Desire Buddhism Quotes

1. Accept everything just the way it is. 2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake. 3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling. 4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. 5. Be detached from desire your whole life long. 6. Do not regret what you have done. 7. Never be jealous. 8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation. 9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others. 10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love. 11. In all things have no preferences. 12. Be indifferent to where you live. 13. Do not pursue the taste of good food. 14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need. 15. Do not act following customary beliefs. 16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful. 17. Do not fear death. 18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age. 19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help. 20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour. 21. Never stray from the Way.

These... things, householder, are welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world: Long life is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world. Beauty is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world. Happiness is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world. Status is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world. ...Now, I tell you, these... things are not to be obtained by reason of prayers or wishes. If they were to be obtained by reason of prayers or wishes, who here would lack them? It's not fitting for the disciple of the noble ones who desires long life to pray for it or to delight in doing so. Instead, the disciple of the noble ones who desires long life should follow the path of practice leading to long life. In so doing, he will attain long life... [Ittha Sutta, AN 5.43]

Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness. Let go. Let Be. See through everything and be free, complete, luminous, at home -- at ease.

We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?

Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.

There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.

There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.

Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.

The Buddha's original teaching is essentially a matter of four points -- the Four Noble Truths: 1. Anguish is everywhere. 2. We desire permanent existence of ourselves and for our loved ones, and we desire to prove ourselves independent of others and superior to them. These desires conflict with the way things are: nothing abides, and everything and everyone depends upon everything and everyone else. This conflict causes our anguish, and we project this anguish on those we meet. 3. Release from anguish comes with the personal acknowledgment and resolve: we are here together very briefly, so let us accept reality fully and take care of one another while we can. 4. This acknowledgement and resolve are realized by following the Eightfold Path: Right Views, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Recollection, and Right Meditation. Here "Right" means "correct" or "accurate" -- in keeping with the reality of impermanence and interdependence.

What is the real origin of my own anger? Is it the ego defending its territory, or is it something that has its source in the desire for the well-being of all? (73)

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

You tell me to stand still, but I am not walking," he shouted, "whereas you who are walking say you are still. How is it that you are standing still but I am not?" The Buddha turned round. "My legs move but my mind is still," he said. "Your legs are still but your mind moves all the time in a fire of anger, hatred, and feverish desire. Therefore, I am still but you are not.

Patience from a Buddhist perspective is not a "wait and see" attitude, but rather one of "just be there"... Patience can also be based on not expecting anything.Think of patience as an act of being open to whatever comes your way. When you begin to solidify expectations, you get frustrated because they are not met in the way you had hoped... With no set idea of how something is supposed to be, it is hard to get stuck on things not happening in the time frame you desired. Instead, you are just being there, open to the possibilities of your life.

You are as the yellow leaf. The messengers of death are at hand. You are to travel far away. What will you take with you? You are the lamp To lighten the way. Then hurry, hurry. When your light shines Without impurity or desire You will come into the boundless country. Your life is falling away. Death is at hand. Where will you rest on the way? What have you taken with you? You are the lamp To lighten the way. Then hurry, hurry. When your light shines purely You will not be born And you will not die.

With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire.

Learn the power of tantra. Focus on your desires with singleness of purpose and align your actions with your desire, and your desires will manifest into your reality.

Everyone makes mistakes. Whether we put our mistakes to use depends on how deeply we reflect on our actions. It is desirable to reflect until the tears come. - On Self-Reflection -

there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.

A fearless heart is free of desire, a kind heart finds paradise everywhere.

You don't value things that easily come to you. You value things that are hard to get. You keep running after them and complain, "Why are things I desire hard to get?

Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

Einstein said: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Search not for happiness outside yourself, for nothing could be further from the truth.

The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achieved when the egocentric model of dualistic thinking is no longer dominant, we are not united with it, nor am I united with you, but we all just are. The movement from object to subject, as described in both Eastern meditation and modern psychotherapy, is training for this union, but its perception usually comes as a surprise, even when this shift is well under way. It is a kind of grace. The emphasis on sexual relations in the tantric teachings make it clear that the ecstatic surprise of orgasm is the best approximation of this grace.

