Meaning of life

[AshvinP]

...

I want to also add another consideration here. As it happens, I Just came across this passage after my last comment.

The Mysteries of Hibernia, the Irish Mysteries, were in existence for a long time. They were still there at the time of the foundation of Christianity... Let me give you a picture of the experiences of a person who was initiated into the Irish Mysteries. Before he was able to receive the initiation he had to be strictly prepared; the preparation that had to be undergone before entering the Mysteries was always in those times of extraordinary strictness and rigour. The important thing in the Hibernian Mysteries was that the pupil should learn to become aware in powerful inward experience ofthat which is illusory in his environment, — in all the things, that is to say, to which man attributes being on the ground of his sense-perception. Then he was made aware of all the difficulties and obstacles which meet man when he searches after the truth, the real truth. And he was shown how, fundamentally, everything which surrounds us in the world of the senses is an illusion, that what the senses give is illusion, and that the truth conceals itself behind the illusion, so that in fact true being is not accessible to man through sense-perception.

Now, very likely you will say that this conviction you yourselves have held for a long time; you know this quite well. But all the knowledge a man can have in the present-day consciousness of the illusory character of the sense-world is as nothing compared with the inner shattering, the inner tragedy that men of that time suffered in their preparation for the Hibernian initiation. For when one says theoretically in this way: Everything is Maya, everything is illusion, — one takes it quite lightly! But the training of the Hibernian pupils was carried to such a point that they had to say to themselves: There is for man no possibility of penetrating the illusion and coming to real true Being.

The pupils were by this means trained to content themselves, as it were in desperation, with the illusion. They came into an attitude of despair: the illusory character, they felt, is so overpowering and so penetrating that one can never get beyond it. And in the life of these pupils we find always the feeling: Very well then, we must remain in the illusion. That means, however: we must lose the very ground from under our feet. For there is no standing firm on illusion! In truth, my dear friends, of the strictness and severity of the preparation in the ancient Mysteries, we to-day can scarcely form any idea. Men shrink in terror before what inner development actually demands.

Such was the experience that came to the pupils in regard to Being and its illusory character. And now there awaited them a similar experience regarding the search after Truth. They learned to know the hindrances man has in his emotions that hinder him from coming to truth, all the dark and overwhelming feelings that trouble the clear light of knowledge. And so once more they came to a great moment when they said to themselves: If Truth is not, well then we live — we must live — in error, in untruth. For a man to come thus to a time in his life when he despairs of Being and of Truth means, in short, that he tears out of him his own humanity.

All this was given in order that the human being, through experiencing the opposite of what he was finally to reach as his goal, might approach that goal with the right and deep human feeling. For unless one has learned what it means to live with error and illusion, then one cannot value Being and Truth. And the pupils of Hibernia had to learn to value Being and Truth.

So you see, the understanding of nothingness, in the way you are also conveying it here, has been around for many millennia. It is an extremely important insight to have. Your insight via depressive states can be very valuable in the path to spiritual freedom, IF you don't stop reasoning there or endeavoring to accumulate more experience. The experience of nothingness, the futility of reaching truth through sense experience, had never existed as an end-in-itself until the modern age, when practically everything, every conceptual system and every state of being, came to be considered the full and final expression of Truth and Being. This includes the state of "Being is illusion and we need to stop seeking after it." It is simply the flip side of the same coin, a polarization to the Nouth instead of South pole.

[Freefrommainstream]

You seemingly are tryin go to clean up claims such as ‘beam away the world’ and getting rid of desires-claims or goals no one is claiming, at least not here in these forums.

No one is claiming this, you are right. By the way I never said "beam away the world" this sentence sound a little bit new agey if you ask me. With "beam yourself away" I meant that you should get rid of being, being is associated with the material, the material is senseless, so you need to forget your human experience and dissolve your ego(* not fully because it is impossible in the material world*).

Again, my question is Who is proposing such nonsense? It seems a bit 'strawmanny'.

Ok if you really want a discussion or understand what I mean then you should read my book which I will post in some months. I understand that this philosophy sounds like complete woo bullshit nonsense but it is not, (I think that now, maybe it is)I am open minded and if someone really defeats my arguments then I will rethink my philosophy. In the end it is just a CONCEPT, so I never really meant that you should completely dissolve yourself in the material world, it is impossible. Maybe it is just me who seeks nothingness and wants to not be anymore and maybe it is just me who wishes nothing ever existed.....

