I don't see a non-arbitrary basis for values on your view of enlightenment, so it seems pretty close to nihilism to me. That's been one of my main criticisms of Buddhism.
You wrote an interesting take on morality in our earlier dialogue on secular vs spiritual enlightenment:
'morality only means conditioning that leads to reduction of pain and is designed only as a common sense guide until one knows what’s the actual “deal”, because when we talk about realization of absolute (as in knowing but also materializing it) we also talk about seeing all conditioning merely as our personal responses to events. Therefore, we hardly deserve to be punished or rewarded. It’s us who punish and reward ourselves and others, while we go through various degrees of mental gymnastics rationalizing it all, as the rules of the game are, indeed, impartial (not to mention that reward and punishment are mental concepts, too).'
This seems to me to entail that an enlightened sage would regard "oughts," prescriptions, and value judgments as illusory. The sage would be beyond good and evil since our values would fade with the realization that the ego itself is a trick of perception.
If nihilism is the view that values are all unreal (as in not part of objective reality and based on errors of reasoning or perceptual illusions), how do you avoid nihilism? What are enlightened values, and what are they based on?
