rachMiel

I doubt this is possible anymore for me. (Was once upon a time, I had my 'masters.') The ship has sailed. It's relative all the way up, all the way down. The only way out of my nihilist cul de sac I currently see is love. (Pure awareness/consciousness does little for me.) Love may or may not be an absolute, but it's perhaps as close to divine as unenlighteneds like me get.

Thanks for the reminder that 'nihilism' is a conceptual construct, a thought form. When your world is inhabited by thought forms, things get weird, tulpas and egregores notwithstanding. I tend to live in thought rather than 'raw experience.' And things do get weird.

Bingo. This is quite the image. Desperately kicking to stay afloat (for what?) vs. giving up and drowning, neither are happy paths. Is there a middle way?

I would say living is no task for the faint of heart.

How is this related to the existential despair of nihilism?

I bemoan the apparent absence of absolute truth. I miss believing in absolutes, feel unmoored and unprotected. I use stories, non-story is too barren for me like staring into the abyss. Given my definition of nihilism is absence of absolutes! No absolutes makes sense to me on all kinds of levels, it feels true, but I can't know for sure. Is there any way out? Is the person who knows the abyss forever stuck with this knowing?

And the deeper you mine, the vaster the 'field' revealed. Seen from this pov, all my prapanca about nihilism is 'much ado about nothing.'

@Ajay0 Thanks for the response. What is the relationship between virtue and love? Is love the antidote for nihilist despair?

@LastThursday Right there is definitely circularity in the assertion “There are no absolutes.“ But I’m not asserting this as an absolute truth, I am saying it’s what I strongly believe. It is my story of the true nature of reality. I don’t want to escape it, I want the truth. I just wish I could find a way to be more comfortable and at peace with it. In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray falls into the dark side of nihilism at some point in his endless succession of the same day. But he gets past it. I feel it’s time for me to get past the dark side, it’s lost its charm.

I work with the emotions at times, let them flower, rise and fade, without resisting them. But I have to tread lightly, my emotions are a bit out of whack these days.

By nihilism I mean the view that there are no absolutes: meaning, purpose, good, evil, right, wrong. All of these exist relatively in consensus reality, but none exist absolutely and inherently. We're all making it up as we go along: storytelling, best guessing, speculating. This goes for everyone, from Buddha to Trump. There are people who are 'closer to the truth' perhaps, but like an asymptote, no view ever reaches the absolute. It took me many years to arrive here, I never intended or wanted to find nihilism, it just sort of emerged from my self-work. The good thing about nihilism is it can be deeply freeing, all rules/codes/morality is seen as fallible, especially the rules that are presented as inviolable! The bad thing is the freedom can feel like free-fall: no up, no down, no control, no security. Just falling freely with no safety net. For people who rely emotionally on the feeling of security and meaning that belief in absolute authority brings, not having this can be nightmarish. This is the predicament I find myself in, I am deeply convinced about the (relative) truth of my nihilist view, I can't un-see it, but I don't feel capable of bearing its consequences emotionally. I can't handle the truth! Thanks for listening. Feel free to share your take. :-)

Bohm and Krishnamurti inquired deeply into the nature and limitations of thought. Lots and lots of links out there. Here are the seminal 12 dialogues:

The author and anthropologist Ernest Becker theorized fear of death is the fundamental driver of human behavior, influencing everything from individual personal goals to collective cultural and societal structures. Makes sense onto me! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker

I think it's fair to say any absolute conclusion you come to about anything is a form of self-deception. "Open your mouth and you're wrong."