WEEK TWO ESSAY
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On an initial reflection of nihilism my first reaction is to say that it has not been part of my life, and that I haven’t had any significant experiences with this concept. However if I think a bit more deeply I can see that my own “limited” thinking about an issue or topic can be considered nihilistic. For example when confronted with a situation, usually a challenging one, I can tell myself “well this is just the way it or he/she is. Nothing will change.” I guess this is really nihilistic thinking! So it might be better for me to reframe this as “this is what is now,” and then not dwell on whether it will change or not.
Since I had a Judeo/Christian upbringing I am much more familiar with the concept of eternalism. I was brought up with the idea that there is a God and a heaven, which is place we should seek to enter at some point. Like many of you this seemed too simplistic for me as a grew into a young adult, so I began exploring other philosophies or paths which eventually led me to Buddhism. I will say that some of the promises of eternalism do offer comfort. My sister and I like to think that our beloved parents are united somewhere, such as heaven since this was their belief, but reality tells me this may not be so. I do know that they are forever in my heart, but that forever may only be as long as I’m here. 🙂 As I journey through life on a Buddhist path, more and more I do take comfort in the concept that I just don’t know what will happen. This helps me not to dread things such as growing old, which is getting closer all of the time! The greatest teaching of this path has been to teach me to continually let go. It does indeed feel freeing.
I hope that all of you have a good week. Stay warm and take care!
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Hi Virginia,
I came across the saying “Letting go is freedom” recently, and find it fits in both material and spiritual senses. Very helpful as I contemplate aging, as you suggest. I also appreciate your point about comfort. I think the promises of eternalist traditions offer a great deal of comfort for people who follow the “rules,” but often seem to require abandoning any questioning of those rules. My early path was quite similar to yours, and once I found my questions had no answers that made sense to me, the comfort evaporated.
Thank you!
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@Colin. I had this same experience of comfort disappearing once I began questioning the promises of externalist traditions. And when I stopped believing them. Their comfort seems to be dependent on believing their premises.
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Thank you for sharing your contemplation and experience.
I appreciate you looking deeply and finding where both extremes have touched your life.
I love your description of “letting go”. Like you, letting go has helped me find the spaciousness to experience a release from old ideas and fears. I guess letting go is a place where we embrace the joy of groundlessness. -
Virginia, your thoughts on nihilism were thought provoking for me. When I was writing my response, I said I haven’t identified with nihilistic philosophy, but your re-think offers a different perspective. I have always hated the old adage that “things happen for a reason.” I chafe at the suggestion that there is some higher purpose, destiny, etc in a school shooting, for example. I guess this is nihilism in a way…hmmmm. Thanks for giving me something to chew on: )
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I was born into a conservative family in India and eternalism was simply the fabric of our lives. As I grew though, I found the system too rigid and constraining, especially for a girl who wanted to grow up to be a scientist and questioned everything. Even the act of questioning was considered radical and rebellious. So, I drifted away slowly at first and then rapidly fell into the seductive trap of nihilism. I arrived in America!
Despite my religious upbringing and scientific training, I always felt that there had to be “something else” and that is what led me here to Buddhism. The path that is rigorous but not rigid. The path that allows for magic and mystery and something else.
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For me, it was eternalism that came first. When my world was governed by my parents, their expectations set during my young and tender years. If I act a certain way, follow the pre-set rules, live up to the ideals presented before me, then my life will be blessed and perfect. I know these expectations came from a place of love, a place that held my parents’ hopes and dreams for me in this country they came to call home. I played by the rules, quashing the early stirrings of rebellion as a teenager, too afraid to test the waters at home.
But enter……the college years! The time period in my life when nihilism shoved eternalism to the back seat, taking the wheel. A shift.
My parents weren’t there watching me. I could make my own rules, ones that suited my life, and my much younger self’s idea of happiness at the time. Rules that were as fluid and changeable as waters rising during a flood. This meant, for instance, that the rules on a Tuesday night could look very different from the rules on a Friday or Saturday night! Whatever worked to make me think I was living my best life.
As I entered the next big phases of my life, roles that would define the coming decades (spouse, physician, parent), a shift once again took place. This time, eternalism reclaimed its front row spot, settling back into the driver’s seat for the long haul.
I won’t deny that it felt good to return to the rules and the greater cause, to be playing the “good girl” again. But deep down, something about it felt off. I knew I didn’t want to return to the days of nihilism, which I now chalked up to that catchphrase of “finding myself” in my twenties. At the same time, I had somehow equated eternalism with perfectionism. And it was exhausting. Discovering meditation and mindfulness practices helped me to see these two aspects—-eternalism and nihilism—-as the opposite sides of a river. My practice continues (and will probably always continue!) to be one of finding that balance between these two opposite riverbanks. It’s how I visualize for myself the practice of the middle way.-
Hi Anita,
I appreciate your description of your changing perspective through different phases of your life, how both extremes can be exhausting, and how important it has been for you to find balance. Thank you!-
Hi Anita,
I love your discovery of eternalism and perfectionism, as if by believing in it you might have been reenvoking a history or style of believing in it that had grown to be more expansive in your life than it was when it was first instructed. I also love the way you frame that each system of beliefs is connected by a through-river, in some way. I feel that, too. That any desire for meaning (or its absence) has us orbiting something very similar.
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Anita, I like the developmental perspective and had not really put it together for myself that way. Since my father died when I was 18, it coincided with my move away from externalism but also going off to college where the exploration of different spiritualities would be considered developmentally “normal.” I always thought it was because of his death that I moved more towards atheism and not necessarily developmental. Thank you for the insight.
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Hi Anita.
Thank you for your reflection, the visual of the two sides of a river resonates – which leads us to the “middle” of the river and swimming, floundering, floating along (row row row your boat gently down the stream” (smile)). I find nihilism and externalism to be the pendulum that has swung to often through my Life. Thank you.
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After contemplating the two extremes of nihilism and eternalism today, I can see that I have often lived like a ball in a frantic pinball machine—bouncing wildly between the two, lights flashing and bells ringing—desperately trying to figure out how to play this game of life.
In school and at work, this back-and-forth is especially clear. My belief in meritocracy led me to think that if I worked hard enough—really, really hard—and did everything “right,” I would eventually attain a kind of student or worker perfection. I imagined becoming a hero of sorts, rewarded with lasting success and deep satisfaction. But when that satisfaction failed to materialize, or when I saw others achieving success with far less effort, or when my own hard work simply did not lead where I had planned, I swung to the opposite extreme. I would ask myself, In my attempt to climb the ladder of success, do I even have my ladder against the right wall? From there, it was easy to collapse into the belief that my struggle meant nothing, led to nothing, and achieved nothing.
I can see the same pattern in my marriage, my relationship to exercise, and really in all areas of my life. What feels most interesting to me now, though, are the moments when something entirely different entered the frame.
A few times—during brushes with death, periods of profound bleakness, or moments when my life was utterly upended—something unexpected happened. Long before I encountered Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s language of “groundlessness,” I was already describing it to myself: The ground is shifting sand. Everything I believed in was a fantasy. There is nothing to hold on to. I have been experiencing something similar over the past year as I struggle with the chaos of the political landscape in my country.
During those earlier moments, I allowed myself to stay with the discomfort of letting go. I let my house of cards collapse. And in those suspended moments—when everything felt up in the air—I experienced something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull discovering flight while attempting a loop-de-loop. These were among the most significant moments of my life. I was certain I would die, wither, or crash painfully. Instead, I found no death, no loss, no decay. I found something entirely new.
It is difficult to describe, but those moments led to more life, more awareness, and more open-heartedness than I had ever known before.
One reason I am taking this course now is to create space for a similar transformation to become possible again—this time in relation to my upside-down feelings about the political situation in my country. I have already bounced between eternalism and nihilism around this issue, and I feel ready to let go. I want this dark trouble to yield something new and good.
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Hi Kat! Thank you so much for your essay. I can feel the back & forth that you describe, including the exhaustion and frustration and heartbreak as you swung from one extreme to another. Our culture’s tendency to dichotomize everything exacerbates this, doesn’t it? And then I cheered for you and related to the way you describe the times you have been (and continue to be) inspired (inspirited) by the more, the limitless, and yes, the groundlessness of life.
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Thank you for sharing, Kat. I can identify with the allure of the promise of hard work/perfectionism being rewarded, and the crashing disappointment when results don’t follow the plan! And I have also found that it has been some of the moments of profound disillusionment–veering off the intended path–that have brought such great evolution. I heard an interesting podcast this week in which Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist, talked about the “end-of-history-illusion–the tendency for people to recognize that they’ve changed a lot in the past (values, personality, etc), yet underestimating how much they will continue to change in the future. Your essay brough it to mind…I thought it was such a cool concept…made me think about how my negative framing of things not turning out as planned may just be my brain railing against inevitable change.
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Your essay really resonated with me. You perfectly captured the feeling of bouncing from one thing to another desperately wanting to hold on to some belief system that would help us make sense of all that comes our way in life and somehow make it easier to navigate. I am reconciling to the “groundlessness” myself and knowing that this is the truth somehow gives me courage and confidence that i am not “doing life all wrong”. Thank you for putting words to this sentiment.
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Anita, it’s so interesting how you have seen the way these two philosophies have played out in your life over time. It makes sense that when you were free to “rebel” that you turned towards nihilism, the opposite of what your parents were trying to instill in you. How do we really grow if we don’t rebel? But as you wrote you found yourself returning to the earlier leanings of eternalism. I bet this happens to many as they become parents. I’ve read from a few different sources, one being David Bowie, that we don’t really come into who we are (or what we truly believe) until the second half of life. I think this is true! Then we seem to find the courage or just the need to be who we truly are. Thanks for sharing!
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Kat, I love the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull! What a nice metaphor for you; something new when things felt so scary. It sounds like you have indeed been courageous through the challenges that you have faced. Thank you also for pointing out the need to find a different way of looking at what is going on in the US. As things get more frightening and divisive I feel that too. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
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I have not swung back and forth. I don’t think I ever was an eternalist – the notion of a god (or gods) judging me was never something that I was taught, or that resonated for me. There was a time when a piece of nihilism did resonate – that “dead is dead”. But that didn’t lead to “so nothing matters”. And the dichotomy of “god(s) vs no god(s) doesn’t resonate, either. It feels to me like there’s something, but not a judge.
