If nirvana is to escape the cycle of Samsara, wouldn't all of humanity being dead meaning Samsara would end? Say there was a total nuclear war and everyone ends up dead.

When I am lying down, my abdomin fills easily, but when sitting with what I believe is proper posture, it feels like my diaphragm is stuck and my breath cannot expand into my abdomen. Only my ribs and upper chest expand. It is not caused by anxiety, nor does it cause a lot of anxiety, but is very distracting and uncomfortable. It this normal or is it something I can improve with exercises?

Most if not all of us had used alias, pseudonym or avatar at one time or another while interacting with others on the Internet. There may be good reasons for doing so such as the desire to protect our privacy, fear of intimidation or to criticize people in power without fear of retaliation. Of course, there could be less than noble reasons as well. Is the use of alias, pseudonym or avatar i.e. impersonation considered breaking the 4th Buddhist precept of lying? If using an alias, pseudonym or avatar is alright then why stop at one? What is wrong with using more than one impersonating identity? If a person created multiple accounts in a forum (like the one I am writing in) and there is no explicit rule forbidding it, is it alright? Appreciate if answers would cover the subject from a Buddhist perspective.

I have been meditating for a few years now. I love the ones that deal with breathe control. I have use Headspace, calm, and balanced. All help a little but I have done trials of all three and don’t know which is better. Please help

No matter how many retreats or how much I meditate and try to practice metta etc people mostly just irritate me. I just feel happier alone like a hermit in a natural setting. I hate living in a shoebox in a city full of ignorant selfish people. It's like hell to me. I actually get up at 2am so that I can do a whole bunch of stuff before I have to deal with people. One on one I can do social things but as far as humanity as a whole I find people repugnant. Animals are so much nicer. They love unconditionally, they don't judge, bully, use, destroy and pollute nature etc etc

I haven't even tried Mindfulness properly and I am already facing huge trouble. I tried to practice mindfulness meditation because I have very poor memory and focus in studies. I tried to be mindful but when I tried to do so, it is interfering with subconscious activities like basic memory and understanding. These are stuff that is mostly done subconsciously but when I become mindful my thoughts are becoming extremely diverse and I am overthinking. Let's say a multiplication comes to my mind - 4x9=36. My mind is like "How is this happening? How is this memory forming? What is 4? What is 9? How am I remembering this specific multiplication when I am remembering so many things? How am I remembering the spelling of 'four'?" and thus my mind would try to decipher my memory. When my mind doesn't find any audio-visual reason for my meditation, these basic memories are fading? I tried to use mindfulness while studying. When I read a sentence, my mind would automatically decipher the meaning. However, due to mindfulness, it is becoming way more complex as my mind is asking questions like "What is 'and'? What is 'is'? What is 'market'? What is 'regulation'? How do I remember the word 'regu' and 'lation'?" And so on. It is slowing me down heavily and I can't control it. If I try to focus on the present, as mindfulness would require, I cannot focus on what I am studying, as my focus is on words, not on understanding, since understanding requires me to imagine and use my intuition, which I can't when I am observing my thoughts. The entire process of learning, which was somehow automatic, is becoming tiresome with mindfulness. I cannot recall anything, as the process of recall is automatic (subconscious) and when I am observing the recalling process, I can't do it. Mindfulness involves focusing on breathing, and I do it, but when I resume my daily life, I find myself often distracted, focused on breathing or my 'self' rather than the activities. On top of it I found that [executive dysfunction is a side effect of mindfulness](https://www.verywellhealth.com/mindfulness-can-be-harmful-researchers-say-5186740) , which is making me worried if I will become disabled by practicing mindfulness. The article says that Buddhist scriptures have recorded these negative effects (where?). Dalai Lama apparently said this is happening because people are not focusing on the 'end'. What is that supposed to mean? What should I do? My memory and focus is poor, so I tried to meditate, but when I do, I start overthinking and my automatic and subconscious processes becomes worse.

There must be some reason, to use **vedayita** and not **vedana**. my intuition says that its not cessation of feeling. but cessation of feeling object. what do you say ? From DPD digital pali dictionary: vedayita nt. which is felt; felt experience; feeling; lit. felt [√vid + *aya + ita] ✓ vedanā 1 fem. (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) felt experience; feeling; sensation; second of the five aggregates; lit. causing to know [√vid + *anā] ✓

I just read '. . . Bhadda Kapilani, a practitioner who for many lifetimes made the aspiration to be reborn as a woman.' What are the textural references for this?

