Our desires make the connection

Will Rogers once said, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.”  This is excellent advice.  I am sure the Buddha would have found it very instructive.  If you think about it, if we wish to recognize the pure Mind within ourselves, we first have to stop or at least control our desires for things, such desires acting to block the path to Mind.  Yes, we have to stop digging in other words—start giving up desires which are heavily pinned on the carnal body and its world.  

We can say that our desires have made us what we are.  At the same time, they have given us spiritual amnesia to the point where we are so engaged with the senses of the carnal body and its world (not to mention using it as a pleasure device!) that we’ve come to believe it is who we really are.

To make matters even worse, it has become almost fashionable to look down on those who have stopped digging, that is, those who have either learned how to control their desires or have given up certain desires and by doing so have found the luminous Mind within themselves. By implicitly supporting a life of desire such people are little more than smug assholes simpletons.  They have only managed to acquire a narrow provincial outlook on life with little or no mastery over their desires.  But living like this only occludes the luminous Mind.

For the Buddha, desire is the means by which we hook ourselves as spirit (sattva) into the psychophysical body, becoming deeply entangled in the human world thus losing sight of our self which is spiritually transcendent and unbodied (I love Teilhard de Chardin’s words, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience”).  However, we should not jump to the conclusion that the Buddha believed the sense organs and their respective objects gave rise to desire.  He did not—they have nothing to do with desire, fundamentally.  To cite one example from the Kotthita Sutta (S. iv. 162), the Buddha explains how the eye and its forms are not fetters (samyojana) or the same, do not give cause for attachment.

“Friend Kotthita, the eye is not the fetter of forms nor are forms the fetter of the eye, but rather the desire and lust [chanda-raga] that arises there in dependence on both: that is the fetter there.” (trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi)

If I am going shopping and happen to see a great looking jacket that I would like to have, neither my eye nor the image of the jacket are bringing about the fetter or the connection (samyojana).  It is my desire/lust or chandaraga that is making the connection with this snazzy jacket.  The senses and their things, let’s say for now, are quite neutral.  The jacket and my senses play no real part in this.  We find later in this same Sutta that the Buddha “sees a form with the eye, yet there is no desire and lust in the Blessed One; the Blessed One is well liberated in mind (suvimutta-citta).”  This is because, with such a Mind, the Buddha is able to see things as they really are in which desire acts to fetter or attach one to the temporal body which is always in a state of suffering, more or less.  Following this out more, without desire, the Buddha has become disembodied in complete nirvana. 

 

Comments

[minx]

What is real suffering? Is it to endure the pains of torture, of injustice, of separation from what is loved and hold most dearly? No, real suffering for someone is to know there is a way out by the compassionate presence of a helping hand, and yet deny oneself the opportunity to rise and walk away from suffering, due to pride, guilt and shame.

Here the pure dharma power of the buddhas and bodhisattvas has been transformed into an inverted force of inevitable self-destruction that knows no end to suffering as long as such ignorance Is maintained.

[Lama Guru Shining Path Holy Light]

epic fail homeboy.

The attribute of the Absolute makes the connection. Namely avijja, i.e. tolma, the privative coeternal objectively dirrected nature of the will, within which attribute and principle are without distinction.

desire doesnt make the connection, and is itself an empirical lesser modality of the avijja which is parallel with the Absolute.

Refrain from 'Obama-wisdom'. i.e. ignorance.