u/nanassaka

How come the Buddha saw a sick man, an old man, and a dead man, and that was enough for him to understand everything, yet we see them every day and we still don’t get anything? Everyone knows that everything passes and everyone dies, but who actually penetrates into the discernment and responsibility of these terrifyingly banal facts? We have an overwhelming amount of information that the Buddha did not have and which the modern age fortunately brings with it, that makes it utterly impossible not to be convinced of the fact that this world is a living hell that must be abandoned and not partaken in at any cost. Take any subject from history, astronomy, or biology, for example, and contemplate what it means to exist on a rock thrown into a void, maintained by an extremely fragile atmosphere being bombarded constantly by sun rays, existing in an essentially infinite universe, or what it means for there to have been 50 million casualties in a single world war in which the entire world was almost destroyed, and which was actually not so far back in the past as well (and which is on the brink of repeating itself quite soon again). Unrest is the mark of existence itself; anything which exists, whether biological organisms or planets, exists only in an extremely fragile balance of constant changes which maintain life in the state it is in and which can be perturbed at any given time (just like how the planets would fly into the sun if they stopped their orbit). My organism maintains itself only to the extent that it can function as a subtle balance of constant transformation of substances and biological processes, of forces and counterforces which mutually negate each other, while the most microscopic change within my organism or the smallest excess in such a force would be enough to wreck the entire balance, essentially collapsing my entire existence. The most microscopic chemical change would leave me disabled and in pain, and the smallest perturbation would wreak havoc on my body for the rest of my life, not to speak of the changes occurring in the macrocosm, of massive tsunamis and volcanoes erupting all the time, in the face of which my body is merely dust. The time I have is extremely limited because a small alteration of these subtle and fragile biological processes maintaining my life as it is is doomed to happen, and is actually immanent, like a pole which is barely maintained in balance and is destined to fall at some point, and thus it is not a thing that will happen in the very far-off future anymore, but more so right in the next moment, as an ever-present structure of collapse. Dying, infirmities, injuries and suffering are absolutely inevitable.

Yet nothing in our lives is shaken up and our existences are still not utterly shipwrecked by realizations that should have done just that. Any medic who has seen a cadaver in his life should have felt himself completely isolated and exiled from the entirety of Creation itself, yet anyone would probably just go along fine with their lives, very easily managing to be conceiving these horrific facts and inauthentically "transcending" them. However, once you have gained a renewable intuition of your own nothingness and ever-present fragility, everything is irremediably lost forever and nothing can be redeemed ever again; there is nothing to look forward to except your own grave. You do not belong to anything in the entire universe anymore—family, friends, vocations, or aspirations—since you are utterly alone with your own death, which you cannot escape, and it is just there on your doorstep, immanent to every second in your life, as if one were thrown into an existential solitary confinement that cannot communicate with the external world anymore, confined in a box with very little space for breathing, from where one is utterly isolated, and from where one cannot talk to people from the outside anymore. What in this world could matter for the person who already feels as if they’re merely waiting to head to the grave at any second now and cannot return to “life” again, and who would be wise enough to substitute the “beautiful views” and “nice experiences” one gets in daily life that make it seem as if it’s worth continuing, with the extremely confining, suffocating, agonizing perspective that the meditation of death, for example, brings with it, and sitting with that perspective for the rest of one’s life as if it’s the only thing worth ever paying attention to, as the only thing that should be the source of one's peace? It is to be terrifyingly alone and confined; everything which breathes is merely a sign of one’s own ultimate uselessness and eventual destruction, as the contemplation of one’s mortality should very well be revealing. Yet our perspectives remain immensely telescoped, and we remain interested only in maintaining and protecting our very small “spaces” in the entire universe, as if they meant everything, while absolutely everything is showing how we actually nothing and are utterly insignificant. Everything is convincing me that I am nothing, yet my existence is the only one that seems to be real

How come, however, that we can understand all this, that many people in the medical domain and not only get to see these things for themselves and have probably seen more than enough things to be aware of the absolute contingency and suffering of existence itself, yet nothing is absolutely perturbed in our daily lives nor in our fundamental attitude toward the world, and everything flies past our heads? How can one stop “misconceiving” suffering, effectively externalizing it from oneself, and how does one see it for what it is (as the Buddha did in the beginning) so that an understanding of being prey to suffering can be fully uncovered? Why is it so hard to arrive at such a perspective, and how can one undo the conceivings that make suffering and impermanence not be understood, that make any attempt at reflection of one's inevitable destiny, not sink in so deeply, if at all?

Why is there something than nothing at all?

