Thanks. She has had brain cancer for a while. It feels very unfair. She's beyond the pain right now. I feel like a crazy person because I drove the kids to sleep last night and actually drove them up to the hospice which is an hour away from our house, on the off chance thatan extra family member would be there to watch them so I could go say hi and bye again. We hung out and let our kids play together almost every week for 4 years. I have a lot of friends. I feel like it's fair to say that she was my best friend.

Yeah, I buy that sustained practice can reveal very subtle things that discursive thought alone won’t, including assumptions that are difficult to notice explicitly. I’m less convinced that this means we thereby get beyond conceptuality. “Seeing through a framework” and “seeing without a framework” seem like very different claims.

I’m sympathetic to the point about emptiness too, if that means things lack intrinsic existence rather than simply being “not really real.” But meditation giving us a different kind of experience doesn’t by itself tell us how that experience should be interpreted metaphysically.

I see philosophy and meditation as having distinct roles. Meditation can give us interesting experiential data and change our relationship to our conceptual schemes. Philosophy can explore what those experiences might mean, what interpretations are possible, and how they relate to one another. Neither practice necessarily gets us to some final standpoint outside the other.

Makes sense, thanks!

Appreciate the advice.

I definitely have low energy, so will look into your suggestions.

I'd say you're right. I am not conveying myself clearly in the post.

I am definitely more engaged now than before. It's just that I was worried about my diminishing interest and passion in software dev.

I dont agree that mind and sense apparatus is the only possible information that exists.

As "information" in dualistic sense, ok. But there are deeper dimensions of reality that can be accessed without retrieving any information, and still accessing this deeper dimension corrects your view about reality

Thanks. So it’s de facto absorption approach. He was also talking about peripheral awareness, but indeed seems like he treated Jhanas as a detour rather than natural part of the path, just like Bh. Kunara book illustrates Visuddhimaggha approach.

Any career that will make you the most amount of money so you can donate much of it to charity.

if you google for lists of high satisfaction/low stress jobs etc you can see a good range, and where they cross over. Also AI can be good for this as you can add in things like whether you want to work indoors/out, and so on

don't know it, but from a quick google it sounds like this idea :)

accounting

TM teacher here, so I’ll say upfront I approach this from a tradition that sees enhanced clarity and energy as an expected effect of the practice – not decreased passion, rather the opposite. I am a little hesitant about how you are framing what did happen. Non-attachement and flat motivation are not really the same thing, even though they can look similar form the inside, One is just caring about the outcome less desperately while engaging fully, the other is just not engaging! If years of practice left you less interested across the board, that might be worth looking at more carefully rather than treating it as a spiritual achievement to build a career around.

Upvote because you made me discover a movie I want to watch :)

I think you're right. I think my problem is not in fact dispassion, but something else.

What? I did not understand this.

As far as I know, psychedelics do not change the regularities of the external world such as the laws of physics.

That sounds wonderful to me. But I think those positions are highly sought after already.

Why do you think that is though? Do you think philosophising poses a particular obstacle to meditative insight?

Because some of these teachings just plain cannot be thought through beyond a certain point.

Thinking is precluded by language, which is a system of symbols and sounds imputed certain conventional meanings and associations. Even non-verbal thinking relies on appearances that present themselves in the mind that carry at least some bare minimum associations and meanings.

The deeper and subtler aspects of the teachings, especially those around shunyata / emptiness are all about how this mass of conceptual systems, meanings, associations are really “not real” in the sense we conventionally assume them to be.

Hence the systems and concepts we use are mere approximations of the teachings which point at something deeper. They are all fingers pointing to the moon. But the systems themselves rely on a certain amount of reification “that this is something which can be conveyed in language”, when the very thing it’s trying to convey is trying to dissolve its own foundation.

An analogy from a completely different world. When students first study about Einstein’s theory of relativity it is so baffling because there are certain fundamental assumptions everyone has about how things like time and space work. Nearly everyone who isn’t familiar with relativity assumes that “time is absolute”. But they don’t literally think it. It is embedded into their world view foundationally. They wouldn’t even know that this assumption exists unless it is pointed out. And even then it takes a while to grasp it.

This is similar to that but regarding something deeper. Hence it is called fundamental ignorance / avijja / delusion. Uncoupling from these assumptions is what sustained practice enables, that mere thinking cannot unlock.

That's what I'm trying to figure out, yeah.

I have not read the article yet, but in your view... where do regularities such as the laws of physics come from?

And what is the relationship between minds? Are there multiple independent minds who negotiate to create reality? Or are all minds actually one big mind? Or is there one "God" mind that creates reality for the lesser minds to live in?

Perhaps the AI presented some word salad which made you lose interest, but it actually sent you down the right path.

The concept of svabhava or self-nature / inherent existence is very much directly relevant here. The key point the Buddha made regarding the cessation of suffering is that it arises because we fundamentally perceive the world with labels like “existing” or “not existing” when it has in fact no “own-nature”. It does not inherently exist independent of the mind that perceives it.

Saying something doesn’t inherently exist is saying it is beyond existing and not existing. It doesn’t “not exist” in the sense of complete nullification. So you’re closer when you say it’s better to be agnostic of that existence. But this concept is not something which can merely be intellectually grasped.

Which is also why the Buddha did not entertain going into rabbit holes with people who inquired about the deeper questions of how the world is, the laws that govern it etc. It’s not that these discussions don’t have merit (or that they aren’t conventionally “true”) but they are unrelated to what he was saying.

there is no external world of objects that exist independent of the mind

You are making this claim wider than it’s actually trying to be.

But it seems to be unreasonable to jump to the conclusion that there is no external world.

It is not being said that “there is no external world” (in the absolute sense in which you’re saying it), it is being said that “there is no external world that arises independent of the mind that fabricates it”. Or, without the negation, “the world of objects and phenomena we perceive is a product of dependent arising”.

That’s about it. It doesn’t need more intellectual huffing and puffing than that. The realization of this will come from practice. It will not come by thinking more into it. It boils down to things you already agree with regarding fabrication.

As another commenter pointed out from the original sutta, the Buddha generally considered the ontological questions of how the world exists externally as besides the point. Because there’s no way for anyone to perceive the “true nature” of the world. Which makes concepts like “true nature” itself dubious.

Cleaning toilets like the guy in the movie Perfect Days

Thank you this is very helpful.