[Ground]

Originally Posted by Ground

That of course does not answer the question what does make one validly know that a specific cessation is possible.

One can know that temporal cessation is possible because that what one wants to get rid of is not continually present. E.g. if one's aim is to get rid of fear of death one validly knows that fear but one can also validly know times when that fear is absent.

But how does one validly know that permanent cessation is possible?

Through investigating 'to the very heart of things' as the buddha recommended: Validly knowing the cause of that what one wants to get rid of one can validly know that if the cause is absent then the effect necessarily is absent too.

However this actually amounts to cessation of the cause and we end up in an infinite regress because the cause is the effect of another cause.

OR ...

... regardless of what it is that one wants to get rid of one arrrives at dependent origination which has the obscure 'not knowing' or 'ignorance' as its source.



However one still does not validly know the correctness of this dependent origination! And one still does not know whether permanent cessation is possible.


The only way out is either to investigate into the infinite regress ...

OR ...

... to take dependent origination as a hypothesis that has to be validated by means of experiments: any member of the chain is a potential point of interruption.

And since one still does not know whether permanent cessation is possible one has to take a pragmatic approach: Does that what one wants to get rid of occur less often and with less intensity as an outcome of one's experiments? If yes that would be a beneficial result and the approach is at least valid in terms of attenuation, if no then the approach is not valid at all.

Here an important remark is to be made:


'Cessation of a cause' does not necessarily mean that the phenomenon which in general is a cause does cease.
Why?
Because a phenomenon is only a cause if it actually causes. I.e. every potential cause may be obstructed.

Therefore if a phenomenon which has been a cause of a specific unease does not continue to cause this unease although it is still present then this also is a case of a cause having ceased.

This is clearly illustrated by emptiness. Direct perception of the emptiness of phenomena does not make these phenomena disappear but removes any possibility of being emotionally affected by these phenomena.
So what actually has to cease is the direct cause not potentially indirect causes and the direct cause of being emotionally affected in this illustration is 'contact' (phassa) which is a member of the causal chain of dependent origination.


Another remark:

It has to be clear that the buddhist model of 'dependent origination' is just a conceptual aid to block the infinite regress that necessarily arises when investigating into causality.
From that one may conclude that causation is only a conceptual construct that has no support in a subject-independent reality but may apply in a pragmatic sense to the sphere of the subject nevertheless.