Beyond desire

Man, like his relatives the animals, has implicit trust and dependence upon the senses.  Indeed, the ordinary person (prithagjana/anaryan) cannot but otherwise live according to their senses and be almost forever enthralled by them, desiring only the sensory.  In this regard, desire is almost too much for the average person to supersede—especially in a culture that enhances desire to the point of addiction.

It is easy to see that suffering can only arise from the sensory that knowing no better, we desire it only to repeat suffering.  What is more, as spirits (sattva) we live in continuous dependence upon the sensory so that even death is insufficient to end sensory desire.

The only reasonable way to end such desire is not to be crushing it involving a brutal kind of asceticism but by profoundly comprehending what it is that actually desires thus to see how it is to be ultimately satisfied.

For the Buddha it was primordial mind that desired.  But what did it desire?  Mind desired itself—what else might it desire?  And by the very agitation of such desire mind also profoundly lost itself. It phenomenalized itself by desire, in other words.  Mind, thus, became alien to itself enclosing itself in its own primordial ignorance (avidya).  In a word, mind became its very own nemesis. Hence, karma.

It is only when one becomes a Bodhisattva, seeing the Mind (bodhicitta)—not the defiled mind in sensory garments—that desire is really grasped and its quenching is realized as attainable in the future by practice.

Those who are intent upon superseding the sensory are the Bodhisattvas, according to the Buddha.  And because they choose this road they have a measure of authentic compassion seeing how desire brings ruin to all beings who are under its power.  They, alone, are blessed among all beings; they are the guides of the world.  But alas, I  dare say that our present world wants none of this.  It wants to suffer more as if it believed that the maximum amount of suffering might save it—as if its Messiah might return.  This, to be sure, will never happen.