So I don’t really have experiences with either. What I do have is the experience of “something else”.
Good friends were Wiccan and I had a big backyard, so for years I hosted rituals for Solstice and Equinox, as well as a pagan wedding. What appealed to me was the connection to nature, and I came to think of myself as a pantheist. Once I was in conversation in an interfaith setting, and somebody said he was struggling to accept God. He said, “I need to see a burning bush.” And what came out of my mouth was “Every bush is a burning bush!” Meaning all life is sacred and divine. So – neither nihilist nor eternalist.
Two things came to me during our discussion in class of eternalism and nihilism: one of my favorite quotes, and an image. The quote is “Things are not what they seem; nor are they otherwise.” (As quoted in 1,001 Pearls of Wisdom (2006) by David Ross, from the Shurangama Sutra) I love this quote; so much fun to play with.
And the image that came was that of a labyrinth. Not a maze:there’s only one path, and it leads to the center, but in a way that’s very indirect and constantly changing. It goes in when it seems like it should go out, and goes out just when you think you’ve reached the center. It’s easy to wonder if you’ve somehow made a wrong turn (though that’s impossible). And yet if you stay on the path, you get there. I can’t rationally explain what this has to do with eternalism and nihilism, but it feels like an illustration of my path: not here, not there, not neither-here-nor-there.-
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Rosie, I resonated with so much of what you wrote. Thank you so much for your essay! For me, with a deeply religious background, the “something else” has been a bit more of a recent part of my life. But it is something that feels so close to home and that I love to continue to explore every day (part of why I’m here in this class!). And thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on labyrinths in this context! I feel a similar way, and yet it is something I hadn’t even considered when I was thinking about eternalism and nihilism, so thank you for giving me something to mull over!
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Hi Rosie, I really enjoyed reading your essay – nodding my head throughout. Your labyrinth metaphor feels very apt for this journey, very well expressed. It never seems clear where you are or where you will be next until you are there. The burning bush comment reminded me of the Gandhi quote along the lines of: if you can’t see God in the next person you meet, you will not find him anywhere. Also, I appreciate your comment that “dead is dead” didn’t mean “nothing matters” for you. I felt the same way when I was closer to a nihilistic view, and I still don’t see meaning and morality as inherent only in eternalist views. I feel we are capable of realizing them whatever we think about continuity. Thank you!
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Much of my life has been lived based on the underlying foundation of eternalism. I believed in the idea of an eternal soul since I was a child. While I had no substantial, intentional religious exposure in childhood, there were loud cultural messages related to the importance of living in certain ways, in order to avoid punishment or to receive rewards in an afterlife. There was some amount of fear and confusion which arose from these messages, possibly because I did not have access to a structured religious system which consistently defined the “right” or “wrong” ways of living. As I matured, I became very curious about the accuracy of these philosophies and spent time studying a variety of perspectives.
I don’t recognize much in the way of nihilism within my experiences or belief systems. In my thirties, I did shift my personal designation from “agnostic” to “atheist” for a time; however, it never felt authentic, since I have a persistent interest in “things that cannot be seen,” and a tendency to perceive deeper meanings below the surface. I would say that finding a middle path between eternalism and nihilism has been one of my most intriguing adventures.
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Natalie, for a long time I have described myself as agnostic, for reasons very similar to what you describe. I have a surety that defies objective description that there is more than meets the eye—actually more than meets perception by the good old five senses! I think it is why exploring the middle path also calls me. Glad to be on the adventure with you: )
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Hi Natalie, I can appreciate what you say about fear and confusion without a solid religious framework. I think that gets to the difficulty around atheist versus agnostic positions. How can you be sure those cultural messages around the afterlife are wrong? How can you know there really is no God? Agnosticism seems like the only position that’s reasonable until your own experience gives you the answers you need – definitely an intriguing adventure!
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Christian faith is the foundation of my mother’s life, and she is the parent who was central to my upbringing. Some of my earliest memories include dressing up on Sunday morning for church and the beauty of candlelit Christmas Eve services. Active involvement in a church community continued through my high school years, including singing in our church choir. We attended fairly traditional protestant churches, Lutheran and then Baptist, where fire and brimstone were not on the menu. When I think about how the study and practice of religion impacted my world view, the emphasis on the unconditional love of God, and how we should manifest that love towards others, are in the forefront. My mother lives her faith and was the love in our home. She made no bones about the fact that church attendance was mandatory. Yet, she has always been accepting and open minded, including about the LGBTQ community and other religions and cultures, which is a big part of why the version of eternalism I experienced was more about a belief in eternal life than it was about that option being snatched away from anyone for “bad” behavior. The God in our home was not one to foresake anyone.
I was not raised in a single-parent household. My dad was there, but played a very passive role in parenting. His contributions were polarizing–angry, loud discipline for any behavior that inconvenienced him and cool-cat listening sessions, with a playlist of classic rock. From a young age I understood he had come back from Vietnam (when I was one) a changed man. Once an acolyte he was now an atheist and a nihilist. From the little that he’s shared about his experience in the war (usually when he’s had a few), I can’t fault his view. And I’m thankful that I can’t fathom the crucible he survived.
Somehow my parents reached a detente. My mom offering my dad grace, and my dad largely remaining silent on his thoughts about religion. In retrospect, maybe this dichotomy empowered me to pick and choose which pieces of Christianity I bought into. I always enjoyed the ritual and community. I believe in the golden rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Prayer was my first mindfulness. Early on though, i choked on Biblical literalism, the inherent patriarchy, and the idea of some all-powerful being judging me and granting (or not) a ticket to whatever is next. And by junior high, I faulted the logic of any organized religion “getting it right,” since which organized religion you ended up in seemed entirely dependent on where you were born and who you were born to. When I left for college, I left church behind, although I completed a Religion minor in my studies, because I think understanding the many approaches to belief around the world is both fascinating and central to understanding history and culture.
While I have never returned to organized religion, neither have I ever leaned towards nihilism. The version of it I experience of it with my dad felt despairing, harshly cynical, and lonely. While I have known for a long time that I don’t believe in a single version of God, I do believe there is a through-thread of spirit across all sentient beings. Still figuring out what exactly that means: ) But I believe our lives and the way our lives impact the world matter.
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Hi Melanie! I was enthralled with your essay. First, in a kindred way with your similar Christian upbringing (candlelit Christmas Eve services, choir singing, etc). Then, with your father. Interestingly, my dad is also a Vietnam vet who still deals with PTSD to this day, but with a totally different religious outlook to your dad. In fact, I would say he is one of the most religious persons I know. It turned me off for a long time as I navigated my own relationship with religion, but now, as a 38-year-old, I love talking to him about religion as, in his old age, he has really branched out. He loves reading Thich Nhat Hanh books and he’s currently on his 3rd read of the Tao. So all of a sudden I find myself having these lovely conversations with him that I never in a million years would have expected. Anyway, thank you very much for sharing your personal experiences in your essay. I very much enjoyed reading it, and I look forward to continuing to be in class together.
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Hi Melanie, wow, reading this was so inspiring. I appreciate the different teachers you had in your life early on and your courage and curiosity to find your own path. The spiritual adventure of getting to know that “through-thread” (love that) is not one I knew I’d be invited on! But discovering that that doorway was open for me to walk through, and expansive and kind enough to ask questions and bring all of my self and experiences with, has become the aspect of my life I feel most joyous with and in. It’s a great place to be when you can both have a seat in the room and have questions-in-progress while you’re there.
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Liana, it’s so cool that your father has expanded his perspective and that it’s provided such fertile ground for shared discussions! It is truly one of the fascinating things about humans, that seemingly similar experiences can result in such different outcomes.
I am also so pleased to be on the journey with you!
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Dear Melanie,
I resonate with This draw toward Buddhism you discovered by the “through-thread.” The philosophy aspects of Buddhism provide a home for those of us who do not want to practice a “religion,” yet, want guiding principles for living a good life or better life. I am moved by your lack of despair and trust in the path. Thank you
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My early years were heavily influenced by eternalism. I went to church every week (by force far more than choice) and lived in a community that was heavily dominated by another Christian faith, which affected everything in the town from politics to the structure of the public school system. I did not enjoy this environment.
I was the kid who asked all the difficult questions in Sunday school. I couldn’t get on board with accepting things on faith. I wanted to know why, how we could trust the source was reliable, what the teachings of this faith meant about what would happen to those who followed other religions (e.g., were we supposed to believe they were all going to hell?). I wouldn’t say I was coming from it from a nihilist perspective, but I had a strong skeptic’s mind.
As a teenager, I gravitated to the new age section of our local bookstore and immersed myself in learning more about pagan traditions, astrology, tarot, etc. My interest came from a place of feeling like there was something more than what could be easily observed and explained (i.e. not nihilism), and tuning into things like the energies of nature and my own intuition seemed more authentic than what I learned in Sunday school.
I still have a skeptic’s mind, one of the reasons I love Susan’s frequent “don’t take my word for it” reminders, and I enjoy the process of learning, questioning, and seeking to discover what resonates for me. -
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Like many others, I accepted the christian beliefs of those around me without question as a small child. I felt following the “rules” was how to be a good person, which would lead to a good afterlife, and the approval of my church community was part of feeling on the right track.
Around age 11, something changed in my perception, quite suddenly. I lost any sense of connection to God as an invisible, all-powerful personage who was concerned with individual wants.
Occasionally, the question “Do you believe in God?” would come up. For a short time in my early teens I would answer “No.” I may have been closer to nihilistic thinking then than at any other time, but I didn’t really accept the binary choice, never thought everything is meaningless. I always felt nothing spiritual was disprovable any more than it was provable, and I couldn’t discount so many other people’s spiritual experiences even if I didn’t see the same things.
I came to think of God as more of an underlying force animating some aspect of physical reality that we identify as spiritual, and my answer evolved to, “Yes I do believe in God, but my conception of what God is may be a little different.”
Eventually my thinking embraced a lot of possibility and nuance, but always looked for the underlying foundation: Whatever is true for humans has to be true for all beings; it has to be the common thread underlying all human belief systems; it has to accommodate what is plainly observable, that is, scientific and empirical evidence.