[Freefrommainstream]

I describe the topic of mystical desire in my book. Aslong we are in the physical world we will never be able to escape from the physical trap, we need desires and we need our ego in this world. But think about this quote from my book " we are born and have no choice other than thinking this world is our reality, after we die we will still think that, we know nothing other than this world, we are bound to it, this is why we reincarnate. Escaping this reality will lead us into this reality another time. We can not imagine something other than this, because every imagination is associated with this world. The only solution to this is to never imagine, to never be and never think after you died. Forget and never remind yourself of forgetting. Being is the start of every endless cycle."
"On infinity and life"

Hi FFMS.

What would be one's motivation to do what you suggest? I mean that in the following sense:

You die and you forget. All links with this world are severed. There's no more any self, there's no thought, no memory. From the perspective of the Earthly self the situation is as the materialists imagines it - all existence (for the ego) ceases. And it ceases indeed, because whatever the liberated state after death is, there's no longer any consciousness of how that state has been reached. There's no knowledge that a conscious perspective was formerly going through reincarnation cycles and in the last cycle it made up its mind to forget everything after death. For the liberated state it doesn't make any difference if it has always existed in that (liberated) state or it has spent gazillion incarnations of suffering. In order to make any difference, the liberated state must retain some form of consciousness of the past states including of the fact that these former states have been experienced through the perspective of a very particular self. But this in itself would mean that the liberated state still has some form of identity. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to relate to some particular incarnational identity, from which it feels it has been liberated. There must be something in the liberated state which knows that it broke free from this and not that incarnational cycle. But from the way you describe it, it seems you suggest that in the liberated state there's no link whatsoever to any past incarnational progression.

The situation is similarly indeterminate from the perspective of the incarnational identity. The striving for liberation is peculiar because from the ego's perspective it is never attained. It's like approaching the event horizon of a black hole - one approaches it but there can never be the experience of crossing it (because of what was explained above - if we cross it, then the liberated state no longer has any relation to the states from which it had emerged).

So why would my Earthly self want to be 'liberated' then? The only reason would be to ensure that there's no such future conscious experience which could ever remember it has lived my current life. The motivation for this is not too clear. I can simply live purely materialistic life without trying to remember previous lives (in our age people don't remember them anyway). So if I live as a materialist, this is my first life as far as I remember. If in my next life I live as materialist again, it would still feel as my first, even without trying to ensure that I'm never reincarnated again.

In this sense, what is your personal motivation for breaking the cycle?

I get what you are saying.
My personal motivation would be to stop suffering, even if I do not remember the suffering of my other incarnations. Suffering is included in the material world, it is somehow unescapeable. Even if I feel like this is my first life, I still suffer. When we reincarnate we suffer again, because it is normal for us to suffer. It is the same thing over and over again. Suffer-die-Suffer-die-Suffer-die-Suffer-die-Suffer-die-Suffer-die-repeat. Everyone is affected by suffering. It is a disease which is embedded in our life and we normally associate life with the material world. Here is a thought experiment: Imagine you are a person which can make people suffer and curse them, every time a person is born you curse it with suffering, the person dies and another one is born, then you curse this person also with suffering, even if it does not know that the person that you cursed before also suffered it still suffers. It is simply senseless, even if our previous memory does not exist anymore the qualities of life will still remain.
Here is a quote from my book which describes this problem:
"The demon of life will curse everyone, everyone will do what he wants and everyone thinks he needs him, if you break the shackles of him he will simply bind you another time, he knows no excuse. He will lie to you and never let you go."
I am very open to counter arguments.

[Cleric K]

I get what you are saying.
My personal motivation would be to stop suffering, even if I do not remember the suffering of my other incarnations.

Well, if that's the goal, the only logical thing would be to commit suicide ASAP. Why endure even a second more of this suffering?

I know how most mystical teachings would respond to this: "No, you can't do that because you would kill yourself as a result of desire (for liberation) of the ego. But this in itself means that the ego hasn't been overcome and will automatically cause it to reincarnate."

But anyway. No matter our opinion of suicide, the whole thing becomes even more pointless if we think about it in the following way:
Currently you're incarnated. You think (assuming you somehow know that you've lived in prior incarnations): "The fact that I exist now means that I didn't detach from existence the last time I died. I have failed to 'forget'". If you somehow realize that this is your millionth incarnation, this would make you feel even more miserable because it means you're a very lousy pupil - you just can't make up your mind to forget at death. In this sense, if we succeed to forget, this should be a kind of accomplishment, although, there's no one left to appreciate it and celebrate it.

