“Rebirth will seem impossible only if you think of the self as a stable, enduring substantial entity instead of, as Nietzsche partly understood it, a series of mental and physical events – a conditioned stream of consciousness. According to the Buddha, death doesn’t break the causal connectedness of these events. It breaks up only a particular pattern in which they occur. And such is the nature of causal connectedness that these events start forming another pattern as soon as rebirth takes place. The Buddha thus made rebirth somewhat plausible, even though this remains the one part of his teachings that requires a leap into faith.”
“The acts with the least karmic consequences are those that flow from this awareness: that we lack a fixed or unchanging essence but are assemblages of dynamic yet wholly conditioned mental and physical processes; and that suffering results when we seek to assert our autonomy in a radically interdependent world, when a groundless self seeks endlessly and futilely to ground itself through actions driven by ignorance, greed and delusion, which when frustrated lead to even further attempts at self-affirmation, making suffering appear inevitable and delusion indestructible.”
“The acts with the least karmic consequences are those that flow from this awareness: that we lack a fixed or unchanging essence but are assemblages of dynamic yet wholly conditioned mental and physical processes; and that suffering results when we seek to assert our autonomy in a radically interdependent world, when a groundless self seeks endlessly and futilely to ground itself through actions driven by ignorance, greed and delusion, which when frustrated lead to even further attempts at self-affirmation, making suffering appear inevitable and delusion indestructible.”
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