end of your post, you are in danger of (type)casting us as Schrödinger’s cats!
Why should any of us be conscripted as your quantum superposition agents?
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Well, if there is a supernatural realm of any kind, there is only one right answer from this point of view. Stuck in the dimension I’m in. If reason takes one beyond his comfort zone he may find truth. There’s ultimately only one contradictory-free right answer, so how hard can it be?
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You obviosly have not yet been to 超自然, and since you have not been paying homage to SoundEalge’s eyrie for nine months, you are at risk of being yanked from your stucked dimension into another dimension in 超自然.
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Seems the trick would be finding pleasure in pain.
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Dear John,
Why should any of us be conscripted as your BDSM agents?
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Come down into my dungeon and find out… 🙂
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SoundEagle shall not be tricked by the surgeon in your dungeon.
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You are to refer to her as Master…
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No true Master can survive the sanctity of SoundEagle without proving their poetic prowess at https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/soundeagle-in-art-and-poetry/
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Interestingly, our reaction to stimuli is quite the learned behavior. We sponsored a Cambodian refugee family in the late 70’s. When the ten year old (Cheng Kiev) was injured, he shouted oy! Oy! That’s ouch where I come from.
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Re “One cannot experience bliss unless able to experience discomfort.” This kind of dualistic thinking is, well, bankrupt as it is not even close to being true. We do not need suffering to experience any other thing. Some people suffer all on their own for unknown reasons, it is one of the powers that people have, like being permanently unhappy or happy.
Like the claim that we cannot have good without evil, consider that many people (most in my experience) live lives without doing evil. Does this mean they can experience good or do good? Hardly. This is why the claim that God gave us free will is bogus as an offset to the Problem of Evil. God didn’t have to take away all of our free will to eliminate human sourced evil, he only needed to take away the Will to Do Evil. All of the other aspects of free will could still exist, in fact, this is how most of us live our lives now. Only by defining all sin as “evil” do these “theologians” make any sense at all but I hardly equate wearing garments of mixed fibers an evil act, do you?
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Try explaining to someone born blind what light, dark, or color is. It’s incomprehensible. In a state of endless bliss, it wouldn’t be bliss without something I compare it to. The elephant on the chain or the happy child in squalor come to mind.
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No, Camus would not disagree at all but shake Mak’s hand.
The myth of Sisyphus is the teacher here. Camus’ conclusion from the thought experiment is also worth noting: in the joyful acceptance of the hopeless struggle against defeat, the individual gains definition and identity and meaning. The final goal (getting that rock to stay at the top) is neither the point nor the important thing to obtain here. Living well is. Life and living well – as absurd as it may appear to be with death awaiting all – is in the process. Sisyphus’ life is in the struggle to roll that rock: that’s what defines his life. Only the rejection of the this lesson produces hopelessness from the absurdity and the rationale for suicide. Thinking life is hopeless/absurd because it ends in death is the defeat of life, the defeat of being able to learn how to live well and wisely.
The same is true for suffering as explained by the creation myth (abducted and then abused not once but twice for Genesis). It teaches us that suffering is an essential ingredient in and for an authentic life, a real life, a life worth living, no matter how much we may be able to mitigate some of its effects, that suffering is a biological fact which requires acceptance in order to live fully. These myths point out a deeper human truth, that we must learn how to fully embrace our own lives even with this mandatory passenger if we wish to live and own our authentic lives.
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I do not suffer in the life. I feel rotten occasionally, but, suffer, no. That is not in my experience.
As for life after dying, who says life can only be bliss or suffering. That makes no sense whatsoever. Even nirvana makes no sense. But then, in my cosmos, total death makes no sense either.
Rather than the word suffer, I would use the word struggle. I struggle, at times, because sometimes I want to accomplish things. Accomplishment is a struggle. During those times I have no need to accomplish, during those times I do not struggle, I merely live.
Do you know the George Harrison song, The Art of Dying? In this song Mr. Harrison struggles with living. He has seen his absolute destination, the state of life he calls “lord,” and he yearns to be there, but life, that period before death, separates him from his goal. “I really want to see you, I really want to be with you!” This is what he wants to accomplish, where he wants to go.. But he must wait till he dies. That waiting is a struggle.
I have felt that exact same way occasionally since my LSD-assisted Near Death Experiences when I was 19 years old. Now I am 71. These last 52 years could have been a struggle, but mostly they have not been. I am using the time to better myself as a person, to understand the intricacies of being alive. If I had decided to just keep on waiting for death to reveal it’s secrets, that would have been a struggle. I no longer wait for death. I am not anticipating bliss, nor suffering. I live proactively now. And I am better for it.
