What I find hard to understand about this, is, if it's just a game, why play it? If we don't really exist, does anything matter?
And yet there are all these things in life to experience, love, joy, grief, sadness, peace..people to love, people to help, things to create. If it's all an illusion, what's the point of engaging with any of it, since it doesn't really exist anyway?
good question!
well, you can't help but play it. there's nothing else to do! you can become what is called, i think, a Patayka Buddha who sits on a mountain all day in non-conceptional bliss but he's missing hte point in my view and i think most Buddhist view.
and who says it's not real? if it seems real then go with that. there's the idealist/hindu idea that it really is just a dream created by a brain, but i have never worked out where they go with that. i do think the senses and the brain are limited, it's common sense. but i don't the external world is just a projection of mind (although things do not 'fall into the eye' - the light travels into the eye and the brain's chemistry makes the images within the brain - so it's truly difficult to tell whether what is out there actually is real at all!)
this is a very hard question to answer from my own direct experience.
i look at it from a place of attachment - i love getting attached to things (playing the game), falling in love, sex, football, politics, friendships but 'seeing through the game' means my attachment only goes so far, infact because it only goes so far i am freer and have more space for the attachment to be exciting, fullfilling, interesting. i don't think for example 'if this person hates me i might as well kill myself'. the existential despair has vanished because of buddhism. but boy am i still a mass of seething emotion. who the hell wouldn't want be!
shakespeare is great on this:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
key stress on:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
buddhism and a great deal of eastern thinking just points at the 'what ever it is' that casts the shadow - the shadow being our lives (the game). but you cannot cast no shadow, no? you have to play the game. you cannot help but cast a shadow. but when you see it's justs a shadow, the game becomes less terrifying, the suffering doesn't last so long, and you have direct experiential access to the weird 'what ever it is' that casts the shadow.
this is all ancient eastern shit that is at the core of buddhism, daoism, parts of hinduism, etc. zen is one of the most direct paths in my view.
this guy who hardly gets hardly any viewsand is funny AF and has meditated for years and what he's talking about here nails it and to me explains it. he is talking about 'non dualilty' which is the essence of buddhism and advaita vedanta.
why can't we have public intellectuals like this any more. pure charisma. and as anti guru/teacher as they come.