The only path wide for us all is love.

Being undone, we discover we’ve been fooled by wishing wells and have mistaken the fire of desire for radiance.

If you master your mind, it will remain naturally concentrated, peaceful and aware. You will even be able to wander around in a crowd without being distracted and carried away by desire or aversion.

The problem is that you THINK that you have to be motivated to do something, instead of just doing it and then having it done. Tip: The willingness to do things comes with action. Don’t wait until you feel like going to the gym and exercising. Start exercising right away and there’s a huge possibility that you’ll feel the desire to continue.

Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being.

Evasion of the unadorned immediacy of life is as deep-seated as it is relentless. Even with the ardent desire to be aware and alert in the present moment, the mind flings us into tawdry and tiresome elaborations of past and future. This craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeates the body, feeling, perceptions, will - consciousness itself. It is like the background radiation from the big bang of birth, the aftershock of having erupted into existence.

To believe that life's problems will somehow work themselves out, everything bad is fixable and something about samsara has to be worth fighting for makes it virtually impossible to nurture a genuine, all-consuming desire to practise the dharma. The only view that truly works for a dharma practitioner is that there are no solutions to the sufferings of samsara and it cannot be fixed.

First, we must see that our negative actions arise due to prejudice and erroneous judgments. The discrimination that labels some as 'friends' and others as 'enemies' must be perceived as the root of our problems. We need to see that we label people and things in terms of our own desires, our own wishes. These wishes are transitory. The labeled objects are, themselves, impermanent. Such labeling is therefore very confused and false, yet it persists, and we continue to create suffering for ourselves. To avoid this, we need to develop equanimity for all beings suffering in samsara, tossed to and fro by their fleeting delusions, just like ourselves.

Because there's no missing puzzle piece. And there's no great mystery to solve. I'm perfect and complete exactly as I am. The world is perfect and complete exactly as it is. An my practice is learning to accept that fact regardless of what desire tells me.

The weaker the desire to change, the further away from now is the moment from which we plan on changing.

These eyes has seen diverse misfortunes follow from diverse desires

With a pure and balanced mind and a focused desire - we can call forth any truth our soul may wish to live.

desires are not killed by fulfilling them

The ability to see things the way they are, not to expect constant gratification but to understand that all things are limited, is what allows for personal growth.

the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of “pervasive unsatisfactoriness,” I was even more impressed. “Suffering” always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. “Pervasive unsatisfactoriness

I've learned much from the land of many gods and many ways to worship. From Buddhism the power to begin to manage my mind, from Jainism the desire to make peace in all aspects of life, while Islam has taught me to desire goodness and to let go of that which cannot be controlled. I thank Judaism for teaching me the power of transcendence in rituals and the Sufis for affirming my ability to find answers within and reconnecting me with the power of music. Here's to the Parsis for teaching me that nature must be touched lightly, and the Sikhs for the importance of spiritual strength....And most of all, I thank Hinduism for showing me that there are millions of paths to the divine.

Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.

William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists. It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.

People sometimes imagine that without desire there would be no enjoyment. The opposite is true. When you're caught up in craving, you never really enjoy anything very much because your mind is always pulling you on to the next desire and the next after that. When you let go of desire, then you're free to enjoy whatever is right in front of you.

The third noble truth holds that you can end your suffering by eliminating the desire for sensual gratification and breaking the attachments you have to the egoic self and any of the other conceptual structures that are the furniture of your life.

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

Actively, we are motivated by the never-ending desires of the self. We are compelled to pursue whatever the self imagines will satisfy its desires. We are convinced that satisfaction of desire is the source of true happiness. Yet the very nature of desire does not permit happiness. Like trying to quench one's thirst by drinking salt water, satisfying desire only stimulates the flow of desire. In the wake of fulfillment, desire once more stirs and reaches out. There is never lasting satisfaction, not even completion.

We have to learn the art of stopping - stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down. How can we stop this state of agitation? How How can we stop our fear, despair, anger, and craving? We can stop by practicing mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful smiling, and deep looking in order to understand. When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy.

To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching.

