{"id":10410,"date":"2011-08-26T10:42:24","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T10:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/26\/grief-three-solutions\/"},"modified":"2011-08-26T10:42:24","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T10:42:24","slug":"grief-three-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/26\/grief-three-solutions\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief: Three Solutions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">\ufeffThat we grieve over the loss of a finite good shows our wretchedness. But the cure for grief is not the substitution of attachment&#0160;to another finite good. We should not distract ourselves from our grief, but experience it and try to grasp the root of it, which is our inner emptiness, rather than the loss of a particular finite good. The proximate cause of my grief, the death of a beloved companion, is not grief\u2019s ultimate cause. The inner emptiness, infinite in that nothing finite can assuage it, has but one anodyne: the infinite good, God. <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">If God be denied, then either the inner emptiness must be extinguished, or we must learn to fill it with finite goods. The latter, common as it is, is a miserable stop-gap measure and no ultimate solution. But to extinguish the inner emptiness, we must extinguish desire itself. This, the solution of Pali Buddhism, cuts but does not untie the Gordian knot.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">So I count three solutions to grief: seek God; Pascalian <em>divertissement<\/em>; Buddhist extinction.&#0160; Perhaps there are others.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeffThat we grieve over the loss of a finite good shows our wretchedness. But the cure for grief is not the substitution of attachment&#0160;to another finite good. We should not distract ourselves from our grief, but experience it and try to grasp the root of it, which is our inner emptiness, rather than the loss &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/26\/grief-three-solutions\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Grief: Three Solutions&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emotions","category-human-predicament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}