[Buddha-l] Bot being able to imagine annihilation [confused]

[JKirkpatrick]

"In his lectures on pragmatism, William James conjectures that
having views about what happens after death probably do have some
bearing on the quality of one's life. He supposed that believing
in continued existence probably gives people more hope..."

Here's another way of having views about what happens after death
as a motivator to feeling hopeful, if not James's view: if one
thinks of post one's own death, one might want to think
beforehand about mending fences, and leaving one's library, for
the benefit of others still alive rather than thinking, Oh
goody---it's not going to end for me, after all. Yay.

Joanna
_____________________________________


On Jun 1, 2010, at 10:58 AM, Richard Hayes wrote:

> One way is to emphasis that no matter what one's view about
personal survival may be, one's experience of life as
unsatisfactory will remain unchanged. Since views about such
things are not the root cause of discontent, one's time is better
spent in dealing with those matters that are the root causes of
one's discontent. So on this reading, the question of
annihilation continued existence is simply irrelevant.

In his lectures on pragmatism, William James conjectures that
having views about what happens after death probably do have some
bearing on the quality of one's life. He supposed that believing
in continued existence probably gives people more hope than the
materialistic belief that when the body can no longer support
consciousness, consciousness stops and there is no longer any
recollection of one's life. Of course, James was smart enough to
know that what was true of his own temperament was not
necessarily true of other people, so he realized that some people
might find greater comfort in the prospects of oblivion than in
the prospects of continued existence.

Being one of those people who find the prospect of total oblivion
deeply comforting and the prospect of continued existence quite
horrible to contemplate, I naturally have an emotional as well as
an intellectual attachment to materialist, and this attachment
has strongly predisposed me to view nirvana as, well, total
oblivion. My claim is that this is NOT annihilation of a self,
but simply the cessation of consciousness (which, obviously, I do
not see as the self). So I claim to be hewing the middle path on
the grounds that I interpret the two extremes (the self is
annihilated and the self continues) as being grounded in a
presupposition that fails.

I'm not sure what a phenomenologist would make of my position. As
an atheist, I am inclined to say "Only God knows." I do know what
many of my fellow Buddhists make of my position. It's not a
pretty picture.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico








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