gottawonder

is this idea that everything is just an illusion, so don't take it too seriously. That death doesn't mean much because we'll just move on to the next whatever, and it's okay. That material things aren't real either, so don't get hung up on that. Etc.

I get that we shouldn't put too much emphasis on things like clothes or makeup or fancy cars, but you know, we also have to live. We kind of have to care about having somewhere safe and comfortable to live. It doesn't have to be a mansion, but it's where we spend a good deal of our lives, so shouldn't it be nice? We have to pay taxes, pay medical expenses, and so on and so forth, so we pretty much have to work. We can't just sit on a mat and think "oh, it's okay if I'm poor". It is NOT okay to be poor. Being poor really sucks, and I hate it when religions or other people try to make poverty noble in some way. Those are likely people who have never really been poor. Some people might think they grew up poor because they wore their older sibling's clothes or something, but poor means a lot more than just not being fancy. It means insecurity and powerlessness. It means working demeaning jobs and taking shit from everyone because you don't have options.

Personally, I would LOVE to be filthy rich. Not because I want to be obnoxious about it, but because it would be nice to have enough money and enough security to only be in places you want to be, with people you actually want to be with, and to be able to make decisions based on what you want to do, or what is optimal, an not based on what things cost. That's what money means to me.

I get that a great deal of Eastern spirituality is trying to deal with shitty lives with no money. Most religion seems to be about trying to find peace even though everything is shitty, and I get it. It's great to find peace in the sense of developing compassion, finding connection with the universe, and so on. I love that side of spirituality. I don't think it functions well if you have to pretend that the world isn't real, though. How do you function in this world, right the way it is, if your religion smugly tells you that nothing in it is real?

A table might be an illusion, but damn, it seems to work to put things on it. A jacket might be an illusion too, but it gives me the illusion of being warm. My body might be an illusion too, but yet, don't I want to take care of it so that it looks nice and I maybe live longer, and I have less pain?

Eastern philosophy often also talks about compassion to others, and to animals, and I agree with that whole heartedly. Yet, what's the deal, doesn't that mean that other beings are also illusions? My dog seems real enough to me, and I have to feed her and care for her physical being just as if it WERE real, or she'll suffer and maybe die.

How do you reconcile the idea that death and suffering are just illusions with the idea of compassion and reducing the suffering of yourself and others? The material world might be all illusions; we know that really we are made up of atoms, and that if you examine an atom, it can be broken into smaller and smaller particles that all seem to be made of smaller particles, and that an atom is mostly empty space, and an electron is empty space, and protons and neutrons and so on are mostly empty space too.

Particles can pass right through atoms. Particles can pass right through smaller and smaller particles that make up an atom. Apparently everything is made up of nothing more than energy fields, and energy is made up of photons, but a photon...isn't really a thing at all.

We know that matter cannot be created or destroyed. When we die, the matter of our body just goes on to be other things. It will do so forever, until nothing is left but photons moving outwardly into the vacuum. That is the projected end of everything, is a vast emptiness with photons pushing ever outwardly. Until something happens, and the photons all get pulled back together dramatically and the universe is reborn (maybe).

So why bother with clusters of particles that cling to life like it's all there is? Don't we have to play by the rules here, and treat our material bodies like they're real after all? It seems like a pretty weird thing to bother with, if you're an eternal bunch of photons.