I found my own personal pre-buddhist “middle way” of sorts, arriving at a place between the eternalist and nihilist poles, but distinct from both. Feeling that whatever is true about aspects of ourselves that persist after death must have a mechanism to support it, just as there is for every other thing that happens. Things appear as magical, mystical, woowoo, when we don’t understand the mechanism, or have no way to perceive their workings. But if a thing happens outside the realm of imagination, there has to be a mechanism. If there’s a mechanism, it’s there whether I perceive it or not.
Now I’m finding the name “middle way” may be misleading, at least to me: the way doesn’t appear to just illuminate a position between or above the two poles, allowing their presence without following either, but instead seems to lead to a place (a state?) beyond conceptualization, where all ideas are contained, but their meanings are of no significance.
And the journey continues, with more questions; my ideas form themselves clumsily, I struggle with articulating them.
May I come to see more clearly what is true than I do now, and put what I learn to good use.
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Colin,
You so eloquently captured the experience I’m having with trying to understand the middle way.
“the way doesn’t appear to just illuminate a position between or above the two poles, allowing their presence without following either, but instead seems to lead to a place (a state?) beyond conceptualization, where all ideas are contained, but their meanings are of no significance.”
I’ve re-read this several times and it feels right, but my mind has a hard time holding onto it. It’s a bit like trying to hold onto water for me. Your writing has given me a lot to think about.
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Colin, this was so moving to read. So much of your thought process resonates with me, though you expressed it both more clearly and more beautifully than I could. I too feel the sense of finding my own “middle way,’ and your “underlying foundation” feels spot on to me. Thank you for expressing this so well to share with us; I’ve learned from you!
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I grew up in a very religious Methodist household in Texas where eternalism principles were taught. My father was a Methodist minister and my mother became one after he passed away. She was a social worker most of my life growing up. My father passed away when I was 18 the year before I went to college which led to an intense period of questioning. I landed on atheism at some point. I am not familiar with the distinctions of nihilism and atheism although they strike me as similar. It wasn’t until my early 40s that I found a sense of spirituality again but not necessarily eternalism. It’s not a sense of follow the rules and you’ll get to heaven; rather that my spiritual guides are present and able to help me. And an afterlife that is available no matter what, where I review the life I just lived and choose how to move forward into the next one. This life no longer feels pointless like it did for 20 years while I was an atheist. Even so, sometimes this life often feels hard, difficult, tiring and there is sometimes a sense of having to endure the hardships to learn lessons along the way and to burn off karma. Perhaps that’s closer to eternalism than nihilism. It’s probably not the middle ground of Buddhism (I’m not really sure as I’m still exploring that) but it feels more middle than to either extreme.
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In retrospect, I was exposed to Eternalism at a young age. I was raised Catholic, though my parents were not particularly observant. They taught me about a somewhat involved God who would judge us after death. For some reason, this prospect never stressed me; I always felt that “judgment” would be based on individual circumstances and true intentions. I knew that divine judgment could not possibly be as simple (or as cruel) as blindly following a list of “dos and don’ts.” While I can appreciate the appeal of this view—its simplicity and the comfort it provides—it never fully resonated with me. Perhaps it was too simplistic, too inflexible, or simply too mystical.
As I grew up, I learned to be skeptical of “beliefs,” recognizing that they could easily be based on bogus or erroneous concepts. This skepticism was reinforced by the modern education system and the scientific method. However, I never equated science with Nihilism. Interestingly, many cutting-edge scientists, both past and present, have believed in a higher power. Scientifically, we know our senses cannot perceive everything that truly exists, such as x-rays or electromagnetic fields. True scientists recognize the limitations of their field: just as you cannot prove the existence of God, you cannot prove His non-existence. Even today, quantum physics serves as one of many examples that may lend credit to various religious theories regarding the source of consciousness. Ultimately, Nihilism is not enough for me; it feels too simplistic, disheartening, and inconsistent with the vast areas of scientific knowledge we have yet to fully understand.
Where am I now? I know the truth cannot be as simple as pure Eternalism or Nihilism, but lies somewhere else entirely. I am currently interested in Buddhism, which I find offers a less paternalistic explanation for life’s big questions. Is it all true? Most likely not, but I believe there are vital kernels of truth to be found there. I am drawn to the teachings of the Buddha, which suggest that one should experience things firsthand and only accept what proves true for oneself. In this process, I believe one must remain humble, open, and skeptical. Without these three qualities, I don’t think I will be able to discover my own truth.
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I guess my first issue with my experience with eternalism and nihilism is that I have given neither much thought in my lifetime. However, my recent experience with nihilism has been a bit of frustration, mostly because I have felt like I don’t understand it much. I listen to a lot of personal finance podcasts, one of which has a host I don’t much like (so why, you might ask, do I continue listening to the podcast? Who knows). And in this particular podcast, the host brings up nihilism a lot. And it kind of always rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because I don’t much like the host. Maybe because even though he brings it up a lot, I still don’t feel like I have a good grasp on what nihilism really means.
I’m not sure I understand it anymore after our reading (I look forward to continuing to re-read this particular reading, as well as the Week 1 reading, often, because there is SO MUCH in both). But, after the reading and after our class last week and after doing a little more research into nihilism after class, I do understand better why it rubs me the wrong way. I think it’s because, for me, nihilism is just so counter to what I believe and who I feel I am. I actually think I would really enjoy talking to someone who considers themselves a nihilist just so I could ask some curiosity questions, because I deeply want to understand how one can believe that life is pointless. But I want to know more! I wish I could talk to the author of our reading…I can’t get the opening line out of my head (The nihilist point of view is one of the biggest problems for all beings). And maybe by understanding more, I can better reflect on how nihilism has shown up for me in my life. I guess I can say at this point that nihilism may have shown up for me during times of immense hardship (going through a house fire, battling depression, etc.). But even then, they were just small flickers, as even in times of trouble I’ve really always held on to my belief that life still matters. Perhaps this is because of my religious beliefs…
On the other hand, eternalism also makes me feel uneasy. Again, I have never really thought much about this until recently, but now what I do know makes me realize that this is the closest thing to how I was brought up religiously, and religion has played a huge part in my life and continues to be an immense journey for me as I navigate adulthood. I grew up going to a very progressive Protestant, Congregational, UCC (United Church of Christ) church in a small town in New England, and I also grew up in a family with parents who very much portrayed the motto “everything happens for a reason” and “God will take care of us no matter what”. I was led to believe that if I followed all the rules of my religion and was essentially a “good Christian girl” that I would go to heaven and be loved by God and Jesus forever. Now, as a 38-year-old, I still go to a very similar (if not even more liberal) church, but I have a very different relationship with religion than I did as a kid. And in fact, this relationship is ever evolving as I continually grapple with “what do I believe” and “how can I mix my personal beliefs and church”. I guess, now that I think about it, I do wrestle with eternalism more than I thought I did!
I am really looking forward to thinking even more about eternalism and nihilism as I continue on my life path as well as my meditation teacher path.-
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Thanks, Liana, for your essay. I decided to reply because you said you wanted to ask questions of a real Nihilist, and I felt the same. My 26 year old daughter embraces nihilism, and as I was contemplating this week’s exercise, I asked her to read this week’s reading assignment. She said she believes our minds continue but fragmented after death, not captured within a neat package anymore…like a wave returning to the ocean. She said she thinks our existence is random, but can be very much enjoyed and used for good. I don’t know if her thoughts are similar to or different from other nihilists, but I thought I would share some of what she shared with me. Hoping it might shed some light for you, as it did for me. 🙂
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Liana, I enjoyed following your train of thought–There are so many cultural aspects of church, beyond the belief structure of religion, that it is very interesting to try to parse out our relationship to the institution as our personal beliefs evolve.
And Kat, I appreciated you asking some interview questions to your daughter! It is SO interesting when we have the opportunity to see the world through different lenses.
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Liana, thank you for your thoughtful essay. I appreciate that you name the ongoing questions and grappling with where you sit in response. I’m also curious about those who fully embrace nihilism, those who have done so for a large part of their lives, and what questions they contemplate. I, too, during times of hardship in my younger years, have felt a part of me that wanted to bend towards the nihilistic side. For me it was like a coping or defense mechanism, because facing the immense emotion (fear, pain, sadness) brought on by the hardship was such a difficult thing to do. Thanks again for sharing!
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I have really enjoyed reading the posts in this thread and feel grateful for the opportunity to share these reflections together and to hear the experiences of spirit, in all its many ways and forms.
I think for me, at any given moment I can come back to two experiences which ground me in a connection to something larger than myself:
I have been estranged from my family for about a decade. About eight years into that, I had a dream that my father was in the hospital. In the dream, he was frantic and a little stuck, and I sprung him out of there and took him outside, where a great swamp awaited. (We’re from New Jersey). He told me that he was afraid and I saw an egret and told him not to worry, that death would be “seeing the world from her eyes, now.” Six months after this dream, a stranger reached out to tell me that my father was in the hospital and dying. I showed up. We talked about Springsteen (again, NJ) and I told him exact things I had said in my dream. The next day I got the call that he passed. His doctor thought he might have needed me to find the peace to pass on. If we go back to Newton, that there’s rules to explain everything we can see, we can’t explain a dream communication. If we think maybe Jung is right, that there’s a meridian of synchronicity inciting communications, maybe we get closer. If we go towards eternalism, maybe all of that is true–there’s things to see and things we cannot–AND *something* guided the potentiality for peace where there had been discord.
And one more, because: I’m a sober person in a 12-step program for some time, now. Sometimes, we alcoholics can get fussy about things. Life gets better, and all of a sudden making time to get to a meeting feels different than it did when everything was on fire. But on any given day, I do a little celestial math about how many people *at any given moment* **all across the world** are sitting inside of meetings instead of driving drunk and then I quickly remember how interconnected with peace my/our sobriety is in ways we might not be able to see. And then I get my butt to a meeting 🙂
As a New Yorker, I’m always thinking about what it takes to take up my full seat on the subway. To be in space and not pushing and shoving or making myself small, just to accept my seat. The feeling in my bones that I’m sitting there as part of something wild, celestial, wonderful, & kind, creates courage to take that ride.
