So, I think one of the Budhist statements isthat "desire is the cause of all suffering" and that when you give up desire you become free and enlightened.
Now, I believe this is true but its effectively unattainable for pretty much all of us. We just can not give up desire. If we did, there would be no society and no people because we would all just sit there and starve to death - but then again that wouldn't be a problem since we would all be enlightened and would go on to another plane of existence... But that kind of by-passes this existence, and I actually think there is plenty of stuff to learn and to enjoy in this life before we "move on" :))
One of the big things we all struggle with in this life, and I think the main motivator for many of our desires, is fear and its near relative (when fear moves into the past) hate. As I said before, these negative emotions are largely derived from non-acceptance of situations that ARE.
This was the essence of my post on "The myth of security" as well as the one about the imagined desirability of motorbike adventure touring. - overcoming fear.Now these emotions really only live in either the past or the future and not the now. Truly, we are only afraid of events in the future, and angry and sad are of the past- even if we are imagining how we will feel after future events have passed. We take a huge step forward if we can manage to live in the present moment and reallocate all that thinking time to "being" time and just let the experience of the moment flow through us.
This is becoming a more "common wisdom" but like the giving up of desires is very hard to do for most of us for any length of time.
That said, when we do achieve this state, we become far happier and remarkably empowered and independent people as well.
Essentially its about overcoming fear. And the trick of that is for any given situation to "not mind" what the outcome will be. Now this sounds a lot like "not caring" but in fact it is quite different.How is it done?
For me, I'm starting to spend more time in this state and even when I have those "bad" experiences (there are plenty of them) and life disappoints me in some profound way, I am finding more and more that even while I'm feeling the surface emotion, deeper inside me there is a profound "Joy" in the experience. Its happening faster and faster now, as I move from the surface sadness of the situation and shift focus to the inner joy of the experience of life. I'm not sure of the origin of that inner joy but if you can find it, it truly is all a gift.This is the "not minding" aspect- shifting focus as soon as possible to the inner Joy - It is Acceptance - and its a real trick to do (again it is up there in the top ten hard things to do) but its a huge relief/reward when you do.
Actually, I have a sneaking suspicion that the inner joy is coming from the same place that that inner light I saw came from...When I get better at it, I'm sure I will be able to stay longer and longer with the inner joy :)