The mental energy that is consumed by right effort is directed into self-discipline, truthfulness and compassion. The same energy might otherwise be channelled through a person’s base nature to produce desire, aggression and violence. Right effort ensures that this mental energy is expressed in wholesome ways.

You are sitting on a computer in the projector cabin of a unique cinema hall in which the screen is not made up of white cloth. Instead, there is a big transparent room full of white liquid. You click on a movie file on your computer, the projector starts throwing light on the room of white liquid, real characters start emerging from the white liquid. You get attached to the characters. You start feeling their pain and pleasures. That room of white liquid is Space-Time or Maya. You are a soul sitting on the computer. The movie file is Karma-Desires. If you don’t like the movie, you can change it and play a better movie.

The advantages of developing absorption concentration are not only that it provides a stable and receptive state of mind for the practice of insight meditation. The experience of absorption is one of intense pleasure and happiness, brought about by purely mental means, which thereby automatically eclipses any pleasure arising in dependence on material objects. Thus absorption functions as a powerful antidote to sensual desires by divesting them of their former attraction.

Without discursive thought it is just dharma practice. Hope together with aim obscures. One does not cut through pride by meditatively cultivating the desire for happiness. If there is hope, even the hope for buddhas, it is a negative force. If there is apprehension, even apprehension about hells, it is a negative force.

The ability to remain constant, whole and playful, even while working technically, concentrating and upholding urgency, is essential to achieve a state of balance that will allow for this to happen. This has to come to life, and cannot stay just an idea or hope or intention or imitation, or ignored. The guarantee and proof that this balance and power is real is in its actualization. That is, that it manifests in functional reality. As in any intention, whether that be vague or specific, an ambition or desire, a goal or state of being, a question or hope, a curiosity or purpose, there exist natural and unnatural obstacles to its realization.

D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism, one day made this sarcastic comment on the Christian tradition to his friends, American mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalyst Carl Jung: “Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!

Close your eyes, Matt, and focus on third eye, the second chakra of your being. Open third eye and you will feel energy of other river as it flows. And energy of Goddess.” He closed his eyes. He could sense the energy of the woman next to him and the power of desire. He felt warmth and a sense of belonging here. But that was all.

In some cultures, like Buddhism, you want things in your life to disappear, to reduce your needs and desires. To achieve some form of enlightenment. I believe in this brand of spirituality as well. I don’t think it and abundance are mutually exclusive at all. If you lower your expectations, for instance, your expectations are easy to exceed.

If one desires a reminder of the magic of being alive - we must simply observe the beauty of nature.

In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.

In some cultures, like Buddhism, you want things in your life to disappear, to reduce your needs and desires

Meditation calms one’s mind and helps one to see beyond immediate problems or desires. It can lead to a paradigm shift toward a less materialistic and competitive way of life.

Maitri can be translated as "love" or "loving kindness". Some Buddhist teachers prefer "loving kindness" as they find the word "love" too dangerous. But I prefer the word "love". Words sometimes get sick and we have to heal them. We have been using the word "love" to mean appetite or desire, as in "I love hamburgers". We have to use language more carefully. "Love" is a beautiful word; we have to restore its meaning. The word "maitri" has roots in the word mitra which means friend. In Buddhism, the primary meaning of love is friendship.

If we see the universe as a whole, nothing is changing in it. The scenes of the past are still there in the past. The scenes of future are already there in the future. You, the soul, are passing through them and experiencing the illusion of change. Karma gives you the fuel, Desires give you direction. If you didn't have any Karma or Desires, you would just float in eternity.

known as the five ‘hindrances’ (nīvaraṇa): sensual desire, ill-will, tiredness and sleepiness, excitement and depression, and doubt. An ancient simile compares the mind that is continually prey to the five hindrances to a bowl of water disturbed or contaminated in five ways: mixed with red dye, steaming hot, full of moss and leaves, ruffled by the wind, muddied and in a dark place.

The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.”3 The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.