I have been following Goenka tradition of vipassana for a few months now(one 10 day retreat and 5 months of daily practice). We are instructed to keep our attention below the nostrils and observe the flow of breath (i.e., just know that you are inhaling or exhaling). My problem with the instructions is that I can feel the sensations under my nostrils, but I don’t understand what that sensation means i.e., if it is inhalation or exhalation. For the longest time, in an attempt to figure/know what the sensation corresponded to, I think I was controlling my breath, which proved to be counterproductive as I was having trouble breathing normally. Even extending to normal day-to-day affairs. I tried using harder breaths, longer breaths, but I never could go beyond understanding that there is sensation under my nostrils. I understand that it is for building shamata, and the knowing of if the sensation corresponds to inhalation or exhalation doesn’t matter that much. But I am assuming there is a reason the instruction is a certain way. Am I doing something wrong. Any help is appreciated. I read that the Mahasi tradition emphasises keeping the attention on the rising and falling of the belly, but I don’t think I am ready to mix traditions yet. Does anyone know what might be happening here or have any suggestions on what can be done to help better my practice.

From wikipedia : Alara Kalama (Pāḷi & Sanskrit Āḷāra Kālāma/ Arāḍa Kālāma]), was a hermit and a teacher of SamkhyaHe was the first teacher of Gautama Buddha. I want to know ***which scriptures of samkhya philosophy were taught to buddha?*** Also was Buddha told characters of mahabharat /ramayan . Is it mentioned anywhere?

I am currently in a state of being that I don't understand properly. My main concern is that even though I am able to bring about major changes in my mind in a relatively short amount of practice, I am nonetheless deeply unaware and unfocused in every day life. For example, a lot of my time is wasted by me being in my head... Thinking unnecessarily situation, concepts, even Dhamma etc. but I end up not getting done much. Every morning with the intent of focusing on tasks, I end up doing just an hour or two hours work at best. Even other normal people are much more focused in their 9-5 jobs where they are working eight hours - and many of them don't even know about meditation etc. Other examples - - the slightest discomfort makes me feel strongly averse and then suffer disproportionately. - small amounts of substances have drastic mental effects - alcohol, caffeine, marijuana etc. I should mention some background info - I don't consume alcohol, weed etc. I am addicted to pornograhphy though. I am socially anxious, with slight aspergers and slight depression. Dhamma-wise, I am quite familiar with buddhism and more broadly, science-philosophy-spirituality. Edit : To clarify, I want to know more about this state of mind and the corresponding defilements. Further, what are the root components of this state (*like for example if someone has a habit of quarreling with people it is probably because s/he has lacking metta, excess anger and conceit*) . Have you experienced something similar, and if yes, how did you overcome it?

I have noticed last few months that my dreams are very real. This I say because if I recall a memory from some dream that I remember, that memory is usually more clear and stronger than most everyday life memories. I remember that better, coz I seem to be more "alive" in the dream. If right now I think about dreaming from yesterday night, I **know** that during the dream I was more alive then I am right now. I know this might be related to lucid dreaming, but I am not lucid dreamer - I haven't had a lucid dream ever. What do you think could be going on here? Have you been in a similar situation?

Arahants have eliminated the conceit of, "better," amongst other aspects of conceit and other fetters. However, if they are perfected people, that would mean they are perfect. Other people are not perfect, by very virtue of not being arahants. How do we explain the fact that an arahant doesn't feel better than anyone, though in reality they are better, morally, spiritually, and emotionally? Doesn't an arahant also lack ignorance? It seems knowing what you are and where you stand is a lack of ignorance.

It appears at the top of two different thangkas in a gompa, one representing Sakyamuni and another one with Vajrasattva in yab yum, and I am unable to find what it means.please help me clarify what mantra is that?

