Saturday, 28 December 2019


If experience is corpuscular, consisting of a rapidly moving series of co-dependent originations, each essentially isolated within itself, then what is suffering? One sense of qualia is that they are such self-contained moments of sentience, ruthlessly determined by their conditions, and suffering is a quality belonging to these units or cells of pure sentience. This understanding arises as one way of trying to make sense out of consciousness as universal; nothing distinguishes these atoms of sentience but the contingent fact of the stream in which they happen to arise, and hence, paradoxically, all suffering is on an equal footing with your suffering. What you share, you share perfectly with all sentient instances, and that is your basic predicament. And if what is good to you is a reduction in your suffering you owe this just as much to all other instances, all being equally embedded in the stream of co-dependent arisal, or at least all that you can in any sense be causally related to.

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