WHAT!!???... Robin, what is it and you with "nihilism"?
Shakespeare was not a nihilist any more than the Buddha was. Shakespeare was a sage, it's just that he unlike very few westerners knew that being didn't end with the ego, rather it began where the ego ended.
Now I have to go find that danged quote from the Tempest again....
PROSPERO
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Now you can take this nihilistically if you want, but Buddha said the same thing as did Ramana among others. It is what lies beyond the dream. It is who awakens from the dreaming. The notion of the literal "saving" of the ego that dominates western cultural religion is the worst case scenario because if establishes a ceiling beyond which it is forbidden to look or worse go. The few who do are taunted as "heretics" as you've read in these threads.
lfen
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