Yes, well don’t get TOO friendly, now!
Are you kidding? Debating the middle way is one of the oldest pastimes among Buddhist pals! This is basically like spending an afternoon at the bowling alley for us! 
But seriously, I want to thank you for being part of this spirited discussion on such a difficult topic. I know that these kinds of discussions can really be difficult because they ultimately concern our deepest beliefs and intuitions about what we are doing on the spiritual path. And because of that, these discussions aren’t just about dry theory but in fact are about us too and how we understand our very lives and what we are doing on the path. So, it is very easy to take these kinds of discussions personally, and I am glad that neither of us seem to be doing that.
I do want to make a key meta distinction here though. I want to distinguish my axiological (i.e., the study of value, the philosophy of what is valuable) concerns with “emotional” as you’re using it here. I wouldn’t agree that my arguments as I’ve laid them out here are “emotional”. What my views are is concerned with value, as much as they are concerned with metaphysics. But all ancient Indian views are also equally concerned with value as with metaphysics.
To depict my view as “emotional” and your view as not emotional in turn is not correct, for this makes it sound like my view is irrational and only based on my personal feelings. But it is not, it’s just concerned with value. I would say that your view is just as concerned with value as mine (though it understands value differently and more negatively) so I would say that both of our views have concerns of value built in.
I am sure you did not mean to paint my view as “emotional” and your view as the unemotional alternative that is purely rational, which would be a straw man. I think you were just using “emotional” to describe concerns about what is valuable. Of course, any discussion among human beings also has emotional concerns built in, but since both of us are human, I think we have similar types of emotions regarding this discussion (hopefully some of them are positive! 
).
Anyways, let me address some of your points which I feel need to be discussed further (I apologize to those who are groaning under the weight of this discussion, but I feel it is important).
That sounds good as a philosophical theory, but in actual practice I don’t think continuists ever get accused of teaching annihilation. If you shared your views with the masses the way you did here, I’m quite sure no single person is going to call you an annihilationist…
Well, I think this is something that depends on one’s audience. In the Buddha’s time, where everyone held the view of atman, it would indeed be seen as annihilating the atman.
Just have a look at which Buddhist views get called annihilationism. 
It’s never continuitism; its cessationism…
If we look at SN 44.10, the view which is being mistaken for annihilationism is the view of not-self, this shows that the issue is closely tied with anatta. This means that it is the anatta teaching that leads people in the Buddha’s time to fear his teaching is annihilation. Furthermore, since he taught that the five skandhas all come to an end, and was generally apophatic in his method of describing nibbana, one can see why people would mistake his view for annihilation.
Also, while it would be very easy to see that all eternalist views are not annihilationism, a view which is the middle way between annihilationism and eternalism and which is mostly apophatic about nibbana and rejects atmans, could be mistaken for annihilationism. That is to say, I don’t think that only cessationalism is a candidate for a view that could be mistaken for annihilation. After all, in my view all five skandhas still cease (what remains is something that is none of the five aggregates) and rebirth is fully finished. There’s no person left over. Thus, the nibbanic reality of my ‘positivism’ is very subtle and in most cases is described apophatically by the Buddha. It would thus be easy for eternalists in ancient India to mistake this apophasis as teaching annihilationism. This becomes even more clear when you consider that the Buddha refused to say whether a Buddha or an arhat exists after death, while many ancient Indian religions like Jainism held that a liberated person did indeed exist after death living eternally in some higher dimensional realm.
In a similar vein, you don’t espouse an atman in words, perhaps. But this “subtle being” you propose seems to be the same thing by a different name. It functions as a self. Or can you teach me how it differs? Because to me, it sounds little different from some Brahmanic views.
There are several ways in which my view differs from the view of, say, Yajñavalkya (to choose one Brahmin, since the Upanishads actually promote many different views):
• My nibbanic reality not a static, or fixed substance nor an essence, it’s dynamic, like a stream, not like a piece of gold (a common Hindu metaphor).
• It’s not something that you already have like a mustard seed within you which undergoes rebirth, it’s something you attain as you let go of everything.
• In the Upanishads the personal self is also the same as the entire universe, which is a single mass of consciousness, that’s not what my view asserts.
The no-self philosophy of the Buddha is much more coherent with cessationalism, where we don’t have to deal with issues of what kind of awareness is considered a self and what awareness is not. There simply is nothing eternal, nothing worthy of calling a self, including “subtle beings” or “a pure unbounded awareness”.
