Nisargadatta said that birth is a calamity. Well, you're in a life because you're the protagonist in one of the infinitely-many hypothetical life-experience possibility-stories. Therefore, it would be quite meaningless to speak of the person distinct from the life. The person, by his/her very nature, is in the life.
.Can you prove this?
.I can see what you mean in a "possible worlds" scenario but that is not quite the same as a soul migrating to different bodies.
.It goes back to the idea of what makes me "me". Can I ever be otherwise? Is that even a legitimate question? I don't think it is.
.If I was not me, there is/was/will be no me. However, the possibility of a person can be projected, though this is not the same as the possibility can be actualized by just any birth-related event. It would have to be that birth related event to be me.
.Have you ever had the experience of waking from a dream in which you knew something that was really important,and really, indescribably, good, but not remembering what it was?
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A number of people report that experience. Spiritual teachers say that it wasn't a dream. They say that you were waking from deep-sleep, and experiencing a rare memory of it.
.Possibly. But this just speaks to the fact that, every night, people mostly look forward to this blissful state of conscious-nothingness. Unfortunately for me, I'm a bad sleeper, so rarely experience this.
.I'd say that is the ideal state. No stress, no decisions, no suffering, just purely existing.
.Yes, [in deep sleep]the brain is doing "something". It is not complete physical-nothingness. However, it is very close to conscious-nothingness.
.As with birth, what is the point of experiencing at all? What are we really trying to do here in waking life with all this instrumentality of the everyday?
I understand the problem. NOTHING, defined as nonexistence, is difficult to grasp. We're in the habit of or are confined to understanding in terms of attributes/properties which, by far, are positive in nature. What I mean is we need some attributes that are attached to a concept or object and only then do we even begin to understand them. However, unlike most objects (mental/physical) NOTHING is defined in the negative. In fact it is the ultimate negative - the absence of everything. In a way we could say "There's NOTHING to understand." — TheMadFool
This probably doesn't make sense give what I've said above but I have commented on how math can make sense of NOTHING by equating it to zero. — TheMadFool
I think "nothing", the word, is quite different from other words. Other words have physical/mental referents but "nothing", by definition, lacks any referent. — TheMadFool
Negative concepts are defined in relation to one's expectations. — Magnus Anderson
I presume not. How many senses of the word are there? I'm not sure the list is determinate, nor that I could make myself responsible for all the relevant senses from here to eternity.And you mean that in every sense of the word? — Janus
The eyes and brain don't actually see the type, since there is no photon output, coming from the type, to stimulate the brain. — wellwisher
The concept 'No-thing' presupposes the existence of things, and as all things are mind constructs, the concept comes attached to both a (P) world and an (M) world. Therefore 'nothing' can be correctly defined as the absence of things in a universe that is apriori composed of things, and thinking things. — Marcus de Brun
"if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you" : Nietzsche — believenothing
In what other way can we make sense of N? — TheMadFool
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