It is confusing to me that what what the goal of zazen is (and is not), as proposed by various people with more or less authority on the subject, varies so greatly. Some say no goal, and others identify various goals. Rationally speaking, no goal makes sense. It is a form of non-dualism. If there is a goal, then there is an attachment to becoming something which one is not. But no goal is also nonsense. If there is no goal, then there is no goal to end suffering. The Four Noble Truths become descriptive, and the Eightfold Path is unimportant. This is as far as my thinking has gotten. I conclude with some verifiable examples of what the goal of zazen is said to be. **remove wrong perceptions** > the practice of meditation, the practice of looking deeply, has the purpose of removing wrong perceptions from us
—[“What is Nirvana and How Does It End Suffering?” by Thích Nhất Hạnh at *MeditationPlex*](http://www.meditationplex.com/zen-meditation/thich-nhat-hanh-nirvana-suffering/#sthash.ymYgRbuO.dpuf) **see ourselves** > Zazen deliberately tries to remove all entertainment and distractions from our minds so we can see ourselves as we really are
—[The Laughing Teabowl Sangha](https://sites.google.com/a/wildblue.net/laughingteabowl/Home/zazen) **there is no goal** > There is no starting point nor goal, nothing to attain
–[*Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind* by Shunryu Suzuki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner 's_Mind) **grasp enlightenment** > the only way to grasp enlightenment is through a calm and settled mind
—[Zen Guide](http://www.zenguide.com/practice/zazen_guide.pdf) **engage with reality (not to make your life better)** > The real practice of Zen is to engage directly with reality, not to use it as a method to improve your health or make your life better
—[“Zazen Posture” by Josho Pat Phelan at *Chapel Hill Zen Center*](http://www.chzc.org/posture.htm) **not to learn** > Don’t think of practice in terms of “eventually”
—[“Zazen is not step-by-step learning meditation” by Harada Sekkei Roshi at *Buddhism Now*](http://buddhismnow.com/2014/02/19/zazen-not-step-by-step-harada-roshi/) **compassion** > the purpose of zazen is compassion
—[“Beyond Thinking: Dogen’s Teachings on Zazen” by Norman Fischer at *Upaya Zen Center*](http://www.upaya.org/2013/10/norman-fischer-10-05-2013-beyond-thinking-dogens-teachings-on-zazen-part-4/)

Dear Friends in the Dharma, Over the years i have accumulated a large Buddhist reference library along with other associated topics. The collection together is far more valuable and useful than the individual volumes would be separately. Does anyone know of a stable situation that such a collection may be donated to? Sincerely, Mr Norman

Buddhism encourages people to get rid of certain negative qualities like anger, hatred, jealousy, selfishness. But, considering an evolutionary perspective we couldn't completely tell what role they might be playing at a deeper level for the advancement of species as a whole even if they do appear bad on the first look. So how can we be sure that a world without those negative qualities would be a better one.

This applies to all superstitious people in general, but especially to someone very close. My mom is extremely ignorant and superstitious. She comes from an uneducated village background from a third world country. Due to ignorance of facts and lack of experience, she falls for any hearsay and produces strong emotions based on them, chiefly fear and worry. Example, she would read in the newspaper that somewhere in the Western world there was a homicide of someone from our country and she would get worried for me. she doesn't understand I am thousands of miles away from the place she has read about. The way she would spin stories out of what is actually written is truly fascinating. For example, 'A homicide of our countryman in the West' becomes 'the people in the West kill our countrymen and throw them out on the streets!' She also, unconsciously, tries to nudge me and manipulate me into seeing the bad aspects of the western world - when in fact the "bad" aspects she tries to tell me are due to her lack of understanding of facts and they are unfounded in reality. An example, she would tell semi-fabricated stories like that to me over call like the homicide one above. I have pointed out this mechanism to her multiple times to make her conscious of the fact-manipulation etc. even with examples. But I am now thinking she doesn't have the awareness to grasp this kind of "theoretical" understanding. Anyways, usually I just point out the falsehoods and switch topics. But last call I was dumbfounded by the extent of this and in order to really make her aware of this I may have said some words which were true but may be hurtful. Something like "you are acting like a 5 yo child who doesn't understand the basic knowledge and gets scared like that". I remember persisting on it a little because I wanted her to see the mistake there, and I feel pity towards her for suffering constantly on these untrue things. Now she is hurt from me because of this incident. I feel guilty and sad to hurt her with words and I have been crying. But at the same time I feel sorry for her for tormenting herself day after day and year after year due to ignorance of basic understanding of science and world. What should be done in this case? Should I ignore her manipulating and let her suffer although that doesn't seem right..? But I can't either try to show her truth for that either is ineffective or it involves hurt. Have you been in similar situation before?