I would argue it is coherent with my view. My nibbanic reality is just not a self, it is not an unchanging substance at the core of a person that undergoes rebirth and is eventually liberated and merges with the universal consciousness (or remains as a personal singular blissful personality in some heaven realm like the Jaina jinas). Just because it is a positive reality does not mean it’s an atman.
I take this “nibbāna” to be a reference to parinibbāna, not to enlightenment. Because after enlightenment there still is aging, sickness, and death.
But the text says he found it, not that “I will find it when I die”.
But, don’t get me wrong, now you’re describing something supposedly indescribable, and you’re explaining it in much more descriptive and clear terms than the Buddha himself did (or is supposed to have done). He didn’t talk about a “samsaric consciousness” versus some other sort of awareness, for example. I think this illustrates what I pointed out before, that continuitists generally have little trouble explaining their views, while the Buddha wasn’t so verbose on these things. So either the Buddha is a worse teacher than them… or perhaps he didn’t actually teach this…
Well, that’s the nature of exegesis, one is drawing out and developing what is unclear or undeveloped in a text. By the way, the Buddha didn’t come right out and say that nibbana is non-existence either. So, your view also has some 'splaining to do.
Either way, in short, I would reply this awareness you mentioned doesn’t exist, and you’re looking for it inside the aggregate of consciousness/awareness. This aggregate is defined as “any kind of consciousness whatsoever, whether subtle or coarse, sublime or lowly”, so it includes sublime, subtle awareness as well.
Within my framework, this awareness similar (but not the same as) the “viññāṇa anidassana” of the Kevaddha sutta, which in turn is not the same thing as sense viññāṇa (the viññāṇa of the five aggregates). This is because this limitless awareness is a viññāṇa where “name and form fully come to cease” (Kevaddha sutta). So at nibbana, the aggregate of viññāṇa ceases, but not nibbanic awareness, which unlike the aggregate of viññāṇa, is not bound to name and form, nor bound to dependent arising. Thus, my view is perfectly reasonable in positing two forms of consciousness. It seems obvious to me this is a radically different kind of consciousness than the day-to-day conscious experience of the consciousness aggregate. Is your daily sense consciousness infinite or limitless? I don’t think so…
Similarly, AN 10.81 states that the Buddha dwells with a limitless mind that is unattached from ten things, one of those ten things is consciousness. So, it seems we can have a limitless mind unattached from consciousness. This seems to support a reading where there are different ontological forms of mind/consciousness.
I think this empty awakened awareness is what thai forest masters have experienced, and what Mahayana figures have experienced and described. And perhaps other people in other religions too! Why should only Buddhists have access to it? Indeed, if it’s a universal truth we would expect that people in other religions might stumble into it too or might get close to it. Indeed, I think this counts in favor of my view, not against it. If we grant that some mystics in other religions can be our epistemic and spiritual peers, then perhaps their experiences are also relevant here. This is actually a welcome side benefit to my view, it is more friendly to the religious experiences of other religions!
As I’ve said above, there are also other reasons too why I think nibbana is a positive reality. Bhikkhu Bodhi does a more thorough job of explaining this perspective in this old classic lecture on nibbana: https://youtu.be/IBNMqqmZI6E
I am not going to rehash all he says in this here. But he notes how the Buddha used terms with ontological connotations, such as ayatana (which describes sometimes a plane of existence and also a sense sphere) and dhatu (a word used to describe existing things as well). He even described how one can “touch the deathless element with one’s body” (AN 6.46). If nibbana meant non-existence, I don’t see how these terms which have positive ontological connotations would be acceptable to the Buddha.
To you perhaps. 
To me it sounds like the worst condemnation imaginable. To exist forever, my gosh! I literally can’t think of anything less attractive than that! I’m being serious.
I also don’t think that if nibbāna was obviously a “truly attractive goal” the Buddha would have said such things like “the view of those who see runs counter to most of the world”, that “the noble ones see as suffering what most people think is pleasant [e.g. pure blissful awareness]”. I think “most people” will find your ideas pretty attractive, actually, which is shown by the pervasiveness of such ideas throughout various religions, including Buddhism. Because despite you saying this awareness is not a brahmanic consciousness, it sounds pretty much exactly like it, as I said, and I’ve heard even Christians describing “being with god” in similar terms.