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Jersey, thank you for sharing your personal experiences. Congratulations on your sobriety, and what a beautiful reflection on considering the other individuals attending meetings all around the world. It strengthens and supports that sense of connection to others and our common humanity. I also appreciate how you described taking your seat on the bus. A routine act that you imbue with its own honor and reverence. It made me reflect on how I approach, honor, and take my own “seat” as I move through my day. Thank you for your heartfelt words.
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Like many of us, my first experience with eternalism came in the form of organized religion. I grew up in a very strict Southern Baptist household. We not only attended church several times a week, we also went to the church school, where my parents were teachers for a short while. Needless to say it was a complete immersion experience. I had no other reality than the concepts of God and Heaven in the next life and Jesus as a personal friend and guide in this life. Absolute acceptance of the rules set out by the church was all I knew. All was well with this insular world view until I reached puberty.
Despite our deep involvement with the church, I had a rocky home life, in which I experienced the hypocrisy of harmful words and actions that were and not representative of the expressed beliefs. I remember very clearly the year I was 13 when I literally lost my religion. I was deeply involvement with my church youth group (a different, slightly more liberal Southern Baptist community), and I still espoused the accepted beliefs. But all of a sudden, I lost my connection to these beliefs and the personal relationship I always felt I had with God/Jesus. I remember laying awake at night wondering where it all went, feeling the loss of connection to something beyond myself.
That experience with nihilism was extremely painful to a sensitive, imaginative young person. It harkened back to a time in my childhood when I was outside looking up at the stars on a particularly dark and clear night when the milky way was visible in all it’s billion-starred glory. I suddenly felt like I was being sucked up into the universe with no reference point at all, just going on and on. It was very unsettling. Likewise those days of angst and disconnection in my 13th year were very lonely times. It was isolating as well, as I felt guilty and embarrassed and so kept it all to myself.
What brought me out of that time of disconnection was a powerful spiritual experience. I was invited to an Episcopal camp the following summer with my best friend. It was a fun weekend of singing camp songs, making crafts and going to services. The small, rustic chapel was steeped in ritual with incense and candle light. There was a statue of Jesus that seemed to be alive and emanating love and acceptance.
On the last night, they had a very sacred ceremony in the little chapel. In the flickering candle light, I felt a sudden reconnection to the part of myself that I had lost. I now see that experience as the magic of opening up to the present moment in a way I never had before. It gave me a glimpse into something ephemeral that was alive, instead the rote dogma I had lived by in my childhood. Perhaps it was a spontaneous experience of the Middle Way. This feeling of connection lasted for several months, and I believe it cured me of nihilism for life.
Though I don’t Practice any religion now, I feel that time of breakthrough was important in healing my fractured sense of self, and it helped to usher in an adult life that is curious, open and respectful of other realities and realms.
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I was born into a Catholic (eternalism) family in the predominantly Confucianist (nihilism) and Mahayana Buddhist country of Vietnam. Growing up in the US, I learned empirical evidence-based science (nihilism) that taught that I can only believe what I can sense and prove. Western education also taught that the mind is supreme, that the body is to be subjugated or ignored (“mind over matter”) and that spiritual matters are best left to the church or family (I highly agree!). I think we all grow up exposed to both ends of the continuum of eternalism and nihilism and it is possible to hold both values at the same time. I believe that the spirit does persist beyond this lifetime but I have doubts since there is no way to currently prove it to be so. Ultimately, I do not think it matters what I believe as long as I live in a way that contributes in a positive way to society. When I was younger, I needed more structure and rules but I am now more comfortable with uncertainty, mystery and magic.
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I grew up Italian Catholic (the East coast version transplanted to CA). The eternalist view of belief in God, Father Almighty, original sin (bad pretty much no matter what you do) and peace in heaven when you die or torture in hell after death or a long stay in purgatory all shaped me. I could never identify with a GOD in heaven running the show. However, I did experience the grace of the Virgin Mary and the companionship of a God. Mostly, what eternalism provided for me was company in the world and a place I could ask for help, in a lonely childhood. In my early teens, I discovered Existentialism through reading Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche. The idea of nothingness and the despair of that idea opened the door to the study of Buddhism. And, here I am continuing to study Buddhism and continuing to deepen my understanding of this very question we are answering in the prompt. It’s hard for me to explain or put into words how my understanding of the hopefulness in Buddhism became known to me. I did see despair in the beginning learning stages. The only words would be borrowed by teachers but here is the best I can do on my own: we really can’t imagine life after death because this transformation takes place on planes unknown (unless one has had an “awe” experience that reveals…..and, Yet,I have sat enough with old age, illness, death to know the mystery and magic of it all makes me open and curious and confident we are all one in universal energy.
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Hi Susan, I definitively relate to what you experienced of grace and compassion, even company within your childhood religious figures. That love and compassion can be quite confusing standing alongside the Hell teachings I received as well. I appreciate the words you found to express the hopefulness you find in Buddhism, as well as the one universal energy you have discovered in the human condition. Thanks for sharing.
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I was raised in an atheist/agnostic family – no one talked much about God or religion, but I went to an Episcopalian school. I don’t think I’ve ever had a personal relationship with a God of an established religion. I grew up around some religious people, but I’d say the overriding culture (in Washington DC) was facts, science, information – those kinds of truths.
So, it’s hard for me to talk about ‘God’ outside the frame of the established religions which look untrustworthy, abusive and divisive to me (Catholic priests, indigenous boarding schools, etc). I haven’t had a personal relationship with a “God,” but I do have the feeling of being judged, a strong sense of good and bad, morality and ethics. But judged by who? I am not sure. I understand why people would turn to God and eternalism to feel less alone in the world, to make it all make sense, to have a framework to live by. I have empathy for that. But I have not been drawn in that direction.
They say “God works in mysterious ways.” But is it God or is it just impermanence and perhaps karma? Many athletes credit God when they win. Do they blame God when they lose? Does God prefer one team over another? I can’t make sense of this.
Grief and sadness and numbness feel like nihilistic feelings: Nothing matters, there’s no point to any of this. It would be depressing to live a life without surprises, mysteries, sunsets and sunrises. I have experienced so much magic and beauty in nature. It sounds like for nihilists, magic is a bug, not a feature.
There is such a huge universe we know so little about. I can’t imagine there being nothing greater than a mind, especially when we know there are so many addled minds. It is challenging to question our own beliefs. But it does make sense to me that they are obstacles, and that the only thing we can ever be sure about is what is in front of us in the present moment right now.-
Hi Alexandra,
I enjoyed hearing your perspective, as my own childhood was very religious. I appreciate your observations that the concepts of God and religion are used by many people not only to harm others but to give glory and praise when things go well. I also agree that numbness comes close to the feeling of nihilism. That seems like a very sad place to live. Beliefs as obstacles. How true.
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Eternalism: I can relate to this in terms of spending lots of time with my very favourite people in a church (-adjacent) community of a choir I’ve been singing in for years. I’m not confirmed, don’t take Communion or say the Creed but am just now wondering what motivates others to do so. I’m sure they find magic and mystery and continuity in the liturgy and sacraments, and I know that many genuinely want Christ in their lives on earth, but perhaps they also believe that God keeps an eye on their “streak”, and that this will be important in the hereafter.
From what I hear in the readings and from discussions in our rather boisterous Bible (Torah) Study group, despite at least ten very clear rules, there is a great deal of ambiguity, knottedness and potential for nihilism (selective versions of reality/belief) in this belief system. It all seems quite hard work, stressful and not always self-compassionate.But then there is the music… I would like sacred choral music with me in/on the Middle Way, and appreciate that Bach, Byrd, Pärt, Tallis, Taverner and co. were inspired and infused by the eternal to create magic and mystery, and I am in turn “eternally” grateful for that.
Nihilism: For me this feels much more mundane. If eternalism is for Sundays, then this is the rest of the week. I eat chocolate in the evening and my sleep score reading is bad, and the next day I get annoyed with the dog and go to work grumpy, and these ephemeral circumstances and events get turned in my mind into some coherent narrative about my failings and bad deal in life. The “and”s get turned into “so’s”.
Are dogs nihilistic, because they are simply reactive? They see their owner and react with a wag, another dog walks past the gate so they bark, and when their dinner is put in front of them they have a singular focus on its substance?
When trying to get my head around the concept of nihilism, I kept landing on another word, “denialism” instead. This “lie first” strategy is very evident in politics today, where the truth seems mostly inconvenient, and some very distorted versions of reality seem very far away from wisdom’s influence.
I thought we would be writing this week about the Middle Way and was grappling with what that might be, but having had to become a bit more familiar with eternalism and nihilism, the Middle Way seems a very appealing place/path of (dappled) light and shade to rest and move through.
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I didn’t grow up in any organized religion, but living in the Midwest, I was surrounded by religious messaging. I was religious adjacent. Messaging about what it meant to be “good” or “bad” came through in the ways I was parented and through relationships with friends and their families. So, while I wasn’t exposed to any specific religious doctrine about what it would take to get into heaven and avoid eternal damnation, I wholeheartedly embraced the idea of “doing the right thing” in order to reach some level of happiness in life. I fully believed (and part of me probably still does) that if I behaved as I’m expected to and didn’t cause problems, I would be rewarded at some point in the future. So, while I wasn’t trying to achieve my way into heaven, I was definitely striving for some kind of payoff at some point in this life.
I’ve also always had a sense of there being something more or something beyond this current physical reality. Not a realm overseen by a god or gods necessarily, but a kind of spiritual order or unified consciousness in the universe that exists beyond the physical plane. This has always been a felt sense rather than anything that I could prove through facts or evidence.
This bent toward eternalism has stayed with me and has largely been the lens through which I’ve lived most of my life. I think I’ve experienced nihilism in smaller, more circumscribed ways. This occurred mostly when I was younger, cynical, and far more fixated on the material aspects of my life. In more recent years, I’ve had periods where it has felt as if I’ve been sleepwalking through my life when I think I was more entrenched in nihilism. Those periods were filled with days when it seemed as if I was just going through the motions of living. It was like living in a black and white, two-dimensional Polaroid picture.
