Going feral

But a select few men have two things.

 

The agony is just waiting for you to notice it, nestled away in the cells of your body. Sitting on the floor cross-legged is agony after 30min, but after 45 min the real torture begins. Even a comfy armchair will be intolerable over time. Nothing is perfect forever, and the impermanence of sensations, good and bad, is the lesson you need to impress upon your subconscious.

Only by equanamously observing this latent sensation can you 1) get rid of it, and 2) train your subconscious to be even-minded about craving and aversion in general. There are also pockets of pleasure lying in waiting, but imbalance is imbalance.

Sounds like you have a residual sankara lurking in your anus, Werozzi. Happy birthday!

 

So can you walk on hot coals and crazy shiz like that now? I think everyone knows that's all Buddhism is good for.

 

After the first fifty hours, I felt like merely setting myself on fire would be relatively easy.

But seriously, the jedi awareness part of the course is a breeze compared to the vulcan-kolinahr part.

Nonetheless I recommend the peace of pure logic to all my friends, and especially my enemies.

 

You realize what "pure logic" can do to an evil man, right? That's why Khergan had a point.

 

You realize what "pure logic" can do to an evil man, right? That's why Khergan had a point.

 

One is certainly filled with the altruistic desire to aid all beings toward extinguishment.

However, Kerghan's logic was flawed due to a lack of data. If he had observed the nature of his own body-mind more thoroughly he would have realised that all beings are solely responsible for their own suffering and liberation.

Furthermore, he would then have been detached enough from his own ego to be both unaffected by, and naturally sympathetic toward, all of Arcanum, instead of, you know, sobbing about the misery of existence and disintegrating the planet with sorcery.

 

Despite that he can be won over in the game, it could be argued that even with that missing data and the awareness of his own bias, he'd be willing to destroy everything to prevent the experience of suffering from ever happening again.

That, even though suffering is experienced on a case by case basis according to the attitude and actions of the actor.

Reason to one man isn't reason to another. Considering the sheer scope of his own unilateral experience, I'd readily admit that after having experienced what a soul does in death and making my way back to life, after two odd millennia, I myself might decide I know better than everyone else, ever.

It may even be possible what Khergan has actually done is, in a sense, an extended meditation complete with astral projection - meaning he would be privy to similar insights as you yourself possess after such an experience, and that's simply how he thought things should be afterwards. Given his life before then was entirely different from yours, and he had no Buddhist monks to learn from, it's fairly understandable that he lapsed into a state of insanity that, according to his perception, was indistinguishable from a logical thought process due to the damage incurred upon his psyche over his lifetime.

Add into this the sheer length of time he's been alive - far longer than any human has any frame of reference for - and you've got a recipe for a rather unbalanced man doing what he can do to rationalize killing an entire world, possibly in subconscious retaliation in regards to how he had to suffer in the void for around two thousand years.

 

I was always sad that when siding with Khergan Arcanum didn't end with "everyone died and they all lived happily ever after", but I guess you can't have everything.

 

I think I preferred the old ytzk.

 

Quite right, Kerghan's madness was very close to pure sanity. He got as far as the first noble truth, anyway, that life is endless suffering.

The key to the technique I practised, vipassana yoga, is to observe the very roots of bodily physical sensation from moment to moment. Astral projection would be the complete opposite of this self-vigilance. When the impermanence of all sensation is apparent, objectivity towards pain and pleasure is much easier. No sensation lasts forever, but the craving and aversion can multiply your suffering indefinitely.

But if things weren't changing, for millennia in a fictional limbo, then the lesson would never present itself.

Also, thy mother, english!

 

Ahh, it's good to have you back, old chum.

 

Obligatory endgame spoiler warning.

I for one didn't find the data he was missing to make that much of a difference.

Kerghan wanted to end all suffering. Assumed suffering is caused by life, therefore no life = no pain. The Living One pointed out that not all souls forced to live are in pain, and that it is because the suffering isn't caused by life itself but by those souls themselves who just hold on too tight to death.

What difference does that make, though? Non-suffering souls capable and willing to let go are and always will be a mere curiosity, an exception that will never become the rule. The cause of the pain is different than Kerghan assumed, but that doesn't change the fact that the pain is still there and will be there as long as life continues.

Kerghan abandoned his plan when he was no longer sure which of the two, life or death, is the natural state. Nonetheless, ending all life still is the only way to permanently end the suffering and the act of doing so still is the best choice from an utilitarian point of view, natural or not.

 

Hah!

 

Muro makes a good point, as usual. Liberated beings are rare, and life in general is nothing but suffering.

The buddha's conclusion was that suicide, or mass-suicide, is no solution because we exist as part of a larger continuum of consciousness which carries the karma and the attachments of previous lives. Attachment to non-existence is still attachment. Only by unmaking our attachments can we become fully liberated from suffering.

Destroying the whole universe at once may seem to be a neat solution, but the theory goes that this would only serve to perpetuate suffering throughout the consciousness-ether of the multiverse. Admittedly this part of the theory is difficult to verify, but the buddha saw deeply and clearly, and encouraged people to obverse for themselves rather than just take his word for it, so I'm inclined to take his word for it.

 

Wow, the Buddha really was full of shit. No wonder you pretend to be a Hindu instead of a Buddhist.

 

Haeeeyah!!

*punches Smuel through his screen*

 

It seems that Buddhism has more benefit than it says; ytzk: you have trespassed the laws of space and discovered the teleporting potential of a computer screen!!
(along with surely breaking smuel's nose)

 

ytzk's puny fist is no match for my mighty nose!

But fine, criticism accepted. I'll write "AN hindu" from now on.