This is fascinating! Because you say that you don’t find my view attractive (“the worst condemnation”), but then say that most people would find my view attractive. I guess you consider yourself to be not unlike most people, and maybe it is true. However, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way either, perhaps you are not as different from many human beings as you think. Because [trigger warning suicide discussion ahead] many people, including many atheists and materialists, find total annihilation a very blissful thing. And its not just annihilationist atheists either. In fact, one of the most common features of people who commit suicide is the desire to annihilate themselves, to bring all their pain to an end, to bring all their experience to an end. Let’s reflect on this because I think it’s a serious problem with cessationalism. It’s basically the spiritual form of suicide. The logic is the same as that used by people who experience suicide (any experience is horrible so it’s best to bring a total end to all experience).
I’ve heard suicidal people describe nonexistence as blissful and how they yearn for it. The person said it with a sense of relief that parallels the way cessationalism describes what happens at paranibbana. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but to me, cessationalism is quite similar to these wrong views. Another thing to note is that if annihilation wasn’t an attractive view, the materialist worldview wouldn’t have spread around the world so rapidly as it did in the 20th century. Thus, the way I see it, annihilationism is just as much of a worldly view as the desire to live forever. In this sense then, the Buddha’s view goes against the way of the world precisely because it is the middle way, not because it promotes non-existence – for there are many people in this world who would really like to cease to exist – even if just for a short while (and hence, you get alcoholics who enjoy getting black out drunk because it’s a kind of short term annihilation, which they mistakenly see as kind of a break from their suffering. One could find more worldly examples of this kind of annihilationist pattern.).
So, for me, cessationalism is really a kind of nihilism, in a very pure sense. In that way it is very similar to the pessimistic nihilism of the philosopher Philipp Mainländer who argued that non-being is superior to being, and thus the nothingness of death is the highest thing one can attain. He ended up hanging himself. The only thing that metaphysically separates your view from his is that you believe in rebirth so your view does not logically lead to actual suicide. However, this remains a serious danger to cessationalism. Should someone of your persuasion lose their belief in rebirth, then suicide is the logical conclusion (not that they would commit suicide right away of course). This is another thought experiment which shows your view is quite similar to the idea that the Buddha holds the view of an “exterminator” (venayiko).
That the logical conclusion of cessationalism minus rebirth is suicide is not only a theoretical concern. As there are many Buddhists whose belief in rebirth could change or will change in the future and thus for them this might even be a life-or-death issue that leaves them with nothing other than a nihilistic perspective on what is valuable…
I know you don’t mind this at this point since you think being mistaken for a nihilist counts in your favor. But perhaps you need to step back for a moment and ponder whether your view is not just being mistaken for nihilism, but is actually nihilism! After all the Buddha did reject nihilist views, so if it turns out you’re wrong here, then it’s the classic case of ‘going too far’.
Indeed, it seems some early Buddhists did eventually fall into a kind of nihilism, like the monks who committed suicide after practicing death contemplation. Thus, while you feel comforted that the Buddha was accused of nihilism and think this is a chip in favor of your cessationalist view, I do not think this is necessarily the case, since the very issue under debate is precisely whether this view is the middle way. Arguably one can accuse the monks who committed suicide as annihilationists, but the very fact of their being accused of annihilationism wouldn’t somehow be evidence that their understanding of the dhamma was correct! Instead, one would have to give independent reasons for why their view was not the middle way. As such I don’t think that this line of argument of “I am in good company with the Buddha because I’m being accused of annihilationism” is very fruitful for your view.
Let’s think about this with another thought experiment. In your view, if we had a button that we could press that would delete the entire universe along with all beings in it, you would be logically entailed by cessationalism to press it. Indeed, this button would actually be equivalent to giving everyone nirvana in your view. But this seems the most purely nihilistic thing imaginable, does it not? It’s precisely total extermination.
This is where we get to the heart of the matter for me. Your view is axiologically problematic because it takes non-existence as the only ultimate value. But this is a very strange move. For me things have value relative to experiences of conscious beings, ultimately, it is their conscious minds that grant value to things. Without any kind of being or awareness whatsoever, there is no value. So, the way I see it, nonexistence cannot have any value. It is not the case that this is the same as the removal of pain, because the absence of pain is experienced by a mind and has value because of this. But nonexistence is just not experienced at all, so it does not have any value and cannot be the highest spiritual goal. It cannot be marvelous, it cannot be blissful, etc. It’s just a blank nothingness.