There is a discrepancy between our craving and the world we live in, between our expectations and the way things are. We want the world to be other than it is. Our craving is based on a fundamental misjudgement of the situation; a judgement that assumes that when our craving gets what it wants we will be happy, that when our craving possesses the objects of its desire we will be satisfied. But

In one study, subjects listened to music while half of them tried as hard as they could to be happy.5 The half that tried to be happy were less happy than the group that just listened. Another study found that those who put a high value on happiness had more negative emotions.6 Of course, long ago the Buddha explained how desire leads to suffering; this seems to also hold even for the desire to be happy.

If you desire to drink water, the Space-Time (Maya) says, “Walk these many steps and reach the fridge. Take out the water bottle and drink.” By fulfilling these small desires without any trick, Maya proves that she is fair. When you try to fulfill bigger desires, she tricks you and traps you. Then you can’t even blame her because she has already proved herself as fair. Then you blame yourself and fall deeper into the mess.

The Buddha taught non-attachment not as a means of escaping reality, but as a means of dealing with the fundamental nature of reality. There simply is nothing to which we can attach ourselves, no matter how hard we try. The idea of behaving without attachment springs from understanding that everything is empty. The self is empty, the desires of the self are empty, and the objects of those desires also are empty. In time, things will change and the conditions that produced our current desires will be gone. Why then, cling to them now? The Buddha taught that our tendency to cling to the illusion of permanence is a fundamental cause of suffering.

Learning to live with desire may be the single most important act for an alcoholic. Our relationship to pleasure and self-gratification was distorted, and until it becomes relatively balanced, we will suffer, just as the Buddha said.

Virtually everyone defines their identity—or constructs their belief of who they are—through their specific combination of desires and suffering. Or, desires obtained (apparent subjective success at the sacrifice of something else), desires unobtained (suffering), and desires still left as questions (to be obtained or not). And...most of the desires, and the suffering, are themselves by-products of others, established by society and the rules of each sect of society.

From experience in the past we create memories, which are the basis of imagination and desire. Desire is the basis of action, once again. And so the cycle perpetuates itself. In Vedic tradition and in Buddhism this cycle is known as the Wheel of Samsara, the basis of earthly existence.That’s why, if you really want to break out of the mundane, you must learn to think and dream the impossible. Only with repeated thoughts can the impossible be made possible through the intention of the nonlocal mind.

We only suffer when we falsely identify with the objects that arise in our awareness, rather than with the awareness itself—when we identify with our thoughts, with our emotions, our personal history, and the many stories we tell ourselves. When you reconnect to your source—the essence of your being, the pure and impartial witness—you become free from all of the troubles of the material world; free from the world of form. You no longer feel the desire to cling to forms or depend on them for your happiness. Instead, you are free to enjoy form, free to let form be, and free to allow all forms to come and go as they please. All forms are impermanent and changing, but your consciousness, being formless, is eternal, and exists regardless of the forms that it gives life to.

Just as mind rises up and rebels at un unskillful attempt to subdue it in meditation, a relationship will fall apart if the partners are not respectful of each other's differences. <...> Separateness and connection make each other possible; they are not mutually exclusive.

Buddhism began in Northern India in the sixth century BC. In origin it was not at all pantheistic. In the oldest scriptures, written in the Pali language, Buddha teaches that life is essentially suffering. His doctrine is above all a method for avoiding suffering and rebirth into a world of suffering. To do so we must abandon desire and attachment to worldly things, and give up the illusion of having a self. If we achieve this, we can attain nirvana. Nirvana is seen not as some separate divine realm, but simply the permanent cessation of all craving and suffering.

In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, “suffering together” or “empathy,” although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others’ ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. “Responsiveness” defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge—loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness.

Man can never understand his freedom while he regards himself as the mere instrument of fate or while he limits his freedom to whatever he his ego can do to snatch from life the prizes which it desires. To be free man must see himself and life as a whole, not as active power and passive instrument but as two aspects of a single activity.

Ego said, "I have just one desire: To find God. And it's so intense that I can do anything for it." I said, "Ok. Do one thing. Drop this desire too." Ego can't do that because that will be the end of Ego. Many seekers can't take this last step. Their life becomes extremely painful. There is no pain greater than the pain of Ego trying to find God.

