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Reminds me of Pema Chodron on hopelessness: > The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What
by jrochkind1 4y ago
Reminds me of Pema Chodron on hopelessness:
> The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.
> The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.
> In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
- ericmcer 4y agoIt is interesting how nihilism and existentialism rose as Christian faith diminished, and how they have so many parallels to Buddhism. Not sure if they were heavily influenced by it or if those ideas rose inevitably to fill the void that lost faith left behind.
- endorphine 4y agoYeah. It also seems to me that philosophers never got over nihilism. Nietzsche saw nihilism as the problem of the human condition after "God was dead", as something to be overcomed in order for humanity to reach to the next level. But this never materialized AFAICT, right?
- jrochkind1 4y agoI would like to think it may be a fundamental truth of the human condition, formalized/written in different times and places. The Stoics had it too, and that's pre-Christian. I suspect some Christians during the first two millenia of Christianity had it too, I don't think it's incompatible with Christianity (or "faith"!) of all historical sorts, but don't know enough about the history to say. (Update: Googling, some suggest Jesuit spirituality as being a Christian philosophy focused on non-attachment... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatian_spirituality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatian_spirituality)