To put it briefly: In my view some things have inherent value, such as spiritual love, and experiences of pure consciousness. In your view nonexistence is always the highest value. This is just a Buddhist version of Mainlander’s nihilism to me and cannot be the Buddha’s view, since he was not an “exterminator” (nor a terminator! 
).
I like the term “Creeping Brahmanism” @keller used. It’s a pervasive view, and it’s not particularly challenging either. I am quite sure the Buddha would have heard about it from somebody else, like the brahmins, instead of discovering it on his own. Because it is exactly these kind of ideas that he was challenging when saying consciousness is impermanent.
Well, I would say that this is not creeping Brahmanism, the similarities you’re seeing in my interpretation are a feature not a bug. We know the Buddha was influenced by Brahminical thought, he studied with them and had much contact with these ideas, and thus it would be quite weird if we found no similarities between his thought and brahmanical philosophy. The same would be the case if we found no similarities with Jainism, for example. However, one would be mistaken (as Stephen Bachelor is, for example) in saying that just because a view is similar or [even the same!] as Vedic religion, that this proves it is not something taught in early Buddhism. It’s interesting, Batchelor’s argument against rebirth-karma has a similar parallel to yours here. Just because my view is in some ways similar to some brahmanical view does not mean it’s obviously false for that reason alone. In fact, looking at this from the point of view of history of religions, we should expect Buddha’s view to share similarities with other religions of his time (I am not, of course, saying it is the same, I am just accepting there is some similarity). So, the fact that my view sounds similar to brahmanical views works in favor of my view, not against it. This is indeed what we would expect of someone who studied under Vedic teachers, but then went off and created his own tradition. We would expect that his system is similar but also different.
Actually, let’s look at this issue a bit more closely because it is yet another problem with cessationalism. What I meant is, cessationalism is an extremely rare view in the history of religions, I dare say it is a unique view. And the problem with this is that it has serious issues with the problem of religious disagreement. This is the issue of how we can accept any specific philosophical or religious ideas while also accounting for the fact that other people who are likely to be our epistemic peers (or spiritual peers, or both) have different views. Now, the philosophical literature on this is large and I cannot give an in-depth overview of it here (and I’m an amateur at this anyways :p). Suffice it to say however, it at least seems to me that if we assume the charitable view that other religious philosophers, mystics and religious practitioners are epistemic peers of cessationalists (arguing against this would be difficult, since we are just speaking of human beings here, so you’d have to show that cessationalists were somehow radically different human beings), then the fact that almost no other religion or spiritual philosophy has something like cessationalism seems to count as a piece of evidence against cessationalism. Of course, this is just one more evidential chip against cessationalism, not a knock down argument, but it should give one pause. It seems that the vast majority of our epistemic peers (that is, most of the very intelligent and deeply spiritual people who have lived) do not hold cessationalism. This includes most Buddhists by the way, including classical Theravadins and Sarvastivadins (who argue nibbana is a real existent, dravyasat) and all Mahayanists (who have some positive view of nibbana and Buddhahood). These are epistemic peers who were familiar with the specific teachings of the Buddha, so one cannot say they lack information about this issue either.
Note that this is not an argumentum ad populum, since it relies strictly on those who could be considered to be our peers (highly spiritual and intelligent philosophers and mystics) and a certain epistemic humility (where we suppose that other great spiritual practitioners and thinkers throughout history have been as intelligent and spiritually advanced as us). Also, this argument only provides limited and probabilistic evidence against cessationalism, rather than claiming an absolute refutation. That is to say, it is merely one consideration for thinking that cessationalism is less likely to be true, but it is not a knockdown argument (this is also why my argument against cessationalism is cumulative, I don’t think there is a single knock down argument against these types of metaphysical claims).
Whatever the case, the upside of this consideration for my view is that the fact that positivism is somewhat similar (not the same !) to other views found in other religions is a strength for my view. On the flip side the fact that cessationalism is so radically different from them is one piece of evidence against it. Another way of saying this is that the number of epistemic peers which support a kind of soteriological positivist view (that the final spiritual goal is a positive one, not non-existence) provides a clear probabilistic skeptical consideration against cessationalism.
If you really believed there was no self in that awareness, you wouldn’t mind if it ceased. You wouldn’t treat it differently from everything else
Well, I don’t think that this is true. I think that some things have value independently of whether or not they are a self. That’s a strange thing to argue. Do you really think that the only way something can have value is if it’s a self or is non-existent? That the only two reasons one can wish for the continuity of something is if it was an atman or if it was non-existence? That sounds strange to me, I don’t think value is such a narrow and limited scope that it can only be had by atmans or by non-existence. This is yet another way in which your view is very strange axiologically.