This question cannot be answered because existence is not a positive, but a negative phenomena. When I say that a cup exists, I do not add anything new to it, but I simply say that it is. The existence of things is negative because existence itself isnt something that "is"; presence cannot itself be present like a phenomena might be present. Consciousness is the "existence" of things, things are present (i.e they are cognized), but consciousness itself does not exist, for it is the existence (or presence) of things

In the same way, it is erroneous to assume that existence can have any positive limits. There is no absolute smallness nor absolute bigness of the universe in astrophysics, no "big bang"---point before things werent, after which they were, for it would be erroneous to assume that a negative phenomena can have any positive limit, a limit to "existence"---and even less so an ultimate ground for being (such as Spirit, Absolute, God, etc), as Heidegger showed in order to disprove 2.000 years of philosophical "positive conceptions" of being through showing how Being (or presence/existence) is baseless and groundless. God can exist, and God can exist as the "Supreme Dictator of Values", but God's existence then remains unjustifiable. Justifications exist, but justification is itself unjustifiable, for there is no reason why something is as opposed to not being at all. Things may be "for" something, but the entire world, as far as it exists, existence itself, is not "for" some ultimate purpose at all, it just "is". It is just a blind and irrational manifestation of "Nature", as Schopenhauer might have put it, that cannot, and does not, have any justification for existing. It would be wrong to say that the world cannot be "explained", or that a meaning in life cannot be "found", the problem is actually that many can be found, and thus, there can never be "one" positive conception of life.

What does it mean to say that existence, or consciousness of things, is a negative phenomena, and not a positive phenomena? It means that consciousness does not exist as a substance (nor can it be found "in" the brain, or "somewhere" at all, for it is not "in" space, but "of" space), because consciousness is not something that exists itself (i.e it is not part of the phenomena), but it is the existence of phenomena. Consciousness does not itself exist, because consciousness is the existence of things. Existence cannot itself exist as a cup or a rock does, because it is not positive. In the same way, the negativity of consciousness is what makes it an utterly irreconcilable and unjustifiable phenomena, for no positive conceptions of it could ever be made

The utter horror of this fact is that my own existence cannot be defined positively. My existence is beyond reason, because it is not necessary---cogito ergo sum is merely but a shining tautological logical proposition. I am utterly gratuitious and accidental in this world. Looking for a positive conception of Being merely begs the question for it's own sake, because there cannot be any reason to why things are, as opposed to not being at all

As I see it, this unjustifiability, groundlessness of being (which even Heidegger missed, conceiving of "Dasein" as being something "positive", not seeing the inherent negativity of any phenomena, groundlessness of Being of any positive phenomena which comes as its "shadow", any "image", thought, or "phenomena"), is what gives rise to the ontological guilt of existing. Every suffering or misfortune only reminds us of what we deserve; it is what we deserve. We are born, and our due is dying—and until we die, we are constantly subjected to infinite possibilities of suffering that might befall us at any given time. Because infinite possibilities of suffering might befall me right now, the ontological guilt of existing (or ontological debt) constitutes an infinite burden, which cannot be escaped, for escaping it would mean escaping existence itself—becoming unconscious. "Existence is not really a burden because there are people in the world living it with much more difficulty than you are right now, in situations of poverty and whatnot." Well, the situation of dealing with "poverty" is simply another thing which exists—the burden of existence already includes infinite possibilities of what could happen to oneself, and thus its awareness constitutes the actual suffering of one's existential predicament, and not necessarily the difficulties one is going through. Anything challenging or difficult we may experience is nothing more than the pretext of our guilt of existing, which is infinite and limitless. Whether it is the smile of a friend, a sunny day, or the screams of a killer, any situation I might be thrown into is equally unjustifiable, groundless, and contingent. Existence itself is the ultimate threat, the awareness of which makes oneself metaphysically illegal, like the devil, for one cannot say one belongs to the world nor to humankind anymore, because one cannot believe in any positive conceptions or justifications of existence anymore—which is more instinctual than rational, to define existence in positive terms—and thus one is exiled from the entirety of humankind, there is nothing that one may be fooled by ever again, not love, friendship, care, institutions, metaphysics, art, philosophy, and whatnot. The best way to be an "underminer" of values is to show how Value itself lacks value, or existence lacks explanation, and ironically enough, that makes you the biggest threat to society as a whole for you put the entirety of humanity at risk, for you do not attack any particular "values", but "Value" itself, the groundlessness of any value regardless of what that value is, and yet you can live peacefully in it for as long as you do not attack any particular values or break any laws per se, although being the most dangerous person that has ever existed in it for that reason. Just a funny thought

To cope with the utter contingency and temporal nature of our own Beings, we delude ourselves into a sort of perception of "subjective eternity" in which we have a break from the responsibilities of being thrown into temporal flux (like Mircea Eliade's sacred cyclical and reversible time of the religious man, a sort of illusion of superstability in time or permanence of the present moment) in which we feel like we can have a "break" from existence, from the utter contingency of our own beings and our finitude, by misconceiving our own "Eternal" and immortal metaphysical essence (I.e Schopenhauer: we are “secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we can forever draw renewed life and new time.”). Because we are "eternal"---an instinctive lie that constitutes living itself, for awareness of death makes the entire delirium of living null, we absolutize death as being in the far off future, not seeing that death is always an immanent possibility of the present moment. In other words, we feel like we will last forever, and on top of that, even project infinitely into the future in attaining our own affairs, or look back into the past when the future becomes hopeless, but in at no point during that do we recognize the absolute contingency of the human being and the transiency of the present moment. We may die right the next second---which for many people is an absolutely absurd perhaps even ridiculous thought, due to how caught up they are in their delusions of absolute invulnerability and permanence, for which death, suffering, old age, and infirmities, represent not ever-present possibilities, but unthinkable fantesies