• Nirvana is the absolute zero – the true baseline. Everything that is not nirvana is some degree of suffering, the same way -50°F in Alaska is still 228 degrees Kelvin of heat. Buddhists are saying there’s a state so far beyond our current experience that everything else is suffering by comparison. From Astral Codex Ten,

    Naively, it seems like there are two kinds of temperature: hot and cold. But a scientist would tell you there’s only one kind: heat. “Room temperature” is a fact about human perception. When you remove heat, at some point your perception switches from “less hot” to “more cold,” but you’ve just been removing heat the whole time.

    Similarly, Buddhists think there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering. The point we perceive as “neutral” is arbitrary. If you remove suffering, at some point your perception switches from “less suffering” to “more joyful,” but it’s all just degrees of suffering. The real “zero suffering” isn’t blah — it’s nirvana, which is “more blissful than we can possibly imagine.”

    “Life is suffering” is equivalent to “temperature is heat.” Literally true.