I’m not religious at all. But ya, seeing this stuff certainly does evoke some religious ideas.
The creator. It’s creating the universe. Basically a big sun-jewel that emits “poetry energy”. No intelligence tho. No personality. Just a big shining thing. No judgment or judgy vibes.
And the land of the dead. Underground. Stone buildings. Lit by colored lamps. Eternal low-key party. Chill music. Spacey people hanging out, talking about their former lives and stuff. Occasional (nonconfrontational) demon (a tall gangly person with arms and legs all poking out in weird directions, swiftly staggering along on its demonly business).
I have a theory about why there’s a “land of the dead” (because why would a dead person have a body?). I think I (my “soul”) carries around a translator with it. That translates any experience into “time, space, things, people, light, dark etc”. A universal human-style-experience metaphorizer.
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Life is suffering: stop trying to find perfect comfort. Stop trying to find the room in the house where you’ll be okay. Stop trying to find the perfect music/light show combo. Stop trying to stop suffering. Life is suffering.
The suffering is caused by a thing we’ve poorly translated as “attachment”. It’s basically the same phenomenon behind the saying “don’t get bent out of shape about it”. To imagine attachment and “bent out of shape”, imagine you’re riding a bike and someone holds out a water bottle as you go by. You try to grab it and fail. “attachment” here would be trying to still grab the bottle despite it being behind you. You can also see how a biker trying to reach backward to grab a bottle rapidly receding beyond him would be, literally, “bent out of shape”. He’s also, literally, left the present by being stuck to the past. He’s “attached” to grabbing that bottle, and it’s going to cause problems.
This attachment reflex isn’t necessary for any mental task. It’s not a necessary component, despite what 1 implies. You can do all the things in your life without this extra layer of bent-out-of-shapeness. Third noble truth is: you don’t have to live with this. The third noble truth is: the cessation of attachment will cease a lot of your suffering, and it’s within your power to do so.
It’s kind of like saying “there’s a switch, in your cockpit, that turns off the attachment”.
The fourth noble truth is that there’s a path to finding this “attachment” layer in the mind. It’s not hidden “deep” per se, but it’s hard to see because we’ve no experience separating the layers. We think of the mind as a single, mono-layer thing. But if you sit still focusing on your own mind for enough hours, you’ll start to see the different pieces.
“Truth” in this case is a little funny because I want to think of it as a statement. The other three are statements. The fourth is, itself, the eightfold path.
If you need a declarative form, it goes like: “The following is a set of practices we predict will move you toward locating, and ceasing, the attachment thing going on in your mind: [insert the entire dharma, ie all teachings of buddhism].
Buddhism isn’t a textbook it’s an instruction manual. The skill and benefit comes from doing, and mastering, the practices the instruction manual lays out. Reading the instruction manual does NOT mean you understand the machine. It means you understand what steps to take to get started fiddling with the machine.
The skill, the understanding of the machine, isn’t conveyable in words. Same way the taste of garlic or the ability to his a target with a baseball can’t be conveyed in words. With the garlic and the baseball, to transmit that knowledge with words all you can do is guide someone to the place where they can develop the knowledge for themselves. “Go to aisle 7. Grab the bag marked ‘garlic’. Buy it and take it home. Open the bag. Eat some garlic raw. Then put some butter in a skillet, melt the butter. Slice some garlic into that butter. Inhale, pay attention to what your nose is saying. After a while, taste that garlic you cooked in the butter.”
See? All instructions. That’s how buddhism works.
As an addendum to the dharma, I’d like to add “Go eat some shrooms”.