Neuroborean
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2020
- Messages
- 1,504
IMO you're quite wrong about the religions you're talking about, you have a Nietzschean/luciferian-like POV about religions... I'll be clear about it:I find Buddhism to be a very dangerous philosophy, because similar to christianity, it is an anti-cosmic religion that associates life with suffering and the world to be something that must be escaped. YOU are here for a reason and that is NOT to learn some lesson and then piss off from this "lowly" realm of "agony" into some ethereal pleroma. The truth is that YOU are here to participate in the world and enjoy it. Think of life as a participatory game, or a sandbox, rather than a place full of limitations and suffering. Simply reframe your perception of life and soon life itself will change. Ideas like Buddhism, Gnosticism, Nihilism, etc. won't help you in preventing suicidal thoughts, because they alienate you from the world around you. Gaslighting people into believing that the world is an illusion is an excellent tool to make them give up on life, isolate themselves from what is happening around them and leave the playing field to power hungry tyrants who want the least amount of resistance from the population.
If you want a philosophy then I suggest you look into pantheism, more specifically material pantheism (the notion that god(s) and all things spiritual are not transcendent or seperate from the world but actually immanent in it).
EDIT: just to prevent misunderstandings, I did not shit on Buddhism as a whole. It has some valuable teachings to live by, but this whole life=suffering idea is very unhealthy and detrimental to a fulfilled life in my opinion. And before some triggered buddhist says that I have no idea of what I'm talking about: I have read the Pali Canon from start to finish and Buddha's teachings basically boil down to that equation...
People like you tend to forget so many thing about the world, specially the historic context and the basic human nature during millenia.
Life on Earth is and always have been hard and full of suffering, the fact that you have lived a relatively easy life (a life without much suffering and pain is unusual in terms of what millions of people live everyday) doesn't mean that billions of people didn't live that during millenia and still today. Go to some country in war, and stay there for months, you surely come back different.
When people go to places like poor places of India, some people vomit, because what they see it's overwhelming, then they realize that so many people there is loving, full of warm personal qualities, they share whatever they have... and they are not suicidal at all. Most of those people is religious.
Religion was created to create another type of relation with suffering, specifically buddhism tells something that it's a basic truth: if you attach to something, you become idolatric and then you suffer, because the world is a flow, nothing remains. The central concept of Buddhism is attachment and dharma, not suffering.
Most Buddhist can enjoy life, but.. without attachment, there's nothing bad in the world, because nothing it's inherently bad, only attachment, because it leads to suffering. They don't say: "don't enjoy eating that fruit, keep your senses off, because it's pleasurable", they say instead: "enjoy it while it last, but don't expect it to last more than it really last, all passes"
Christianism is not necessarily institutionalized christianism, otherwise it would be an evolving doctrine because the Church doctrine has changed overtime so much, and there's thousands of different perspectives about the Bible and about what Christ said. It's more like the positive egregor and all of what it has been done in history actually according the words and ethic message in the new testament.
Again, considering that Christianism centers everything on suffering is just a cliché of those who never got close to the Bible or Christ. Is just like those who talk negatively about communism but have never read The Capital or the Communist Manifesto.
Considering that the context of christianism was a completely fucked up context on which jews were more or less slaves... then you understand that the message of Jesus was not really about suffering or overcoming suffering, but was more like wining the enemy doing the exact opposite that they were doing, loving instead of hating, uniting instead of separating... and so on. The idea of "common good", universal respect and love between races and cultures, was born there.
Initially that was the message, the fact that the Church did this or that in the name of God it's obviously a mistake and was violently misguided, but the message was clear, and the genuinely spiritual people who follow that religions knows that.
Now, the idea of sacrifice..
normally those who are completely self-absorbed, ego-driven and full of resentment, like Nietsche was (and consider that I've read and re-read thousands of pages of him, including the unpublished notes of his diaries), those think the idea of sacrifice is some kind of self-loathing act of giving yourself in the name of something that it's not you, so it's like denying yourself, and denying your own will just to please whatever else (like God). That's a very fucked up misunderstanding. The problem with those ego-driven philosophies fail in the same point: they think there's nothing higher than themselves.
Those philosophies or religions of what I call inner trascendence fail to see something crucial: the religions of outer trascendence don't deny inner trascendence and their personal value, they just understand that there's values, powers and realities that we cannot reach directly and their clearly above our personal will.
That means that there's a possibility of beings above whatever we could become, ever. I mean, imagine that science discovers that there's different dimensions and there are beings (like for example DMT entities) that are infinitely more powerful and creative that we could ever imagine and become (even with millenia of transhumanism). Practically those beings could be "gods", but that gods are not what abrahamic God is... not at all. Abrahamic God reaches a similar realization that hinduism mysticism: Being must be infinite, self-driven, ever conscious and creator, and probably some qualities that we cannot even grasp.
Yes, we have also that qualities but in a limited amount, and whatever it happens during history we'll never be God, because we are not everything. This could be seen in a semi-pantheistic POV but it's not necessary, panentheistim is more accurate. It would be pointless to discuss about which type of "aspect" or person-like qualities God has, because it must be all and beyond, all and beyond it's all we can think about, it's negative theology.
This is where the idea of sacrifice and love comes handy, what Christ taught is that what leads to the world of God is love, and in a way love is sacrifice. Why? because when you forget about your own ego-driven desires, you trascend yourself becoming a channel of love, trascending our self-driven animal or spiritual wishes. A rock it's not as close to God because it cannot think about anything but to being passive, an animal can love their offspring, it has some qualities of conscience, but limited. A human being that it's closer to God is a human being that is closer to love and more specifically universal love that trascends their own interests and progeny. Science is not something that should alienate us away from God, on the opposite, it's a little glimpse into what God is, because it shows the rules, the rational and (beyond-rational) complexity that everything has in an abstract way, those invisible forces are just a glimpse (what our human filter can filter about the "reality"). Ending with this, love exists without sacrifice but often sacrifice is a part of love, because it means that you are able to give life a reason that it's beyond yourself, transcending yourself, into a higher creative nexus of love. I guess you know what I mean. It's not like you need to deny yourself for loving, it means that if that needs to happen, it's perfectly ok, because you know that as being part of God and the universe, our limited/finite existence is just a glimpse of what we could be. I think that this doesn't need a promise of heaven or hell to be real, but I understand that it makes sense because if justice cannot be a reality here, it must be somewhere else, if there's people creating wars and human sacrifices, pain of millions just because s/he feels good that way, then that being must be put in their places, somewhere, sometime. In my opinion that idea of sacrifice shouldn't mean to suffer that because of the promise, on the other way, it must mean that one should not be a coward and one must fight, even sacrificing themselves, to create a world of love here, giving some reason to suffering: transcending it via giving yourself for higher values and ethics. Loving your enemy means understanding that they are wrong but they could be right, if they realized how wrong they are.
World has obviously full of good qualities and potentials (specially nowadays in 1st world countries) but suffering has been a problem for millenia and still is, ending world suffering it's not only accepting suffering as it is (like stoicism or some christian interpretation) but also transcending our own desires trying to build a better world for everyone.