I’m grateful for all of these experiences because without them I would not have felt the pull to wake up and search for a different way to understand and experience my life. I knew I didn’t want to continue to live within the dichotomous confines of good vs. bad and I definitely didn’t want to experience my life solely in the material world. My experiences with, and waking up from, both eternalism and nihilism, are what ultimately led me to Buddhism.
The dharma and meditation practice have helped me to realize that I can have temporary experiences that may touch into both eternalism and nihilism, but I don’t need to set up camp in either. I can maintain my belief in there being something more beyond physical reality (the continuation of consciousness) while not equating my worth and basing my existence on being a “good girl” or trying to get into the right kind of afterlife.
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Hi Erin. Your description of having a sense of there being ‘something more’ resonated deeply with me. Looking back into childhood, I can see I sensed something heavy and important and trustworthy moving below or behind the physical world. It was definitely something I connected to physically, a kind of intuition or deep knowing that always helps me know when I’m on an unhealthy path and need to change direction.
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Hi Erin, thank you for shedding light on the fact that we can have temporary experiences in both “camps”. That’s a nice way to think about it. While I want to further explore a middle way, there are also some nihilistic ideas that I don’t want to let go entirely – for example, some things might be pointless, and that’s ok. Regardless, in some weird way I’m excited to change my mind on all of this!
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I grew up in a religiously neutral family. My mother always said we could choose our faith when we were 18 or older, and that she wasn’t going to push my brother and I in any specific direction. She was suspicious of all religions, I think. Despite that (or because of it?), I was always curious about religion and spirituality; asking difficult questions like who created God? At that point, eternalism was the only religious model I knew about, so my questions were always based on a Christian idea of the world.
But as I got older, especially in my teens and 20’s, I was very rebellious and skeptical of any person, system, or organization that society held up as ‘an authority’. And learning about heterosexism, misogyny, and colonial history added a lot of fire and contempt to my views of religious organizations and their rules.
But even though at that point in my life I toyed with nihilistic ideas, they brought up sadness and feelings of defeat. But I haven’t abandoned nihililism altogether – I still love all types of science, and I believe in the scientific method. But I don’t buy any claims about complete objectivity, because the sciences are also subject to unexplainable forces, like human bias and the placebo effect.
I’m very comfortable with the agnostic idea that we simply can’t know everything. And I still believe in the mysteries of existence – dreams, intuition, synchronicity, and déjà vu. It helps me stay open to possibilities and steer more towards a beginner’s mind, especially when my ego’s false sense of security bubbles up. Leaving room for mystery and the unknowable also fuels my sense of hope and curiosity.
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Hi Djuna, it’s interesting to read that in your experience nihilism led you towards feelings of sadness and defeat. It makes so much sense, however I never thought about it that way. As a former nihilist, my experience was a little different than yours (and it almost feels like it could be its own middle way?!). In my teens I was very involved in political and social causes and it was instilled in me that any contribution to the greater good was not only positive but essential, even if we wouldn’t see the results in our own lifetimes. Thank you for sharing about your experience.
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Like many in this community, I also grew up in an atheist family. Come to think of it, my parents were probably the first atheists in each one of their family’s history. We never talked about God or even took the concept seriously. Most of those around me thought along the same lines (except for my grandparents, but they never talked about religion with me). I always gravitated towards “evidence”, “proof”, and similar ideas. Somewhere along the way – I can’t remember when or why – it began to make more sense to me to give space to a middle way, and that’s where I stand now. I believe, however, that ultimately it’s a matter of choice, as we have no evidence for neither extreme.
If I understand Thinley Norbu Rinpoche’s essay correctly, eternalism appears to be more possible than nihilism because it does not deny the continuity of mind. But again, what is the evidence for this alternative? This is something I would like to understand more about.
Staying open minded and aware of what we believe versus what might be is key for informing our evolving views and staying closer to our personal “middle way”. I’m really looking forward to seeing how my view changes and meanders over the course of this training, and to be challenged by all the different points of views and experiences here.
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Oh wow, this week’s essay is a doozie. I feel like, depsite a ton of notes and thought, this will be a stream-of-consciousness extrordinaire. I hope it makes sense. I’ve chosen to not read any others until I finish mine, as I don’t want to be influenced or do any comparing.
My experience growing up was one of forced eternalism. On 1 side of the family, the Grandmother whose home I was mostly raised in was 7th day adventist. An immigrant to Canada from Ukraine, she had 9 kids. I sometimes think the faith was a way of getting through harsh conditions, and became a form of fear based child rearing. It trickled down to us many grandkids. I was taught the 10 commandments and know them well to this day. I was told I would go to a place called heaven…if I behaved just so. I can’t ever smell Irish Spring soap – as that was what she used to wash out our mouths if we swore. So essentially, by today’s standards, it was child abuse. So, that’s eternalism for me in a nutshell… it leaves a “bad taste.” And yet…while rebelling against that as soon as I could (14ish, when I got my 1st job, own money, some measure of freedom) I have long romanticised another avenue to nirvana…heaven by any other name. In uni and for some time after, that was recreational drug use and drinking and dancing into oblivion… later it was hot yoga and retreats and meditation of all varieties. I think I can now look back & say it was seeking forever in people… in romantic entanglements of various types. This notion of forever…of permanence…of getting all the sweet treats if I can only be a good enough girl… it endures. In high school my best friend Mimi was Jewish. I almost converted because I loved her so much, and her life seemed perfect. I’m glad I didn’t. In my 20’s I attended intense 1 on 1 Kabballah studies. I left when it became eerily about recruiting others and paying for courses. Then, in June last year, I took my Buddhist vows. This feels right. As Susan says…”an end to spiritual shopping.” Phew.
About a decade ago, after a 10 day Vipassana silent retreat, I tattoo’d on my arm “this isn’t permanent” (see what I did there ;)? It still surprises and delights me to look down and have tat reminder. The tattoo isn’t, the moment isn’t, the flesh it marks isn’t… none of it will remain forever. It’s bittersweet. Most people who notice it don’t get it…that’s OK.
So, on to Nihlism. I think this is something that typically accompanies a form of an intellectual argument. some would say it’s more the realm of the scientists… I don’t know about that…as science is a process…and requires our respect. Much like faith…science seeks to make sense of our world – just without false idols. And anyway, science has confirmed for us that we are made of stardust…how fantastical is that?
So I will say this – I’d love to believe in reincarnation… that we will all be back…and I hope I’m a whale shark. I sometimes feel so much eerie deja vu that I really think I must have been here before. All I know is that…I don’t know. And that’s ok. I’ll stay here in the middle way, and observe.-
Ana & Djuna, to both of you I think it’s great that a faith wasn’t ‘forced’ on you…or assumed… and yet that there was a suggestion of choosing 1 later… as if that is an adult affect.
As someone who was raised with forced faith and all it’s trappings, who now is raising kids without without any G*D, it has never occurred to me to even remotely suggest to them to do that. -
Hi Dawa,
I really like how you described “seeking forever in people” through various means (dancing into oblivion, hot yoga, retreats, etc.) despite rebelling against forced religion. Although my early years were different than what you describe, I can related to the experience of seeking something more.
Also, I love that you have a tattoo that says “this isn’t permanent.” It’s much more fun version of the “right now, it’s like this” tattoo that I’ve been considering.
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I spent the first 20 or so years of my life following Catholic doctrine. It was both a cultural and spiritual requirement for me. My immediate family was very firm on this. I had two uncles who were priests and two aunts who were nuns, so Catholicism permeated our family like incense. For the most part I was okay with this, although as I moved through my teenage years I became more resentful of the guilt imposed by dogma that seemed more and more rigid. After high school I decided to take a break and stopped being observant.
I didn’t shift toward nihilism at this (or any other) point. I continued to hold onto an eternalistic understanding of spirituality. Although I got married in a Catholic service, and both of my children were baptized Catholic, I was just a lapsed Catholic and continued to identify as such until sometime in 2018 when I read several Thich Nhat Hanh books.
These TNH books sparked my curiosity and I began to read other books about Buddhism. In 2021 I was given Susan Piver’s “Start Here Now” book as required reading for my yoga teacher training class, and began my (mostly) daily meditation practice. I took the Refuge Vow in 2023.
I never flirted with nihilism, perhaps because I had been so thoroughly imprinted with eternalism as a younger man. The idea that there were no spiritual phenomena beyond my limited conceptions has always felt narrow, limiting and self-centered. And the eternalistic approach felt more and more like a human construct intended to impose order and hierarchy.
Through my meditation practice and trying to stay open, my own awareness and experiences have reinforced the idea that this middle part is the “right” one.
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Mike; this really resonates with me now: “eternalistic approach felt more and more like a human construct intended to impose order and hierarchy.”
I work consistently to maintain/develop a non binary approach to my life and work (and parenting and marriage …) and this means reviewing what i take in through a robust series of filters. Most of the time, I see things as they are now – socially, politically… as quite binary…aka patriarchal … aka racist to the core (white) … aka sexist (male) … aka hetero-normative (a heady mix of mysogonist and homo-phobic at once) … and almost always harmful as a result.
If faith (eternalist approaches) keeps masses fearful of a G*D, what a fantastic distraction it is from the true state of the world! And now more than ever! Sorry not sorry that got political. -
I was raised by two scientists, neither of whom shared or exposed me to beliefs that align with either eternalism or nihilism. We didn’t go to church as a family, ever. My exposure to organized religion came through my maternal grandmother who was devoted to Billy Graham and who sent us to Bible School when we visited her in the summertime, and through going to the Lutheran church with my best friend growing up, where I felt mostly uncomfortable and like an outsider. In my family we were serious tennis players and on Sunday mornings, my brother and I would have to play doubles with our parents; Dad would say “We’re going to the temple of the tennis!”
My first husband, whom I met in graduate school, was raised Episcopalian, and he would describe his (and his family’s) relationship with the church as much more a social than spiritual one. His family wanted us to be married in the Episcopal church and I remember going to pre-marital sessions with him, and actually feeling like the Episcopal priests (one of whom was a woman) were really intelligent and open-minded, and for a while I even served on a strategic planning committee for the church we attended, where my marketing research and business background came in handy. But none of it went very deep for me.
