I’m thinking that dying sucks but being dead is easy AF.
There isn’t anything intrinsically good or bad about death. Death is unfortunate for those who care about the deceased. Their loss and anguish is real.
But it’s like asking if dropping your ice cream cone on the pavement is good or bad. Those words just don’t apply, may as well ask if dropping your ice cream is ‘purple’ or ‘spikey’.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I feel it is a mischaracterization of Buddhist belief. I want to explain that there is a difference between suffering and liberation from suffering. Buddhism focuses on liberation from suffering.
What you have said is like saying, Christianity is such a cynical, negative religion, it teaches that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and that the wages of sin are death. How negative, how terrible! But that view of Christianity omits the Good News. The Good News is that Jesus died for your sins and grants you eternal life. That’s the focus of your religion - deliverance from death. That whosoever beliveth in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." (Bolding mine.) That idea doesn’t work without the part about perishing.
The Good News, in Buddhism, is liberation from suffering. You can’t be liberated from suffering without talking about the condition of suffering. But to say that it is focused on suffering is a mischaracterization. Now I was a devout Christian for around six years of my life, and I read a lot of books in the Bible, they talk a lot about suffering. Job was particularly interested in suffering, King David lamented the passing away of all things. Complaints about suffering litter the Bible. Jesus himself seemed very interested in the problem of suffering as during his lifetime he devoted himself almost exclusively to caring for the outcasts, the unloved, the sick, the dying. He seemed to believe, through his actions, that alleviating the suffering of others was the most high calling. He even had that parable about the sheep and the goats where he implied the only ones who would receive eternal life were the ones who cared for the suffering.
Would you then say, Christianity is overly negative because it focuses too much on suffering?
When I read the Buddhist sutras (there are thousands of them, I haven’t read them all) there’s not a lot of lamentation about suffering. There’s a lot of talk about liberation from suffering, usually in kind of a philosophical, thoughtful way, with very specific instructions in some cases, but there are also numerous passages that are effusive with joy, and indeed, Zen practice is about the joy that you find in accepting the present moment just as it is.
I hope that clears things up.
Back to the OP, I was discussing this with my husband. Sometimes when I meditate and I’m feeling particularly sentimental, I find myself thinking, maybe the purpose of life is to experience it. Whether that makes any sense or not, one is put in contact with the reality that life is an extraordinary, rare, bonkers thing, nearly incomprehensible in the context of the whole universe, where we are, as far as we know, alone. So whatever you believe about how life came to be, it is a really extraordinary thing. And maybe just that fact makes it worth preserving, worth feeling a little bad about it coming to an end. I don’t believe in intrinsic good or intrinsic bad, really. But I can see an argument for the end of all life being a bad thing based solely on its apparent uniqueness.
I wasn’t using the word “negative” to mean anything synonymous with “cynical.” It was more like the mathemical sense, where negative = below zero and positive = above zero. If the ultimate goal and focus is to extinguish suffering, that sounds like the goal is to get to zero and stay there, as opposed to moving into the positive.
Yes of course, but that was not his only or main focus. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” To my mind, there’s more to abundant life than just absence of suffering.
(And I think it’s fair to say that, in the Christian view, suffering is never inherently good, but it may be a means to an end, a greater good—as Jesus’s own suffering was. I’m not sure how this compares to the Buddhist view. Is there a “greater good” than liberation from suffering?)
Well, I don’t know if it’s possible to completely “clear things up” in serious discussions of religion, philosophy, etc. But it at least helps and gives food for thought.
I perceive life for conscious beings as a gift—an opportunity to experience qualia for the duration permitted by their species’ lifespan. While the experience no longer matters to the deceased, it is comforting to know that they had the opportunity to live. For me, this is significant. I value the notion that conscious beings have experienced existence both extensively and well. By the same token, it saddens me to think of those whose lives were cut short, or was full of suffering.
However, on Earth, my wish for long and happy lives does not extend to certain individuals—specifically humans with the capacity for significant evil. Individuals like Adolf Hitler, who perpetrated large-scale atrocities, or Chris Watts, responsible for more personal yet heinous acts, do not deserve the gift of life. Non-human animals don’t have the capacity for evil, so I wish them all well.
When I refer to life as a “gift,” I do not imply it is bestowed by a deity, as I do not believe in the existence of God. Instead, I see it as a gift arising from natural processes.
So, while death may not affect the deceased, a life cut short or filled with misery represents a gift left unfulfilled.