Now consider this: imagine this is your first incarnation. The nothingness spontaneously became entangled in a cycle. Whose fault is this? Not the ego's, for sure. The latter came into existence because of uncaused fluctuation in the nothingness, it was not its own decision since it didn't exist before the fluctuation. Now the ego, after a lot of suffering decides to merge back to the nothingness foam.

This is the grimmest picture of existence imaginable. The 'accomplishment' of the egos which revert to nothingness simply has no value. No consciousness can ever appreciate the 'sweet release'. The suffering never really stops because there's no such conscious perspective which can say "There, now there's no more suffering".

Effectively, what this philosophy strives for is not liberation from suffering but resetting of memory. There's eternal suffering and all the ego's endeavors amount to simply reset the memory of it. If you think about it you'll convince yourself that there's absolutely no difference. Imagine it lucidly. Imagine that at the time of your forgetting at death, at your dreamed of liberation, a fluctuation in the nothingness follows and an ego with no prior memory is born. Effectively, the suffering has never stopped. It's simply that an ego was born with no memory of the preceding eternal suffering of countless egos.

This leads us to the dark perspective that the egos are born like bubbles from the foam of suffering and begin to accumulate the individual memories of that suffering. The bubble inflates until it can't take it any longer. The bubble says "I've accumulated too much memory of suffering, it's too much to bear. I'll burst." And that's how life proceeds in this universe. Bubbles emerge which begin to inflate with memories of suffering until they burst. The suffering never stops. It has been going on eternally, it's just that ego bubbles don't have full memory of it.

Do you feel this? Do you realize that your goal of stopping suffering is actually absolutely equivalent to having your current ego's reincarnational memory reset? Effectively you can never know if you are 'new' ego just beginning to accumulate memories of sufferings of you're the 'same' ego that has suffered for eternity but it simply got its memory wiped at the moment of forgetting.

[lorenzop]

Ok if you really want a discussion or understand what I mean then you should read my book which I will post in some months. I understand that this philosophy sounds like complete woo bullshit nonsense but it is not, (I think that now, maybe it is)I am open minded and if someone really defeats my arguments then I will rethink my philosophy. In the end it is just a CONCEPT, so I never really meant that you should completely dissolve yourself in the material world, it is impossible. Maybe it is just me who seeks nothingness and wants to not be anymore and maybe it is just me who wishes nothing ever existed.....

This seems to be a common theme/strategy - find or develop that perfect ontology/philosophy/model/teaching etc., and then, figure out how to get experience to line up with that preferred model, and then everything will be peachy.
Instead, experience with clarity.
Experience with clarity means experience without beliefs, beliefs are the cause of suffering, and no, you're never going to find that perfect belief.
Our current experience, right now, does not require any trumpet blaring angels singing on high experience.
Inspect your current experience without belief.
What is your current experience? Is there two things, a subject and object, a line of demarkation between you and the world, or, is there an integrated wholeness. Duality is the cause of suffering - and with a brief moment of inspection, we find there is no duality.
We do not find a world out to get us, we find peace.
You don't need a phiolosophy - all you need is clarity.

[Freefrommainstream]

I get what you are saying.
My personal motivation would be to stop suffering, even if I do not remember the suffering of my other incarnations.

Well, if that's the goal, the only logical thing would be to commit suicide ASAP. Why endure even a second more of this suffering?

I know how most mystical teachings would respond to this: "No, you can't do that because you would kill yourself as a result of desire (for liberation) of the ego. But this in itself means that the ego hasn't been overcome and will automatically cause it to reincarnate."

But anyway. No matter our opinion of suicide, the whole thing becomes even more pointless if we think about it in the following way:
Currently you're incarnated. You think (assuming you somehow know that you've lived in prior incarnations): "The fact that I exist now means that I didn't detach from existence the last time I died. I have failed to 'forget'". If you somehow realize that this is your millionth incarnation, this would make you feel even more miserable because it means you're a very lousy pupil - you just can't make up your mind to forget at death. In this sense, if we succeed to forget, this should be a kind of accomplishment, although, there's no one left to appreciate it and celebrate it.