I am new to Buddhism and wanted to ask a question that's been brimming on my mind for a while now. As a warning, I will touch upon a number of concepts that I am a complete layman in and so I am sure this post will be rife with fundamental misunderstandings and false equivalences: I thoroughly welcome any corrections of my ignorance. This post will get a bit long-winded, so I will briefly summarize my high level question: As I learn more about Buddhism and its central philosophy around desire, karma and the perpetuation of suffering, I an reminded of the thermodynamic concept of entropy: the similar idea that actions (or thermodynamic interactions) have consequences, and that consequence is consuming usable energy and permanently increasing the level of chaos disorder in the system. If this connection is legitimate (and I hope to substantiate it further in this post), I can't help but wonder if the ultimate "goal" of reaching nirvana - the cessation of karmic output - is futile in the face of the [2nd Law of Thermodynamics that entropy is nondecreasing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics) (and is de facto increasing), and an empirical observation of the accelerating trajectory of today's society toward disorder? The connection between karma and entropy further is most evident in terms of their human interface: human desires and actions. My understanding is that in Buddhism, our desires and our karmic actions based on those desires have direct cause-and-effect consequences - ultimately perpetuating the cycle of suffering. Meanwhile, our desires increase entropy output on both a thermodynamic level of disorder (in order to exist, we are entropic engines that consume energy and produce waste), and on a conceptual level of disorder: our ego needs take from the systems around us and perpetuate existing feedback loops of increasing chaos. In feeding our hunger to exist we kill, disrupting both lives and ecosystems, in feeding our desire to build we exhaust nonrenewable natural resources, in feeding our egos we perpetuate escalating cycles of conflict and violence. All the while we produce waste: biological waste, material waste, emotional waste, which impact the systems around us. Entropy increases, and so does suffering. In fact, a [recent up and coming theory of the evolution of life](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/) posits that life itself evolves directly as a consequence of the law of increasing entropy: our desires are outwards projections of the universe's unyielding creep towards efficient energy consumption. Here we can see a potential direct relationship between entropy, karma and samsara: in both Buddhism and the material world, we exist because of (and in order to) desire, and our desires produce entropy and karma that perpetuate suffering. On a societal level we can see that this creep toward efficiency has outgrown us individually: our collective desires feed into the insatiable organisms of capitalism and technological growth which efficiently and exponentially march forward toward profit and progress, often if not always at the cost of individual happiness. Again the karmic/entropic consequences of growth are self evident: at the cost of our collective egos we plunder our planet for resources, we efficiently fry our dopamine receptors (and increase desire) with decreasing time frames of gratification, we experience rapidly increasing political polarization in social media echo chambers and wage wars that escalate toward nuclear destruction. [At certain science-fiction scales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) , even the Sun itself is no longer a renewable resource in civilization's journey towards consumption. As accelerating growth and technology increase consumption and suffering, it directly disrupts the human condition and proportionately increases the difficulty of achieving presence (a sentiment shared in the infamous but prescient [Unabomber's Manifesto: Industrial Society and its Future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future)) . A really fascinating case study of the relationship between technology, exponential growth, and samsara is that of recent developments in artificial intelligence. Regardless of one's specific opinion on the timeline toward AGI or sentient AI, [the general consensus among experts](https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines#:~:text=At%20the%20time%20of%20writing,than%2020%20years%20from%20now.) ([reinforced by tremendous growth over the past year](https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/18pqd58/a_look_at_midjourneys_journey/)) seems to be that this is a question of not if, but when we will develop AI with human-level capabilities. Suppose at some time T in the future we have an AI that has the ability to progress and self-replicate exponentially. The underlying mechanism of growth for this AI is that of innate desire and suffering - they exist solely to efficiently chase some reward function, not unlike ourselves. As thus, it appears that the AI would be subject to the cycle of samsara: the idea of karmic feedback loops are clearly manifest in the self-tuning of parameters towards efficiency (and greater suffering). As the AI performs actions or do work based on these desires, their karmic actions [consume vast amounts of energy](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/climate/ai-could-soon-need-as-much-electricity-as-an-entire-country.html) and produce consequences not unlike those of our own desires. To sum this all up: we have a sentient system (or at the very least a suffering system subject to desires and samsara) that multiplies exponentially, thereby exponentially increasing (a) # of sentient beings trapped in samsara and (b) karmic output, entropy production, and resulting suffering. To wrap up the science fiction(?) and bring this back to the original question: if there is a connection between the concepts of karma, suffering, and entropy, is the Buddhist path toward individual and collective enlightenment possible in the face of the iron law of thermodynamics that entropy is nondecreasing? To be clear, this is not a comment on the validity of the Buddhist message: its truth and wisdom are clearly self evident and have brought enormous benefit to me as an individual and all of us collectively. Rather, this is a question of its feasibility in the grand scheme of things, in the same way that we can acknowledge that late stage metastatic cancer is less than ideal while admitting that fighting it is futile. Projecting current trends into the future, all feedback loops toward disorder appear to be accelerating, and it feels unlikely if not thermodynamically impossible to ever turn back the entropic clock. Is enlightenment feasible if each subsequent rebirth lands you in a reality exponentially more chaotic than the previous one? Is achieving the Bodhisattva vow to achieve enlightenment for all sentient beings feasible in the light of the exponentially increasing number of sentient beings, themselves exponentially growing towards more efficient suffering? Thank you for reading my rant / question and I wholeheartedly look forward to all discussion, critiques, corrections, and resources!

from my experience aum-mantra meditation and physical yoga have altered my mental/spiritual state quicker and it's been sustained for longer in between practice sessions than just focusing on my breathing. The former have brought me much stronger states too.