Ah, I think I see. I wish I had a pithy and incisive answer for you! I will try, but keep in mind I’m speaking from a newly practicing Zen perspective and there are many other ways to follow the path. Buddhism teaches that everyone is born with perfect awareness of the interdependent nature of all phenomenon, and that awareness is clouded by greed, hatred, and delusion - the stuff of suffering. When I clear away that stuff, and can make contact with life as it is, pure experiencing, whatever you want to call it, it brings me a sense of clarity about my purpose in any given moment and the ability to make choices informed by human relatedness, as opposed to ego or mental clutter. It allows me to take a pause before I respond, and consider the effects of my words. It makes me more patient with my kid and more present with my family. It makes me less divisive in my speech. And it makes me more effective at work, which in my case is helping DV and sexual assault survivors. The big idea, really, is peace. Peace within yourself and spreading peace to those around you, through your intentions, your speech, your actions, your effort. There is no script for lay Buddhists to follow in terms of what specifically constitutes right actions or effort, that is up to our own judgment. I personally lean toward the late Vietnamese peace activist Thich Naht Hanh’s model of engaged Buddhism, which demands thoughtful, non-aggressive social action.
I would agree that suffering is sometimes necessary for a greater good, yes. To use a very concrete example, I think my past trauma has made me a more empathetic person. That doesn’t mean the trauma was okay, or even good, but my empathy is at least in part a conditioned response from that experience. And that experience has influenced the way I act in the world, how I relate to other people, and the way I express myself in my fiction writing, and a lot of other ways. I would not want to take that away from my current worldview or expression. My teacher has commented that we shouldn’t view greed, hatred or delusion as bad things, even though they cloud awareness, because they have been the stuff of our practice, they are a part of things as they are and a part of the journey that brought us to where we are now. In Zen, there is nothing that doesn’t belong. That’s one thing I really like about it.
I certainly hope not. I am trying to imagine loving everything and everybody very, very, very very much, equally and with no personal preferences and the very first thing that pops into my head is “involuntary mind control”.
A man was walking along when he encountered a tiger. The tiger chased him. He ran to a cliff and jumped off, holding onto a vine growing out the side of the cliff, and dangled there. Above him the tiger was looking down at him and drooling, Below him was another tiger looking up at him and drooling. Two mice were gnawing away at the vine and it was about to give way. The man saw a strawberry growing nearby and popped it in his mouth.
How sweet that berry tasted!
I don’t want to derail the thread but who said anything about loving everyone equally without any preference whatsoever?
Exactly!
Just to be a party spoiler, how do we know we stop feeling after death? Maybe just outward signs cease, and body decays, but your mind is in insane horror and pain whole time until brain disintegrates. I mean, no scientific experiment exists that can verify you lose consciousness after death. All those near-death-experience cool stories aren’t really about true death, more about hallucinations with poor brain function in some close-to-death conditions, like poor blood-flow or whatever.
Scary, huh?
What drives this consciousness if electrical activity in the brain ceases?
You know that place you were before you were conceived? You get to go back there.
At least, that is what all the evidence leads us to believe.
Cleveland? Eeeewww.
One thought that has occured to me before: what if we don’t lose consciousness when we die, but instead, our consciousness is trapped forever in the moment before we’d lose consciousness.
I’m not saying I believe this or think it’s at all likely, but it’s one of the scariest counterfactuals I can think of.
Death is “bad” only when the the participant is unwiling.
My dad died of lung cancer, when I was 8. He’d been suffering for years, long before I was aware.
I dont really want to die, but I have a brain disease that makes it inevitable in the next eight to ten years.
Such is life. I will die before my mother, my kids, my family etc.
Death is just an end. It is not good or bad. It is the end.
(Though, I do love the Nick Cave/Kylie Minogue cover of Nick Cave’s “Death is not the end”, (youtube link) https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DUQ3ZM_zNbmg
Well, yeah. Nothing matters to the universe because the universe is just a bunch of dumb subatomic particles bumping into each other. The universe is not beautiful, it’s not important, it’s not terrifying, it’s not interesting, it’s not big, it’s not anything without us around to call it those things. We’re the most important thing in the universe because without us, there is no “universe”, there’s just stuff.
Agreed. Setting aside alien intelligent life which IMO probably exists but is currently unprovable …
The Universe is a vast cold uncaring void with a bare smidgen of gas, dust, and radiation wandering around in it. Capital-L Life as seen on Earth is equally directionless and pointless. Individual organisms, be they bacteria, amoeba, dogs, whales, or humans, are equally immaterial and temporary.
If there is any meaning whatsoever, it is what we each in our conscious mind create in relation to another conscious minds. And all that dies with us.
Uh oh… You realize where this line of logic leads, right?
We have had threads about who you’d save if your dog and a stranger are both drowning…
What about a human stranger and a conscious, sentient, sapient alien? Is human life inherently more worthy of our protection than alien life?