Now consider this: imagine this is your first incarnation. The nothingness spontaneously became entangled in a cycle. Whose fault is this? Not the ego's, for sure. The latter came into existence because of uncaused fluctuation in the nothingness, it was not its own decision since it didn't exist before the fluctuation. Now the ego, after a lot of suffering decides to merge back to the nothingness foam.

This is the grimmest picture of existence imaginable. The 'accomplishment' of the egos which revert to nothingness simply has no value. No consciousness can ever appreciate the 'sweet release'. The suffering never really stops because there's no such conscious perspective which can say "There, now there's no more suffering".

Effectively, what this philosophy strives for is not liberation from suffering but resetting of memory. There's eternal suffering and all the ego's endeavors amount to simply reset the memory of it. If you think about it you'll convince yourself that there's absolutely no difference. Imagine it lucidly. Imagine that at the time of your forgetting at death, at your dreamed of liberation, a fluctuation in the nothingness follows and an ego with no prior memory is born. Effectively, the suffering has never stopped. It's simply that an ego was born with no memory of the preceding eternal suffering of countless egos.

This leads us to the dark perspective that the egos are born like bubbles from the foam of suffering and begin to accumulate the individual memories of that suffering. The bubble inflates until it can't take it any longer. The bubble says "I've accumulated too much memory of suffering, it's too much to bear. I'll burst." And that's how life proceeds in this universe. Bubbles emerge which begin to inflate with memories of suffering until they burst. The suffering never stops. It has been going on eternally, it's just that ego bubbles don't have full memory of it.

Do you feel this? Do you realize that your goal of stopping suffering is actually absolutely equivalent to having your current ego's reincarnational memory reset? Effectively you can never know if you are 'new' ego just beginning to accumulate memories of sufferings of you're the 'same' ego that has suffered for eternity but it simply got its memory wiped at the moment of forgetting.

Sorry if this text is too short but I wrote a very long text and somehow the website could not load and my entire text was gone
My point is that suffering will affect everyone because it is simply embedded in the material world, the material world does not care if this is my 1000000sth incarnation ,my first one or if I remembered my previous one, I will just suffer and suffering is not good, it does not matter who is affected. But I realised a paradox in my philosophy, we simply can not wipe out conciousness and imagination even if we do not choose to reincarnate and enter the state of nothingness it will still be something, our view of nothingness will affect our state of nothingness, so we will still experience nothingness which should not really be possible. I will change my view.

[Freefrommainstream]

Ok if you really want a discussion or understand what I mean then you should read my book which I will post in some months. I understand that this philosophy sounds like complete woo bullshit nonsense but it is not, (I think that now, maybe it is)I am open minded and if someone really defeats my arguments then I will rethink my philosophy. In the end it is just a CONCEPT, so I never really meant that you should completely dissolve yourself in the material world, it is impossible. Maybe it is just me who seeks nothingness and wants to not be anymore and maybe it is just me who wishes nothing ever existed.....

This seems to be a common theme/strategy - find or develop that perfect ontology/philosophy/model/teaching etc., and then, figure out how to get experience to line up with that preferred model, and then everything will be peachy.
Instead, experience with clarity.
Experience with clarity means experience without beliefs, beliefs are the cause of suffering, and no, you're never going to find that perfect belief.
Our current experience, right now, does not require any trumpet blaring angels singing on high experience.
Inspect your current experience without belief.
What is your current experience? Is there two things, a subject and object, a line of demarkation between you and the world, or, is there an integrated wholeness. Duality is the cause of suffering - and with a brief moment of inspection, we find there is no duality.
We do not find a world out to get us, we find peace.
You don't need a phiolosophy - all you need is clarity.

You are right, life still does not make sense for me but you are right.

[Cleric K]

Sorry if this text is too short but I wrote a very long text and somehow the website could not load and my entire text was gone
My point is that suffering will affect everyone because it is simply embedded in the material world, the material world does not care if this is my 1000000sth incarnation ,my first one or if I remembered my previous one, I will just suffer and suffering is not good, it does not matter who is affected.

The point is that by resetting one ego's memory of existence you don't really solve the problem of suffering for anyone. As long as souls pop up into existence spontaneously, your liberating efforts are like pouring water into a bottomless bucket. You reset the memory of one ego but new/reset egos keep re-inflating with memories of suffering.

But I realised a paradox in my philosophy, we simply can not wipe out conciousness and imagination even if we do not choose to reincarnate and enter the state of nothingness it will still be something, our view of nothingness will affect our state of nothingness, so we will still experience nothingness which should not really be possible. I will change my view.