It wasn’t really until much later in my life, after I’d been married and divorced a second time and had left my marketing research career, that I began encountering and opening to religion and spirituality — reading amazing mystical authors and interacting and working with wonderful people who were grappling with their own beliefs and transformations — and I gratefully connected with notions of continuous mind and eternalism. I often thought that even though I felt and sometimes was made uncomfortable by my lack of religious upbringing, I also found myself as an adult with very little religious baggage (or trauma) to unpack, work through, or deconstruct. I was — and am still — in constructing mode, not deconstructing mode! 🙂
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For me, eternalism comes out when I start speculating or daydreaming about the future. Despite my time spent studying and observing impermanence, there is some part of me that is still trying to create an eternal, permanent goldilocks zone for myself. I must still be holding out hope that if I meditate enough, I will reach some eternal state of bliss and compassion called enlightenment and then I’ll be DONE. In this sense, I think eternalism was part of what drove me to Buddhism and to practice.
My experience of nihilism shows up when my eternalist hopes are regularly dashed. During such times, my internal (and occasionally external) dialogue starts to sound something like a Rust Cohle monologue from the show True Detective: “We are all just sacks of meat, furiously trying to consume as much nutrition as possible and fulfill a biological imperative to reproduce, while making up meaning where there is none.” Here’s a confession: this statement still seems true to me any time I’m feeling the least bit grumpy.
I suppose I’m in love with the Middle Way because at the very least, it is something ELSE besides these two extremes.
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Hi Joe, I appreciate your awareness of increased nihilistic tendencies with certain emotional states. I can relate to this!
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Think you are right, and most of us experience both extremes constantly. Never thought about it that way, in my view we would go from one extreme to the next for periods of time. But you are right that in any given day or week there are moments or thoughts that are Eternalistic followed by nihilistic thoughts. Interesting thought…
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On reflection of the reading, and the clear question – where have I experienced both nihilism and eternalism – it seems perfectly human that we must, almost as an imperative, explore both, because consciously or not, we have experienced them both.
Nihilism for me has often shown up with a cloud of depression, a hurt, an attempt to roust myself from some state of being – an intense state of dissatisfaction and frustration (external and small self view) – “F*ck it, it really doesn’t matter. NONE of this matters!” (dramatic arm gesture to sky). Though this might be framed as exasperation or “what’s the point?” when things get hard, there can also be the side of nihilism that says “it doesn’t matter (no heaven/hell, Goddess or Gods, peoples’ opinions, conditions, etc., to answer to) – “go for it.” Nihilism for me, ultimately seems shallow and tinny. It can be fickle. There’s not much there, there. But then, I suppose, that’s nihilism. There is no “there” there. This can be very disappointing, “am I Good?” am I Bad?” is there no purpose to being here?
I was born queer into a Southern Baptist family, and was introduced to eternalism as the first agenda item of New Life, along with the Set of Rules by which to play the game to win (eternal salvation). I knew I was queer (“more Basic Badnes points for you”) from a young age, and realized that this theory simply did not make sense. As Pema says “there is no great babysitter in the sky”(GBS), no ground to fall onto, and certainly not some old white guy up in the sky. Along with The Rules, there were foundational beliefs of The Game, the most relevant one here which was “you are basically bad” and that I should spend my life appealing to the GBS that I could be Good, if only I would be given lots of chances to fail and repent and ask again and again – ugh! exhausting and manipulative. And, I could smell the falsities rotting beneath the church pew. It took me awhile, cycling through the pendulum swings of Southern Baptist, Catholicism, Espiscopalianism – “here’s the way, to getting out of your own basic badness.” (Oh, and “please tithe” so we can help you pull yourself from your own basic badness).
I remember hearing about Basic Goodness for the first time in Shambhala – it shocked me. “Wait, wait, what?!” I hadn’t realized how deeply the ingrained beliefs that I knew (or would say) were not even “mine” (basic badness). It rocked my world, and somehow rang deeply, richly True. It was energy releasing.
I believe there is something of us humans as we rise day to day, make plans for a future, and drive forward, that wants to believe “I” may live on. It still pokes its head up for me occasionally. But, as I pick the earthworm up off the pavement of my rainy walk and place it in the grass, and hear the raindrops falling on my jacket, and feel my sock rubbing against my ankle, I realize that I will dissolve and cross to the Other Shore (Gone beyond) and that none of it matters, and that it all does matter, deeply.
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I definitely have more experience with eternalism than nihilism. I grew up in a large Catholic family and went to parochial school. We went to church every Sunday and sometimes before school during the week as well. It was the 1970s, and what I recall being taught at home and school I describe as “social-justice Catholicism”–take care of those less fortunate, feed the poor, racism is a sin, everyone was created in God’s image so we’re all equal. Lots of folk music too.
But as I learned more the questions began–why do I have to go to confession if I’m being watched all the time anyway? Why could women only be nuns? And then the big one: original sin. Even as a kid, I couldn’t get my head around that. However, I’m very grateful that I did have something to ground me and never stopped thinking there had to be “something.”My late husband was more of a nihilist. Very logical, the show-me-your-proof type. I especially remember one animated discussion when we had to stop in the middle, as we realized we were both using the same ‘evidence’ to argue opposing sides (me that there was “something”; him that nope, this is it). We laughed, but of course neither of us backed down. He was also one of the most hopeful and optimistic people I’ve known–I’m not sure why, but I found that ironic.
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Thanks Mary, your story of both you and your late husband is very familiar to both my personal story and the stories of so many around me. I very much liked your reflection on finding it ironic how hopeful and optimistic your late husband was. It made me chuckle. Thanks also for reflecting on grounding.
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This story is a momentary construct of fragments and bits of memory combined with reflections of how I’m experiencing my life at the moment. My memories from early life start at me being very young and marveling at our existence and particularly the magical intertwined-ness of everything. Living was part of a very powerful manifestation of something that was immaterial and full of drive and energy. It was larger than anything imaginable. Then came my first experiences with eternalism. Questions I had with this magical experience where answered in Christian religious terms. Somehow these questions did not sit well with me. This happened somewhere around my 7th year. My parents sent me to catechesis and I was expected to echo the catholic teachings without further investigation and explanation. I was very inquisitive and read the bible texts myself and based on that, asked many questions. The answer to my questions was to pray. When this did not seem to answer my questions, I started to question the praying, the teachings and the whole religious movement. Around this time I was also experiencing family members passing away. And my questioning started to include the sense of living. I had a tendency to reject what I was being told about heaven, hell and earth. This may have been when I started embracing the notion that we can’t make sense of our being and existence. What difference does it make how we try to explain things? This combined with me reading and learning more about theories like evolution made me reject the eternalism offered to me and lean to the almost complete opposite view. I do have a tendency to be digital in my thought processes.
Experiencing the passing of family members caused by incurable diseases made me commit and focus on studying medicine. I eventually entered medical school at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In Nijmegen I was exposed to ideas about both eternalism, our current experiences are all part of a big and unchanging plan, and nihilism… our existence is all the result of a cosmic coincidence. To me, during this phase of my life, this strengthened my belief in the theorie of coincidence. But I also started to read buddhist and taoist texts and talk to those who embrace this in their lives. At that moment, I rejected this based on rationalizations of not being ‘proven’ by the scientific methods and concluded all this to be of no value to my understanding of existence and life.
Shortly after my 20’s, I met a girl who had very strong fundamental beliefs about creation as the result of a universal, maybe Godly love. The effect this had on her being at peace and having an unbreakable moral compass had an effect on how I viewed the more nihilistic point of view. I reconnected with the sense of our magical existence I experienced in my youth. Without knowing what I was doing, I started to ‘re-configure’ my belief foundations and structures and arrived at what may be seen as a more ‘middle way’. To me, it seems to be a shift from a phase I was in from my 7th year, in which I mostly tried to wrap my mind around my experiences with ‘logic’, my thinking and thought patterns, towards including my heart and senses and feelings beyond brainy thinking. In this proces of reconfiguration, I also started to experience some sort of ‘flashy’ moments of complete connectedness and awareness which are very hard to describe rationally. These experience brought me to embrace everything around me in a more inclusive manner as I could sense the ‘sameness’ better than the ‘separateness’. To me, this made me arrive to a place of awareness beyond logical thoughts and explanations, to direct connectedness with being… Today I embrace the buddhist approach and the taoist views to living and interacting. The sense is I am dwelling in a universal limitless ‘space’ where I feel at home.
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Please reflect on your experiences with both eternalism and nilihism. When have you noticed each within yourself? (there are no right or wrong answers here)
I grew up in a household that had roots in eternalist religious traditions although it was a not very Jewish household. I was encouraged to try Hebrew school but when I announced I was done when the rabbi told us “if you have faith you don’t question” there was no pushback. It was the 1960’s and my sense of place was formed in context of the ferment of protests begun (or rather, continued, but begun as in entered my awareness) in the 50’s with the civil rights movement. Tweening and teening, I followed the slightly older kids on protest marches and burned to find my way to join the action. With all the righteousness of that time of life, I firmly and disdainfully rejected the eternalistic Judeo-Christian panoply of patriarchal beliefs and edicts, and was as close as I got to a nihilistic sensibility in my focus on the socio-political here and now, and in my confidence of my ideas of right and wrong.
My involvement with political activism introduced me to my work as a community organizer, which at first, I looked into as a means to an activist end. It became an end in itself, or rather, an enduring process that both supported and helped me evolve, or uncover, my guiding principles in a role as facilitator of discovery, loosening my grip on expectation that allowed me to be present in and inspired by both my work with people as an organizer and later as I evolved to work with people as a psychotherapist that “saved” me from reliance on/adherence to the both the ultimate authorities of eternalistic rules as well as nihilistic beliefs and opened me up to expanded questioning.
When I look back on my life, many experiences tend to lean into an eternal quality as in enduring but not fixed, with perhaps an aid of a cleaner sweep of the nihilistic brush yet with more mystery than I might see; from my sense of awe and of the eternally sacred in my earliest experiences in relationship with art, music, nature, and love and in subsequent roles with work, in shamanic herbal apprenticeships and in moving from Buddhish to Buddhist. -
I sit here nodding, saying ‘yep’, ‘me too’ and in some ways can simply say DITTO. Yet I do have my own story, similar to most posts starting with eternalism/cradle Christian. Fast forward, I met Terry who was not Christian, labeled himself “agnostic”, we fall in love so deep and so fast – we eloped 6 weeks to the day we met and then spent close to 41 years before his too-early death from ALS in 2017. I went from “I could never marry anyone who wasn’t Christian” to love that took away that boundary. In our time together, we both traveled – in and out of denominations progressing more liberal with each move. Terry’s views shifted toward Christian Agnostic and when he did find himself involved in a church, he’d always be in the soup kitchen or driving the bus to take families to visit loved ones in prison. Talk about ‘as you do to others …’! I was steeped in learning – Spiritual Formation, Seminary classes and more. He always said he was “hands and feet” and I was “head and heart”.
