Does he live up to the hype?
>>18501806Isn't the desire to be free of desire also desire?
>>18501857>Isn't the desire to be free of desire also desire?Duh. But that's what you have to work with and at least it motivates some actually useful actions.
>>18501876I just don't see how Buddhist enlightenment is supposed to work if the act of prying oneself free from desire is also motivated by desire
>>18501876Is it theoretically possible to happen without that desire? Can you be forced into enlightenment or some such?
>>18501877
>>18501897It's also worth pointing out that the second noble truth, that the origin of suffering is craving, concerns a specific subset of desires described as craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, and craving for disbecoming. It's like an addiction where you're trying to satisfy a desire with something that only seems to satisfy the desire briefly and also makes you miserable. In that case, the cure isn't to simply try to will yourself to stop desring entirely to halt the addiction, but to redirect your desire from the false substitute to something that actually meets the desire. And in Buddhism, that would be the noble eightfold path, as in the fourth noble truth.
>>18501877>I just don't see how Buddhist enlightenment is supposed to work if the act of prying oneself free from desire is also motivated by desireIt works because at some point the practice just becomes a constant in your life, something you get on with regardless of desire. You get absorbed in the minutiae of your meditation, the art of it. It primes you for certain types of experiences that come when you forget all about what you're trying to accomplish but simply do what you need to do. Think about it from a Daoism perspective: it's effortless action applied to the practice of meditation. It's like mastering any art. If you don't desire mastery, you wouldn't practice at all. If you want it too much, your obsession with goals and accomplishments will close off the flow state. If you start obsessing about wu-wei and policing yourself to be less covetous and more spontaneous, you take the same problem one level up. From this simplistic analytical perspective, you're fucked no matter what and yet people achieve mastery and get into a flow state.
>>18501806yeah
