I’ve relapsed into a little period of hedonism the past few days, not entirely, but a much stronger ratio of comforting indulging : intellectual fulfillment. At times, after too much bed rotting, my frontal lobe kicks into gear and forces me up and into a book or math problems. What I’d like to note here is the ridiculous palpable difference in brain states when switching between two situations so quickly. Pleasure/enjoyment brain-mode seems to disregard detail and gaslights itself into thinking it’s thinking. Going between modes, the effect from the preceding mode on the brain always lingers for a bit. Brainiac to pleasure feels like an insult. Pleasure to brainiac feels humbling, in the worst way.

Anyhow, the convenience and desolation factor as a core biological tenet of the human mind once again presents itself to me in Buddhism. Previously on Hinduism. It’s getting late, so I’ll only brief what I mean to say by saying Mr. Gautama, or at least what he’s believed to have said as recorded in the Pali Canon and other records, contains so many seeming minutia that become premises for the becoming of a spirit in the absence of a soul in a perhaps convoluted (but somehow sensical) way that I don’t know whether I’m understanding it correctly or have been tricked by myself into believing I have understood out of some biological preservation mechanism to stop me reading the same passages for another hour. Trimming the fat, the hard pill (and perhaps poisonous) to swallow is when Gautama says a being is in their present-state by lawfulness (causality), but has control over this present state. It feels contradictory on the surface, but by the minutia I tried to encapsulate the feelings of just above, which I’m too lazy to pour over, it somehow begins to sit okay in them brain wrinkles.

Another tenet of the human state presents itself to me in Buddhism in the split of Buddhism. We saw that in Hinduism, now the same paradigm repeats with Theravada Buddhism vs. Mahayana Buddhism. Philosophical mind vs. the romantic mind. Arhat vs Bodhisattva. Structure and discipline vs convenience and emotion. Personally, I think the Mahayanas looked at Gautama’s return from nirvana to the people and ran with it.