Interesting to mention Ricard in this context. Is that heightened left prefrontal cortex activity a sign of awakening? Tricky, because awakening should presumably involve truth as well as happiness, and sometimes we can be a lot happier by deluding ourselves.

But when you put it like that… I almost want to say it’s perhaps NOT needed as a regulative ideal in the way Kant needed his 3. If we could boil down karma to psychology or virtue as you mentioned Dale Write did a few years ago, combined with hard empirical data such as the studies done on Matthieu Ricard, then perhaps you’d have all you need…

Looking forward to your further thoughts, and thanks again.

And it seems you’re taking the Third Noble Truth in something very close to that way, as a regulative ideal. (I believe Ronald Green tried to treat karma-rebirth as a regulative ideal in Religious Reason, and possibly his later work too.) We cannot know that there is an end to suffering, but we must assume that there is. This is particularly important in light of the recent discussions here about certain knowledge: how could we ever know for sure whether someone else was fully awakened? How could we even know for sure whether we were? But there’s a lot of appeal to saying “we need to assume it’s possible anyway.” I need to think about this some more…

Lying itself cannot be helpful in either case. I’m pretty Kantian in that regard. But something like “reasonable acceptance of truths we as yet do not know to be true” does seem justified in terms of motivation or other expedient means. Telling a group of alcoholics “you *can* be free of alcohol” even if you know that, statistically, this is only a half-truth seems acceptable. If challenged, hiding those statistics or lying about them would be wrong though.

For me the 1st & 2nd NTs are convincing. I do cling and crave and see this as the source of my subtler suffering (gross suffering, dukkha-dukkha, even the Buddha still had to deal with) in times of change and it is reasonable to me that, yes, even my moments of joy are ‘tinged’ a bit by knowing they will fade. But practicing the path does ease the clinging/craving and thus the dukkha, so I have reasonable confidence that more practice will do even more. The 3rd NT I have no idea about personally. It sounds good though as a potential extension of the effects I’ve experienced already. And the tradition claims it’s true, so while I won’t beat my fists and demand anyone’s belief in it, I’ll go with it as a reasonable possibility.

Well, that still got long-winded. Oh well :)