When Terry entered hospice in 2016, we had a chaplain, John, who visited us and John was perfect for us. Raised Catholic, he was now following Buddhist teachings. The community he and his wife were a part of at the time was called the Buddhist Christian Mother Earth Church. (Trying to be all things to all people?) John and his wife began their own Sangha a few years later and I joined that Sangha in 2021.
So where was nihilism? Well, after Terry died it occurred to me he might be right – maybe there is nothing but THIS. In an odd sense, that felt ok, even better than ok. Sort of a seize the day awakening – Life goes on and forward I will go now, on my own. It morphed into an “I don’t know” and then a sense of ‘something’ – sort of like a glue that sticks this all into relationship and I could not deny it’s reality. John Caputo writes that “God (I really don’t like that noun) doesn’t so much exist as insist”. That feels like a truth … there’s an insistence toward lovingkindness – it can be ignored and we see that every day. But it’s there. This glue, this insistence, the nothingness (nihilism?) that isn’t nothing but very much something.
Well, this felt rambling – luckily John and his wife are visiting today and the three of us do this often to reflect and journey together. Wisdom generally shows up from our time together.
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Thanks for sharing this beautiful story Mary Beth. Loved the practicality of your late husband and the fact that he focused on directly helping others instead of just talking about it, or simply believing. Also loved the fact that you didn’t let differences get on the way of happiness, well done.
You are right, there are huge commonalities in all our stories, and perhaps that is understandable given we are all alive today and live in a somewhat similar context. -
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I was raised Catholic by Italian immigrants who believed that hard work was moral. They came here to escape poverty and my job was to endure and not really question much. Meaning lived in effort. God kept score.
Education dismantled that story as I learned (still am) the real history of this country that my parents emigrated to for a better life. The American Dream was less about hope and more about cover. Nihilism followed. Not despair, nor cynicism, but honesty. Detachment felt right in a culture built on denial.
White, privileged, disillusioned, I thought love would save me believing intimacy might offer something grand. Perhaps impermanence since institutions didn’t. Love didn’t interrupt that reckoning. It collapsed like everything else. Although heartbreak was devastating, it confirmed what I was learning. Permanence is a myth and impermanence is terrifying.
After learning from ancestry, education, and love, still wounded I met Yoga. It taught me (slowly and unevenly) to wake up my body. Angry, exhausted, numb, and still unkind, it brought me back into my body at a time when withdrawal was feeling like wisdom. Then I met Buddhism. It didn’t argue with Nihilism, but it did start to clarify some things gently and in the most uncertain and magical way.
Nihilim sharpened my vision. Eternalism was all in my foundation. So the quote by Tupac Shakur, reality is wrong, dreams are for real, still resonates with me well after many decades of hearing it and witnessing it. But a practice where attention and presence matter most, means more. A lot more.
So now nearing 60, I don’t believe hard work redeems suffering. I don’t believe history bends toward justice. I don’t believe goodness is rewarded. I believe in practice – one that asks for quiet and one that demands staying awake. Doing away with hardening, away with stories, nothing is certain. No ground, just practice.
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My understanding is that eternalism presupposes some permanence, some eternal soul, some unchanging self. I do believe in some sort of ultimate, universal goodness. Something bigger than ourselves, some common sentience. Like the metaphor, my consciousness is a drop of water, waiting to rejoin the ocean. Is that the same as eternalism? Is the difference in the individuality of it?
My understanding is that nihilism thinks ‘this is all there is’, or that nothing exists unless it can be seen or experienced or proven. Which honestly seems scary to live in to me… the idea that this is all there is, that reality is constrained by what the human brain can conceive. There’s such a loneliness in that. Somehow this feels like teenager years and existential dread to me.
My understanding of the ‘middle way’ is that things are interdependent and changing. Not being eternalistic means things aren’t independent, as then they wouldn’t be affected by other things, they wouldn’t change. Not be nihilistic means things are real, things matter.
I am still working on defining in my own brain, they both sound simple and make my head spin!
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The responses to this question are fascinating and so very personal. I have had very personal experiences with both eternalism and nihilism.
I am a cradle Catholic and my earliest influences were my grandmothers; most specifically my father’s mother. She was a loving and very devout woman. As a little girl we would go to mass each Sunday with her lady friends followed by lunch and an afternoon spent playing cards. At night we would pray and she would tell me stories about my grandfather and other close family members in heaven. She was a child immigrant that came over to America through Ellis Island in the early 1900’s. She had a deep faith and I adored her. I never knew my grandfather her husband, but she assured me that we would meet one day in heaven. I remember lying next to her staring at the ceiling and pondering this wonderful place.
We moved away when I was five and that time spent living next door to my grandma was priceless to me. The memories are the favorite time of my childhood. I think it was my entire childhood because soon after we moved away, my parents’ marriage became clearly irreparable and our home a battle zone. I attended catechism for a while, but eventually that went by the wayside as my parent’s couldn’t keep it together. I ultimately became the parentified child and my faith became a sanctuary. As a young adult I pursued the continuation of my sacraments – the big 7 in Catholicism – and I became a seeker. I’ve never considered myself religious, but I have a deep spiritual curiosity and there is a part of me that identifies with the traditions and rituals of being Catholic. The problem is the man made teachings and the current climate have turned me away from the church and the hypocrisy.
It’s complicated seems to be most accurate because I married an athiest from a very wonderful Catholic family. He was and is a nonbeliever, a scientist and was never in our relationship “going to see the light” although I prayed and prayed and prayed! I chose him because a bible waving Christian that didn’t practice living with integrity, acceptance, love and values was scarier to me than a man that was very direct in his views but also unwaveringly solid in matters of integrity, social responsibility and the values of being a good human. I know so many nonbelievers that are amazing humans and so many believers that are just not. That may be very judgey, but for some strange reason or not it felt safe to me. Perhaps my denial was a more accurate description of reality, but he played along and allowed me to marry in the church where his parents were wed, and baptise our daughter into the faith.
When my kiddo was four years old, we attended the wedding of a dear friend. He and his bride were married in a Buddhist ceremony at a Zen monastery in upstate New York. It was a wonderful experience. My friends’ reception was in a charming B&B close by. During the reception I came upon the groom chatting with his VERY NY Italian catholic family. They were asking all sorts of questions about this Buddhism business and I remember that he seemed so light and free as he fielded questions from his loved ones. I remember saying to him – what about God? – He responded – what about God? Later I received a book in the mail – Zen Spirit Christian Spirit – The place of Zen in Christian Life by Robert E. Kennedy I was extremely enthralled with this book. He talked about an opening and the path…My memory of this experience is one of spaciousness.
Years later I stumbled upon the Open Heart Project. The way Susan Piver spoke about things spoke to me. It was even more spacious. I started believing that Jesus/Catholicism/Christianity/World Religion gave us rules and the Buddha gave us tools. Tools for navigating the messy middle. Technique for showing up in a more authentic and accountable way.
What I am learning today is that perhaps my tool analogy is incorrect in the context in which we are learning about The Middle Way.
I understand that we are not here to fix anything. I have less answers than I have ever had about any “isms”. What I do have is a practice, a technique and much more to learn.
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Hi Kimberly,
I enjoyed reading about your life experiences very much. I also feel as though I have fewer answers now than ever before. -
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Hi Kimberly,
Your line that you referred to as judgey, “I know so many nonbelievers that are amazing humans and so many believers that are just not”, really lands for me. Perhaps because I’m very judgey. But it is also an entry point to the The Middle Way for me. I notice how believer/nonbeliever dualism gives me a sense of ground. But in reality, it’s not helpful. At least this is what I’ve been learning from my self-study and reading teachings by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Pema Chodron. Let go of fixed views and relax into everyday life. This reminds me often that goodness isn’t about belief – it’s about how I meet suffering.
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My life experience has been almost exclusively with eternalism. There was a brief period perhaps a decade ago when I had a sort of “what even matters?” perspective as I wrestled with the lack of a felt sense of purpose, but even then I never truly felt that there was no structure to the universe or to life.
The worldview that was instilled in me during my formative years was one of an absolute God and a created order that required my compliance in order to please the God who held my eternal fate in his hands. Because this belief was the water in which I was born and learned to swim, it did not feel in any way optional to me. It was just the way things were, and I as the created being had no say in the matter.
More recently as I have decided to prioritize curiosity, wonder, and mystery, I am growing much more comfortable with not understanding the Divine. In fact, I think that a deity that I could fully understand with my finite human mind wouldn’t actually be much of a God! The more I can let go and the more I can accept uncertainty and groundlessness, the more open I can be to the myriad ways to experience the spiritual life.
Compassion is the water in which I choose to swim now. I am confident that there is a creative and benevolent force of love in the universe, and I can be in relationship with this love, and I can cultivate this love in myself as well. As for anything beyond that, and what happens to our souls or consciousness after our human life ends, I’m content to let it remain a mystery.
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-note, I’m glad this is our essay question this week, since there seemed to be a lot of interesting stories in the class period and I’m curious to hear what you all have to say!
Nihilism, meaning that there is other determined purpose for your life, that nothing follows death, that without established meaning no actions or behaviors actually matter. What follows is that each individual determines their own meaning and purpose, and essentially their own rules or lack thereof for existence. My sense of relating to this philosophy comes from a non-religious upbringing. I was not taught about God, and only in a sort of socio-culturally accepted sense did I understand heaven. People said that after you die you go to this other, better place, where you can see your dead relatives. As a child this made enough sense to me–though it was vague and unexplained, it seemed fair. Also, I understood that anyone went there, including pets and animals. This was my child-like eternalism, though it didn’t last long.
