metaphysics and philosophy

[allegro]

It's difficult talking to people about this because God as an institutional being is present in a lot of my family members life. I like to talk philosophy but it tends to make, for example, my sister very uncomfortable because she has never wanted to question her faith and it's what keeps her going in life... or else "what is all the suffering for?" Ugh, I feel bad but I wish my sister would just face that dark abyss which is kind of the fear of the absolute chaos and chance our world and lives are. And the fear of death being absolute nothingness- I personally think it's not absolute nothingness. My molecules are going to turn into something else, get eaten and processed and dispersed and the energy that keeps those molecules able to be transformed into something else that is ultimately ALIVE. So I'll continue living in some form, but the consciousness/ego that calls itself "I"- my memories and experience of my life probably won't stick around in any form whatsoever.

I've been studying Buddhism for a while (particularly Zen Buddhism) and especially meditation. There's this guy Dr. Mark Epstein who's a psychiatrist and also a Buddhist and he has a lot of great books:

In his teachings on suffering, the Buddha made clear that some kind of humiliation awaits us all. This is the truth that he felt could be apprehended by those with “little dust in their eyes.” No matter what we do, he taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency. We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disease. We are all engaged in a futile struggle to maintain ourselves in our own image. The crises in our lives inevitably reveal how impossible our attempts to control our destinies really are.
"Thoughts Without A Thinker" - Mark Epstein, M.D.

All worry about the self is vain. The ego is like a mirage and all the tribulations that touch it, will pass away. They will vanish like a nightmare when the sleeper awakes. He who has awakened is free from fear. He has become Buddha. He knows the vanity of all his cares, his ambitions and also of his pains.

- the Buddha

see this transcript for an interesting interview with Mark

Mark Epstein: I think actually in the Buddha's time there were beliefs in many other worlds, the culture in which the Buddha grew up believed in god realms and animal realms, spirit realms; but one of the Buddha's great contributions was that he taught people to focus on the here and now. He taught people to make use of this life, of this moment to awaken themselves instead of waiting for the next one, instead of propitiating the spirits in the other realms, you know, he taught a psychology that was centred on the experience of the individual, that was counter to the prevailing ideologies of the time, which were all about propitiating the gods, invoking the spirits, and making sacrifices to the other realms and so on.