This I will add: if life ceases with death, which I doubt, I will not know I wasted my life trying. But if there is life after death, I will know I did not waste my life living.
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your concept of awareness wrong. awareness is not something you ‘have’, it’s not inside your body. everything occurs within awareness: are you not aware of your body? are you not aware of your thoughts? your feelings? that’s because your body is within awareness, your thoughts rise and are perceived within awareness. there can be no experience outside awareness.
awareness is like a ‘space’, everything is experienced in this space. it is the background of all possible experience. like space, it doesn’t care if the experience is good, bad, painful, joyful, beautiful or morbid. space accepts all, non-judgementally. it doesn’t care, because it isn’t affected by it in any way. also, this space is the same in one building (container) as in all other buildings. can empty space be different than other empty space? no. you can populate that space with diff furniture, but the space is always the same.
as long as you take yourself to be ‘inside’ the body, as a ‘person’, some ‘entity’, there will be a sense of separation. that is the illusion. the body, the thoughts, the emotions, feelings arise in YOU. you Are that space, the pure awareness. the witness. unchanging, undying, infinite.
get rid of this idea “I am in the body”, it is poison! and keep in mind the thought “I am the consciousness”. it’s your mantra. let that sink in your bones.
you are not this, or that. remember, nothing can define the real you. you are That in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ is experienced. don’t ever let that go out of mind.
you feel anger? observe the anger, you feel happy, observe the happy. develop an attitude of witness. no judgment, just observe what occurs. you will soon feel there is a space about you that is unmoving, and all else comes and goes like a movie. place your anchor there.
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other words are used synonymously with awareness: presence, being, consciousness. use the one that resonates for you. you’ll feel great expansion and peace just saying the word in your mind.
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You could substitute any word you want here and it works the same. May I suggest, “Tortilla.”
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Wouldn’t be prudent as I’d end up being accused of cultural appropriation.
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go ahead and amusez vous, Monsieur Scientifique! you might be calling Jim on your death bed to ask him “what was that crazy chick saying again?”😆
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Muddying the meaning of descriptive words (as if that increases their depth) to magically transpose them into objects and nouns is a word game. Games can be fun. So you can use any descriptive word you want and produce the same conclusions. That demonstrates a problem with the methodology you’re using. That matters because it means this method does not produce insight into reality as you are presenting it. In other words, the danger here is using a method that can and does fool people all the time. And we are the easiest people to fool because we want to believe something is the case. That’s why we use these kinds of unreliable methods, to fool ourselves into thinking we have arrived at a conclusion we want but independently of our desire to believe a preferred conclusion. So the question to always ask yourself is, “Is this claim true and how might I KNOW?” Once you introduce knowing into the method as an essential ingredient, you have to put aside any methods that are not knowledge-based, meaning adduced from reality FIRST. This is the heart of critical thinking.
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The thing is that “you” are inside your body; or more specifically, your conscious awareness can be traced directly to the neurochemical reactions occurring within your brain. Thus your consciousness is entirely dependent on your continued physiological well-being. When your body dies or your brain is severely injured, “you” effectively cease to exist.
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show me the evidence, please! 😁 until then, this is only a belief, no better than religious belief.
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I don’t need to show you. Just drive down to your local nursing home or brain trauma center and ask the patients’ doctors, nurses and relatives how Alzheimer’s, dementia and severe brain injury has affected the personalities or their loved ones.
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So are the normal perceptions and imaginations of a healthy brain “wrong” or a natural development of evolution? It seems unlikely we would evolve to perceive things that are unreal.
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Evolution is not a directed process. It’s about being able to survive long enough to reproduce and pass on your traits. If a tsunami hits and the village idiot survives to pass on his gene while the village scientist perishes, them’s the breaks. 🙂
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the Tibetan Book of the Dead remains one of greatest masterpieces of world literature- it describes the journey the consciousness takes in the afterlife. this 45 min movie, narrated by Leonard Cohen, is a beautiful and compassionate representation of that. i highly recommend it, if you have the patience and curiosity
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of course, the brain is damaged. the body and brain will die. but you are not the brain, nor in the brain. is all i’m saying.
and this is what all the greatest meditations masters have found and said for thousands of years. i’m not making it up. not the body, not the mind😊
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“where do chicken pox go after they’ve run their course?”
Medical experts claim they lay dormant and reappear as shingles in old age.
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So too, you will reappear. I knew we’d agree on this.
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The pursuit of pleasure and the elimination of suffering, in many ways seems to be the modern consumerist project. It resonates of course with Huxley’s Brave New World where there is pleasure at the cost of conformity
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