I would say that growing up into my education, the founding beliefs of that education were scientific in nature. Meaning that the mechanisms and forces of the universe come only from scientific and mathematical explanations, and unexplained phenomena could be yet explained, and explained phenomena could yet be disproven. As we explored, this can be essentially nihilistic. It doesn’t really accept faith (eternalistic or otherwise) as a valid explanation for phenomena or philosophy. I was taught to believe in scientific explanations, and I didn’t reject that viewpoint. I internalized the belief that basically once you’re dead, you’re dead. There are no gods. The scientific processes continue, cause and effect, like karma (I say with hindsight, I was not Buddhist yet). Humans make their own beliefs, some are beneficial to us, and some are harmful. I learned of many examples where it seemed people formed religious beliefs around selfish goals and which resulted in violence and injustice. I actually developed a resistance to organized religion based on my educational environment and my sociocultural setting.
However, since I was very young, I have felt attuned to the particular, nonverbal, felt tone of experiences and places and emotions. In an essentially “non-scientific” way. This was especially noticed in my experiences of nature and art and books. It was related to my artistic sensibilities, and my introspective personality as well. And yes, I am a 4.
In high school I found God. Or at least, I thought I did. I just didn’t see it the way I used to, as a made-up bearded man in the sky, who I couldn’t relate to at all. I began to have feelings of a deep and secret beauty, permeating all things. I believed that all things were connected, which was actually supported by my scientific understanding of the universe. I imagined a flow of energy and matter like a constant river through the night sky. A river we are all a part of and can remember at any time. This was my God. It was the love of the Universe. All matter is interconnected and interactive, and is changed into different forms of itself, and is never created or destroyed. In the same way I felt that Love and beauty permeates us all, connects us, and when we die, our matter and our “souls” (whatever that is), returns to the One.
This is my personal example of science NOT being nihilist, but rather eternalist. And if you look at history you in fact see many scientists who believe in God, and their belief is affirmed rather than denied by their study of science and mathematics.
Anyway, I started listening to podcasts of Sufi wisdom by the professor Omid Safi. I fell in love with the teachings, the poetry, and the man himself. I fancied myself becoming a mystic Muslim. I listened to Quran recitations, found the copy in our house, and wanted to learn Arabic. I got books by Rumi and Hafez. I also agreed with Dr. Safi, who said that all the mystics of many traditions, the truest wisdom of all creeds, converged on this same wisdom of ever-permeating and flowing Love, which he calls the Islamic God, Allah, but many can and do experience under different names and descriptions. I agreed that it seemed that many mystics of different backgrounds, at some point through their seeking, often came to the same wise and revealing conclusions about connectedness and love in our existence.
At a similar timeline I started meditating and being exposed to Vajrayana Buddhism. This wasn’t contradictory but rather developed alongside other beliefs, practices, and wisdom, in conversation with each other. In college I continued to have spiritual experiences, unexplained and mystic feelings. I swam through the ocean and sang on the cliffs under night stars. I played improvisational music with friends by firelight. I hiked and camped far and wide under different wildernesses but the same sky. At times I felt God with me, or rather remembered that interconnected love which I would say is the God I know, and at other times I wasn’t sure if I related to the concept of a god.
Meanwhile my Buddhist practice and study developed. I felt more and more that these were teachings I had known and held within me all my life, and that they were slowly permeating and opening my life.
Today, I have taken refuge within this path. I never did become a Muslim, though I suppose that could still happen. As a mystic Buddhist, I still carry that openness for experiences beyond description, for the unexplained, for even the divine. I know I can’t pretend to explain or understand it in full, so I don’t try to. Any religion could be “right”, but that isn’t really important to me. I live through my lived experience and practice and if anything choose to believe in intrinsic goodness, beauty, and interconnectedness, because why would you want anything else to be true? As well as my experience seems to reflect this. The practices and teachings of Buddhism have been greatly influential to me, and beneficial to myself and others. In this way I suppose I had a personal development of the “middle way” between eternalism and nihilism.
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Let’s first lay some groundwork. Nihilism is a belief that life is meaningless. Existentially, because nihilism denies knowledge, and even more extreme that nothing exists, this view can lead to feelings of apathy, or can be used as a vehicle for apathy. Personally, this view is a waste of precious human life. It is completely devoid of magic. It is also so confused about the nature of existence (i.e., not nothingness, rather, interdependent, interconnected, dependent on causes and conditions, and constantly changing, spacious and full of endless possibility – magic).
Eternalism, and I understand we are applying it here theistically, is a view that God is the eternal ordering principle that sets the Cosmic Plan and gives everything a specific meaning. I did not grow up in an overly religious family. This view, while inviting magic only derives that magic from “God”, and invites the removal of agency from one’s life (lives). Rather, the path of relying on a Spiritual Guide provides agency, applies wisdom, asks to investigate and then decide if you are “buying it”, and also comes with so much magic.
I am in love with the magic of life all around me. This is why I am a scientist. Science is a methodological process to investigate the world around us; a process of discovery. Through science I have never found nothingness or lack of meaning, but rather an expansive experience of greater magic and meaning in life. This is the opposite experience of nihilism.
We used an example in class of applying scientific investigation of the body’s response to meditation as an example of nihilism. However, the scientific investigation of the body’s response to meditation is not in itself nihilistic. Rather, the conclusion that one could choose to make as a result of that scientific investigation that e.g., there is no deeper meaning to meditation other than the body’s reaction, reduced to mere electro-chemical reactions in cells, is a nihilistic conclusion. I offer this observation with the intention of clearing some confusion around the process of science, as our discussion, or at least the chat discussion seemed to reveal some different views of what science is and is not (science is not nihilism, but nihilism can be applied through science depending on one’s view).
That’s all for now. Thank you. – Jodi
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These have been two topics that are prevalent in my life as I enter midlife.
As a child, eternalism wasn’t really pushed upon me, but I always had a curiosity and would be curious to the point of attending church with friends and their families. In my twenties after a couple of traumatic events, I reverted more over to nihilism.
I have found myself floating in the middle of each, swaying closer to one or the other at different points.
Currently, I am searching for meaning but have not found it.
I read and study but know these answers must come from within. And so I wait. -
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Reflect on your experiences within both, eternalism and nihilsim. Where have you noticed each within yourself?
What I notice regarding nihilism, within myself was a child at about age 6 or 7. Attending adult church service at the end of children’s Sunday School, was a frightening experience. Hell and damnation was preached, and we were told if we didn’t get baptised we were going to hell. I’m not sure if my inner-response was from a sense of nihilism or not, but I felt like, if that happened (me going to hell) it would be painful experience that I couldn’t even imagine, and that it would last for what seemed like forever, and when that ‘forever’ ended, that that would be the end of me. It didn’t go farther than that. Even after surviving that experience and attending other churches through about age 18, the idea letting that go, and opening to there being more to life than the body, was not a teaching I’d been exposed to through age 30, when eternalism dawned on the horizon for me… although it wasn’t called that.
Eternalism: At age 30 while going through divorce I began to have a lot of questions about life, such as how to get out of the internal angst I was experiencing and feeling like it wouldn’t be happening, if only “they” would stop behaving a certain way. Something in me was searching, and led me to the bookstore, and even though I thought it was simply to feel better, it was the beginning of my journey into personal and spiritual exploration, growth and development. It was then that I became aware of the idea of what could be called eternalism, although that word was not mentioned, and not verbatim with the White Sail article. The idea of ‘continuity of mind’ and being in relationship with (or within) this continuity.. created an expansion, and a spaciousness, in my mind for hope, optimism, discernment, personal agency, choice, and more; and a desire to explore, learn, practice and apply it in my life;, which I did and continue to do so and adjust accordingly. So, the eternalism journey continues presently.
Please note: This is very difficult for me to express and describe, as I try to weave a clear understanding of the White Sail article (writing style?), sifting through and translating the wording in a way my mind and heart understand, so as to communicate, apply it properly, and address the learning, and the question clearly and accurately. I’m still a work in progress on this one especially. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
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Nihilism comes up for me frequently in my practice of being a scientist. I suffer from the weight of it a lot! I have been especially noticing the habit of residing in nihilism once we named it in our discussions. On the day-to-day, most of my work entails studying the physics of glaciers. So, I have an acute exposure to unhealthy changes in polar ecosystems coupled with (somewhat) of a sense of the vast spatial scale of ice sheets. That’s all to say, I easily reside in the feeling of overwhelm, which I feed with nihilism (e.g., asking “what is the impact of my work, if at all, given the problems are so vast?”). Even when I experience wonder and “small-ness” relative to the universe at large, nihilism creeps up. It sound like “what is the point of this little existence?” “are we all just here trying to love and be loved?” “is this reality really all there is; this reality is all there really is.”
Conversely, I notice I have tried very hard over the years to have an eternalist view (as if that were the only other option). Meaning, I have wanted to believe in an afterlife, as someone that grew up in a white American Christian household because I was told doing so makes living easier. I was led to believe it is easier to believe in and trust in God because if I did then all of my actions would be in service to him and would ensure my entry into a heaven. None of this messaging resonated in my bones as a little kid, but I wanted it to. I wanted to believe that my actions were on a “right path” because I witnessed/witness the conviction that my family had/has (and other Christians I was exposed to in our white, male centered Church). It seemed so empowering! Now, I notice the remnants of this desire for certainty in the entry into heaven in my unconscious desires: I have a desire to do good and be good, not by my own judgement but by some external judge. And, if I meet a certain level of *goodness* then I’m “safe.”Not sure what else to add from here, as these are very fresh observations. I do know for sure, that I am of the nature to die. I am of the nature to get old. And, that I have a desire to be love, regardless of the return on that love.
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I think my personal struggle with eternalism is the constant need I feel to see myself as an undeniably good person, as though that’s something I could achieve and hold on to, and the nagging sense that I’m failing to live up to that (im)possibility.
Both eternalism and nihilism are based on the underlying assumption that the only things that really matter are things that are permanent (“eternal”). If you believe this assumption and think such things exist, you become an eternalist. If you beleive the assumption and don’t think permanent things exist, you become a nihilist.
The idea that only eternal things matter is very tempting, but once you buy it you’re locked into one of those two paths.
So the struggle, and I think possibly the central point of Buddhism, is to understand that every moment matters, even though every one of them is ephemeral.
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