The path to the goal is portrayed in our fairy tales. We hear the ceaseless messages of the necessity of us being endlessly giving, beautiful, and selfless if we wish to find the fulfillment of our dreams, salvation. We learn through the absorption of our myths that desirability is synonymous with worthiness and goodness synonymous with acceptability.

There is a veil of gravity in his eyes, but no sadness. In a confidential tone, he speaks about this lama who had been close to him and was just a little older. His death is a reminder of impermanence, in the Buddhist sense, which asserts the transitory quality of sentient beings and phenomena. Everything that is born from causes and conditions is perishable. Impermanence contradicts our feeling of the lasting quality of time and our human desire for immortality. It is unbearable for ordinary beings who have not trained their mind to conceive of the world's absence of reality. Denial of impermanence represents one of the main causes of suffering in our existences. Buddhist teachings invite us to contemplate and accept it.

After this examination there are still gaps of doubt and apparent contradiction. And it is natural that it be so, because the Eternal Return is an experience. There lies its importance: in the fact of being. The Eternal Return is not the reincarnation as it has been spread in our days. Original Buddhism, on the other hand, could be pointing to something similar. Buddha was a shastriya, that is, a prince of the warrior caste, not a brahman, or priest, and his Doctrine was also for heroes and warriors. Then, it has been transformed by the monks. Buddha, like Nietzsche, talks about a reincarnation without mentioning the soul. What is it that reincarnates, then? As in Nietzsche it could be that 'atom-seed', or 'all those conditions that determine its existence and that they come back to give themselves', in the turn of the Energy, or of the Light that finds the old image. The Buddhist would want to be liberated, to leave the Circle; that's why it kills desire, that makes return. The Will to Power, as we have seen, returns to its 'archive', wishes to possess again its 'non-existence'. The difference: Nietzsche wants to return eternally, incorporates the Will and considers Nirvana a dream of decadents, of warriors who have become priests, monks. However, we do not know what Buddha really thought, because he did not talk about these things, nor did he explain Nirvana. Maybe, he just wanted to get out of this Circle to enter to fight in another wider Circle, that is more immense.

I refer to the Gospel account in which Christ weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus. We need to pause and consider the meaning of these tears, for in this very moment there occurs a unique transformation within religion in relation to the long-standing religious approach to death. Up to this moment the purpose of religion, as well as the purpose of philosophy, consisted in enabling man to come to terms with death, and if possible even to make death desirable: death as the liberation from suffering; death as freedom from this changing, busy, evil world; death as the beginning of eternity. Here, in fact, is the sum total of religious and philosophical teaching before Christ and outside of Christianity - in primitive religions, in Greek philosophy, in Buddhism, and so forth. But Christ *weeps* at the grave of his friend, and in so doing his own struggle with death, his refusal to acknowledge it and to come to terms with it. Suddenly, death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: 'The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered state of consciousness. It is usually described, in the early texts, negatively: as a candle being snuffed out.

Even if we were very good at making everything outside of ourselves be just the way we ourselves want it to be (a ludicrous thought, you must admit), we could fundamentally never get everything perfect: because our desires are always changing, because they are often conflicting, and because the changes of the environment can never keep up with the pace of the wanting mind. The satisfaction of desire as a strategy for happiness will always be a doomed enterprise.

Each being in the universe, therefore, inhabits a private world. It is as if the universe were populated by countless cinemas, each occupied by a single person, each eternally viewing a different film projected by consciousness, each eternally suspending disbelief. For the Yogacara, ignorance and suffering result from believing the movie to be real, from mistaking the projections to be an external world, from thinking that what appear to be external objects are independent of consciousness, and then running after them, desiring some and hating others. For the Yogacara, wisdom is the insight that everything is of the nature of consciousness and the product of one's own projections. With this insight, desire and hatred, attachment and aversion, naturally cease, for their objects are seen to be illusions. With the achievement of enlightenment, the substratum consciousness is transformed into the mirror like wisdom of a buddha.

Baha’i—Lay not on any soul a load that you would not wish to be laid upon you and desire not for anyone the things you would not desire for yourself. Buddhism—Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Christianity—Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Confucianism—Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you. Hinduism—Do not to others that which if done to you would cause you pain. Islam—None of you truly have the faith if you do not desire for your brother that which you desire for yourself. Jainism—In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self. Judaism—What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Native American—Respect for all life is the foundation. Sikhism—Don’t create enmity with anyone as God is within every one. Wicca—If it harm none, do what you will. Zoroastrianism—Do not do unto others all that which is not well for oneself.