I can see why you say this, but you’re mixing up ontology (i.e. “what it is”, for those unaware of the term) with the emotional side.
I would say that in this case, the two are linked. You’re promoting a specific ontology of nibbana as the highest spiritually valuable thing, the highest spiritual goal that people should follow. I am saying this ontology cannot be applied to a supreme spiritual goal, precisely because it is mistaken about value. You cannot totally separate ontology and axiology here.
Because it isn’t equivalent to the materialist view of death, for one thing because materialists don’t believe “this saṁsara is without discoverable beginning”.
But that’s not the point, the point is that the ontological status is the same: non-existence. Freedom from jail is only valuable because I’m still alive. Your metaphor thus is not applicable. Your view is more like committing suicide to escape jail…which many people do.
I referenced AN9.34 before, but let me quote it here then…“The fact that nothing is felt is precisely what’s blissful about it."
The way I see this passage is that there is no vedana in nibbana. But this does not mean there is nothing, that its non-existence. If it was non-existence, it couldn’t have any qualities, including “blissfulness” or sukha. You could not even describe it with any emotionally positive way, the Buddha would have had to only use neutral terms - but he didn’t. So, I feel I am in good company with the Buddha since I don’t think nibbana can only be described neutrally or negatively 
And remember, ontology, axiology, and psychology are all closely linked in this topic, as I argued above! So in my view, the whole “emotionally positive, ontologically negative” claim does not hold water.
Bottom line, the Buddha said, “nothing is worth holding on to”, and that includes awareness. To some that is challenging, but shouldn’t spirituality be challenging? The whole reason we got stuck in samsara is that we didn’t dare to look at the truth.
Well, I don’t think that the nibbanic awareness that I accept is “holding on to awareness”. It’s precisely an awareness that has completely let go of all things, even sense consciousness, and even itself. It clings to nothing, like the mind in AN 10.81 which is not attached to consciousness. So, it is false to describe my view as “holding on to” awareness. To put it another way, just because my nibbanic positivism does not accept the equation of nibbana with non-existence does not mean it is ‘holding on’ to something. After all, the Buddha’s mind was not clinging to anything and yet it was not non-existent.
This nibbanic awareness is something like the appatiṭṭha viññāṇa (unestablished consciousness or consciousness without barriers) of SN 22.87 that Mara could not find. It’s like the consciousness that is “unestablished, not coming to growth, nongenerative, liberated. By being liberated, it is steady; by being steady, it is content…” (SN 22.53). It is similar to the anissita viññāṇa that the devas cannot find in MN 22: “When a mendicant’s mind was freed like this, the gods together with Indra, Brahmā, and the Progenitor, search as they may, will not discover: ‘This is what the Realized One’s consciousness depends on.’ Why is that? Because even in the present life the Realized One is not found, I say.” Thus, here we have a kind of consciousness that does not depend on anything.
Furthermore, this nibbanic awareness is similar to the unsupported consciousness that does not land on anything in SN 12.64: “where there is no delight, no craving, then consciousness does not land there or grow. Where consciousness does not land or grow, name-&-form does not alight. Where name-&-form does not alight, there is no growth of (karmic) volitions. Where there is no growth of (karmic) volitions, there is no production of renewed becoming in the future.”. Of course, this nibbanic reality that is liberated from the five aggregates is something which is subtle, and “deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom like the great ocean.” [SN 44.1]. But that does not mean it is non-existent, for how can something which can be fathomed (albeit with difficulty) be non-existent? Similarly, nibbana is described as something that can be directly known (e.g. MN1), but can one “directly know” non-existence?
I also want to say that even though I use terms like consciousness and awareness, this nibbanic experience is radically different than what we call “consciousness” in everyday speech, since it is contentless, unestablished, limitless, not suffering, and so on. Thus, even though it is a kind of subtle experience, it is only in a metaphorical or very loose sense that I say it’s a “consciousness.” This is just like how the Buddha calls nibbana an “island”, but it’s not literally an island. Since this ultimate state is ultimately beyond all concepts or descriptions, my descriptions apply to it only in a relative sense. It’s just a finger pointing to the moon. 
Regarding whether spirituality should be challenging to us. I agree! Yes, it should be challenging! And it seems you find my view a bit challenging or scary as well so maybe both our views are challenging after all, though in different ways.
