Life is full of contradictions.


I also learned some meditation. Φυσικά, the unreal soul in me wouldn’t let it slide without a thorough analysis, finding or inventing all kinds of connections.

Let me start with something totally unconnected. Ειδήσεις. Why is something news? Πρόσφατα, I read about some people of Indian origin getting shot in obscure places in Kentucky or Ohio. That is the kind of things an Indian would pay attention to, when planning a trip to the US during these troubled times. Αλλά, why was it news to begin with? Because it doesn’t happen that often. Με αυτή την έννοια, this piece of news should be a comforting one. Isn’t that a contradiction?


Let me get around to what I wanted to discuss. The purpose of mindfulness meditation is, φυσικά, to be mindful. What does that mean though? The meditation techniques teach you to be as aware as possible of the here-and-now. You accomplish this feat by gently removing your thoughts, by emptying your mind, όπως ήταν. So mindfulness is not totally different from mind-emptiness! What a paradox!


I have another argument to put forward to insist that this proximity to θάνατο is what the meditative state entails. In Buddhist tradition, the cycle of life and death is suffering. The purpose of life therefore is to rid ourselves of this cycle, samsara, by practising detachment, για παράδειγμα. When we finally transcend samsara, we are one with the manor oneness that is the supreme consciousness – η Brahma. Our tiny consciousness finds its source and destination. We are no longer accursed to live. It is indeed a final and complete death.

In the physicalist view of mind, Ωστόσο,, consciousness is an emergent property of our physical bodies. There is no such thing as consciousness without a body, and the notion of a supreme consciousness is just silly. When the body dies, so does the associated consciousness. Every death is a final and complete death, and there is no continuity of consciousness beyond the death of its housing. This view has to be true, or we would be walking around with the memories of previous lives. Βέβαιος, there are some reports of people remembering their previous lives, which is news precisely because it is rare. Without commenting on the veracity of such reports, we can safely say that there is no continuity of consciousness for almost all of us. Και, there is no such thing as discontinuous consciousness. The stream of consciousness cannot be cut into independent pieces with no memory of each other, for then they become separate consciousnesses.