There are quite a few feelings like this—feelings that, back when they entered our lineage, served our ancestors’ interests but that don’t always serve our interests now. Take road rage. The desire to punish people who treat you unfairly or show you disrespect is deeply human. And admit it: though there’s something unpleasant about being made angry, there’s something pleasing about the feeling of anger itself—the feeling that you’re rightfully enraged. The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.

Preceding the birth of every religion, there was someone who was an incarnation of this process: imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which causes imagination…the dynamic that takes place in the dimension of spirit. That is, for whatever reasons that will remain mysterious, although they are suggested in various schools of thought, someone got the cause thing down right, and the rest flowed. After the fact, an effort was made, almost always by others, to control both the impact of this and the possible benefits from it. Ambition and desire took over. Where you had an exact presentation, or manifestation, of beauty and truth, somebody began using it for other purposes.

[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . . Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . . Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . . The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . . These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . . “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . . In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . . An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . . For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . . Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.

The desire for romantic love is so strong in our society that it could be seen as having displaced religion as the main source of ‘spiritual’ fulfilment and, indeed, almost displaced it as the means to personal salvation. ‘Saved by the love of a good woman’ may be a cliché but, in many instances, it is only the love of another person, man or woman, that gives some people a sense of worth or any meaning to their lives. This way of thinking, however, also leads to the expectation that one’s partner will – nay, should – make one truly happy. This puts an intolerable strain on many relationships, as it is unrealistic to demand that one’s partner provide a continuous supply of Rapture when permanence and stability are the very qualities the world of Rapture simply does not possess. Perhaps this is one reason why so many marriages break down these days. The

Gotama takes a noun, “the unconditioned,” and treats it as a verb: “not to be conditioned” by something. He seems acutely aware of the relational nature of language. There is no such thing, for example, as freedom per se. There is only freedom from constraints, or freedom to act in ways that were not possible because of those constraints. Nor is there any awakening per se, but only awakening from the “sleep” of delusion, or awakening to the presence of others who suffer. And there is no such thing as the unconditioned, only the possibility of not being conditioned by something. Nirvana, therefore, does not refer to the attainment of a transcendent, absolute state apart from the conditions of life but to the possibility of living here and now emancipated from the inclinations of desire, hatred, and delusion. A life not conditioned by these instincts and drives would be an enriched one. No longer would one be the victim of paralyzing habits; one would be freed to respond to circumstances in fresh, unimpeded ways.

Our desires, dreams and hopes, open portals. These portals manifest in our conscience and 5 senses, in the form of decisions related to the material world - one person, a job, an opportunity. Now, at the exact same time, or maybe even slightly before in time, we get the exact opposite, the temptation, the illusion and deception. And when we are about to make a decision, as if by magic, the two things come stronger to us, as if pushing us into a duality that makes it hard to decide. Now, this brings me to another super interesting fact. Most people assume that they have freewill, and that choices are hard to made, and that life is full of dualities. And I've learned that this is just a great deception related to our planet, which as human beings, we must transcend. And what I'm really saying here, is that the duality and the freewill don't exist. There's only one choice to be made, the one that bring us upwards. Self-destruction is not a choice. And yet, every duality presents exactly that, and not really a choice.

One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.

Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process—and this process is the path itself. But neither does this render us in any way perfect or infallible. We are quite capable of subverting this process to the interests of our far-from-extinct desires, ambitions, hatreds, jealousies, and fears. We have not been elevated to the lofty heights of awakening; awakening has been knocked off its pedestal into the turmoil and ambiguity of everyday life. There is nothing particularly religious or spiritual about this path. It encompasses everything we do. It is an authentic way of being in the world. It begins with how we understand the kind of reality we inhabit and the kind of beings we are that inhabit such a reality. Such a vision underpins the values that inform our ideas, the choices we make, the words we utter, the deeds we perform, the work we do. It provides the ethical ground for mindful and focused awareness, which in turn further deepens our understanding of the kind of reality we inhabit and the kind of beings we are that inhabit such a reality. And so on.

