[acituan]

Ultimate stillness is death, and the ideas of nirvana while leaving folks behind is but a single school in Buddhist thought. I find it to be anti-humanist romantic escapism.

Another version of nirvana brings back the learnings to other humans and help alleviate their suffering.

Ego inflation causes a lot of the suffering for sure, but you can’t function as a human without ego either. To deny it is to deny humanity, to escape into a baby or animal like state.

On the other hand spiritual inflation (i.e bypass) of this sort can be just as bad; ego evolved because it was evolutionarily adaptive (despite having massive failure modes). You can meditate in complete peace only if you free ride others taking care of business of the real world.

Sati also means to remember, anamnesis in Plato’s terms. Among many, to remember who you are; not a god, not a devil, a human that evolved into consciousness and now has to reconcile the upstairs and the downstairs of reality with your fallacious cognitive machinery the best way you can.

[_y5hn]

Death is never the first step, though it will be the last. Well-written :)