HEPZIBAH wrote:Jewel, how does all this negativity sit with your Buddhist beliefs?
You are equating so called negativity with realism?
Firstly as a Nihilist I don't have any beliefs - Buddhist or otherwise, but cherry pick books like Shakespere and the bible for appropriate quotes.
Buddhism clearly states that life = suffering and that all is illusion.
Only by means of relative or absolute childlessness, resulting in mankind’s ebbing away, could happen what might be named – borrowing from the Greek myth – Sisyphus’s revolt. He would give up his work, not in order to commit suicide but rather by refraining from having children who otherwise would have taken his spot. In such a way that in some point in time there would be no one in the rock’s path which would eventually roll out. In terms of the Asian primordial decision: By means of abstention from procreation the wheel of suffering would be deprived of its impetus until it comes to a standstill.
In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of „the abyss of birth”. An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.
Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, New York 1976 (1973), page 33.
Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of Sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death.
If you're never born, you'll never suffer, you'll never die, and you'll never experience one iota of experiential deprivation concerning the 'good stuff'.
On the other hand, if you ARE born, you WILL suffer, you WILL die, and your fulfillment-to-deprivation ratio WILL BE contingent on determining factors mostly to wholly outside your control. On top of which you WILL cause harm to countless lifeforms along the way, no matter how nice a person you think you are.
Oh, yes, and you'll end up in the very same place you started from before you existed, with absolutely no awareness that you ever existed in the first place?
Nothing as constant as change, nothing as certain as death.
Experience is not what happens to you;