The basic foundation of the practice of morality is to refrain from ten unwholesome actions: three pertaining to the body, four pertaining to speech, and three pertaining to thought. The three physical non-virtues are: (1) killing: intentionally taking the life of a living being, whether a human being, an animal, or even an insect; (2) stealing: taking possession of another’s property without his or her consent, regardless of its value; and (3) sexual misconduct: committing adultery. The four verbal non-virtues are: (4) lying: deceiving others through spoken word or gesture; (5) divisiveness: creating dissension by causing those in agreement to disagree or those in disagreement to disagree further; (6) harsh speech: verbally abusing others; and (7) senseless speech: talking about foolish things motivated by desire and so forth. The three mental non-virtues are: (8) covetousness: desiring to possess something that belongs to someone else; (9) harmful intent: wishing to injure others, whether in a great or small way; and (10) wrong view: holding that such things as rebirth, the law of cause and effect, or the Three Jewels8 do not exist.

In his numerous works, especially in The Idealist View of Life and Eastern Religions and Western Thought, the great Eastern Philosopher, Professor Radhakrishnan, advocates the necessity for the revival of the deeply spiritual mystical experience which is the basis of all religions and which is expressed in a pure form in Hinduism. He says: “In spite of all appearances to the contrary, we discern in the present unrest the gradual dawning of a great light, a converging life-endeavour, a growing realisation that there is a secret spirit in which we are all one, and of which humanity is the highest vehicle on earth, and an increasing desire to live out this knowledge and establish a kingdom of spirit on earth.” (Eastern Religions and Western Thought, p. 33). “The different religions have now come together, and if they are not to continue in a state of conflict or competition, they must develop a spirit of comprehension which will break down prejudice and misunderstanding and bind them together as varied expressions of a single truth. Such a spirit characterised the development of Hinduism, which has not been interrupted for nearly fifty centuries.

Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will: for the will, as emotion of command, is the distinguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power. That is to say, the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for one who commands, who commands sternly, — a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience. From whence perhaps it could be inferred that the two world-religions, Buddhism and Christianity, might well have had the cause of their rise, and especially of their rapid extension, in an extraordinary malady of the will. And in truth it has been so: both religions lighted upon a longing, monstrously exaggerated by malady of the will, for an imperative, a "Thou-shalt," a longing going the length of despair; both religions were teachers of fanaticism in times of slackness of will-power, and thereby offered to innumerable persons a support, a new possibility of exercising will, an enjoyment in willing. For in fact fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system, in favour of the over-abundant nutrition (hypertrophy) of a particular point of view and a particular sentiment, which then dominates — the Christian calls it his faith. When a man arrives at the fundamental conviction that he requires to be commanded, he becomes "a believer".

We usually think of abundance (arising, realization, buddhas) as positive, and we consider deficiency (perishing, delusion, and living beings) as negative. When we understand Buddha’s teaching in this commonsense way, it seems that we should escape from samsara, which is something bad, in order to reach nirvana, which is something good. We think nirvana is a goal we can achieve in the same way that a poor person can work hard and become rich. We may think that practice is a way to reach nirvana in the same way that working hard is a way to attain wealth. The common understanding of Buddha’s teaching is that since ignorance turns the lives of deluded beings into suffering, we should eliminate our ignorance so we can reach nirvana. If we simply accept that teaching and devote our lives to the practice of eliminating our ignorance and egocentric desires, we will find that it’s impossible to do. Not only is it impossible, but it actually creates another cycle of samsara. This happens because the desire to become free from delusion or egocentricity is one of the causes of our delusion and egocentricity. And the idea that there is nirvana or samsara existing separately from each other is a basic dualistic illusion; the desire to escape from this side of existence and enter another side is another expression of egocentric desire. When we are truly in nirvana we awaken to the fact that nirvana and samsara are not two separate things. This is what Mahayana Buddhism teaches, especially through the Prajna Paramita Sutras; it teaches that samsara and nirvana are one. If we don’t find nirvana within samsara, there is no place we can find nirvana. If we don’t find peacefulness within our busy daily lives, there is no place we can find peacefulness. This is why the Heart Sutra “negates” the Buddha’s teaching; it attempts to release us from dichotomies created in our thoughts. If we understand Buddha’s teaching with our commonsense, calculating way of thinking, we create another type of samsara. Eventually we feel more pain as our desire to reach nirvana creates more difficulty in our lives. This desire to end our suffering is another cause of suffering, and the Heart Sutra presents the Buddha’s teachings in a negative way in order to avoid arousing this desire.

There appears to have been institutionalized bias against women right from the earliest times. I don’t think anybody sat down and thought, “Oh, let us be biased.” It’s just that it was part of the prevailing social scene. As the years passed, everything was recited and recorded from the male point of view. I am sure this was not intentional, it was just how it happened. Because most of the texts and the commentaries were written from the male point of view—that is, by monks—women increasingly began to be seen as dangerous and threatening. For example, when the Buddha talked about desire, he gave a meditation on the thirty-two parts of the body. You start with the hair on the top of the head and then go all the way down to the soles of the feet, imagining what you would find underneath if you took the skin off each part; the kidneys, the heart, the guts, the blood, the lymph and all that sort of thing. The practitioner dissects his body in order to cut through the enormous attachment to physical form and see it as it really is. Of course, in losing attachment to our own bodies, we also lose attachment to the bodies of others. But nonetheless, the meditation that the Buddha taught was primarily directed towards oneself. It was designed to cut off attachment to one’s own physical form and to achieve a measure of detachment from it; to break through any preoccupation the meditator might have about the attractiveness of his own body. However, when we look at what was being taught later, in the writings of Nagarjuna in the first century, or Shantideva in the seventh, we see that this same meditation is directed outwards, towards the bodies of women. It is the woman one sees as a bag of guts, lungs, kidneys, and blood. It is the woman who is impure and disgusting. There is no mention of the impurity of the monk who is meditating. This change occurred because this tradition of meditation was carried on by much less enlightened minds than that of the Buddha. So instead of just using the visualization as a meditation to break through attachment to the physical, it was used as a way of keeping the monks celibate. It was no longer simply a means of seeing things as they really are, but instead, as a means of cultivating aversion towards women. Instead of monks saying to themselves, “Women are impure and so am I and so are all the other monks around me,” it developed into “Women are impure.” As a consequence, women began to be viewed as a danger to monks, and this developed into a kind of monastic misogynism. Obviously, if women had written these texts, there would have been a very different perspective. But women did not write the texts. Even if they had been able to write some works from the female point of view, these still would have been imbued with the flavor and ideas of the texts and teachings designed for males. As a result of this pronounced bias, an imbalance developed in the teachings.

We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it. The expression on each man's face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the "Three Teachings" of China, and that the vinegar they are sampling represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling. To Kung Fu-tse (kung FOOdsuh), life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of, the universe. Therefore, he emphasized reverence for the Ancestors, as well as for the ancient rituals and ceremonies in which the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, acted as intermediary between limitless heaven and limited earth. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. A saying was recorded about K'ung Fu-tse: "If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit." This ought to give an indication of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism. To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend "the world of dust" and reach Nirvana, literally a state of "no wind." Although the essentially optimistic attitude of the Chinese altered Buddhism considerably after it was brought in from its native India, the devout Buddhist often saw the way to Nirvana interrupted all the same by the bitter wind of everyday existence. To Lao-tse (LAOdsuh), the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. As he stated in his Tao To Ching (DAO DEH JEENG), the "Tao Virtue Book," earth was in essence a reflection of heaven, run by the same laws - not by the laws of men. These laws affected not only the spinning of distant planets, but the activities of the birds in the forest and the fish in the sea. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away the harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or fight, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour. To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons. Its lessons needed to be learned, just as its laws needed to be followed; then all would go well. Rather than turn away from "the world of dust," Lao-tse advised others to "join the dust of the world." What he saw operating behind everything in heaven and earth he called Tao (DAO), "the Way." A basic principle of Lao-tse's teaching was that this Way of the Universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared the most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best.