A quick comment that I posted on another forum. Edited :


Folks, there's a bit of confusion that comes from taking the Buddhist statement "Desire is the cause of suffering" that at face value without going a little deeper into the substrate of consciousness.

In Buddhism, Advaita, and several others the point is not that the solution is to get rid of all desires. There is nothing wrong with having desires, setting goals, and striving to achieve them. The problem comes when you invest your emotional energy (your heart) in them. Then if you don't get what you want to have or achieve, you allow that to damage your self esteem--actually "self valuation" would be the better term. That's suffering. Once you understand that, any "failure" does not make you have less value. Once you see that, your "value" can go infinite, because you're the only one that can set it.

Anybody Home in this Body? Light Humor

Letting go more and more.
Now notice pretty quickly when I go off track.

Found an enormous ball of fear identity.
It was in storage.
Its story was that, "There is never enough!  What if the whole thing crashes and burns? That could happen any second!"  Etc., etc.  Seeing it like that I was happy to let it go, to allow it to dis-create

But the thing is, it was pretty central to the personality, so seeing it as "Not I" was pretty significant.

Big Surprise! Big Insight! Big Realization!

"Hey! I can relax now."  And I did!  Really did.  Really!

The (now-blob-like and somewhat comic) fear floated off into the sky.  And there were no regrets!

So here I am. Now.
Poised for another thought to bubble up.
I mean one that has somewhere to go.
Not like these dead ends.
So far....

Wait.  Not every idea has to be significant, world-shattering, new dimensions blooming every second!
Some can be ordinary.  Like "We're out of toilet paper!"
But the Sheer Improbability of There Being Anything At All overwhelms even that!

Then it's like the World has sprung an Improbability Leak!  Gallons of Improbability pouring into our Safe and Predictable World!  This could change everything!

Externally I'm having some balance issues and competence in some areas appears to be starting to drift away....

Done.

All The Big Questions

The present appearance is of a version of the "I AM" experience called [your name] experiencing the words apparently written here and forming the individual ideas to which those words point into a larger idea.  Whew!  That is to say, "complex idea in a complex sentence."  Let's try to look that closely at "your" experience

Ask, "In this moment, what can be known to be undeniably true, eternal, indisputable?"  This "self" that "you" attach "your" name to?  Is it there when "you" sleep?  Doesn't seem to be, does it?  It seems to reassemble itself when "you" wake up in the morning.  What does that say about the reality of this "self"?  What if it's just a bunch of ideas clustered around this Bare Attention, this Naked Experience, this I AM?  Where are those ideas of self without the experiencing I AM?  Where is anything without THAT?

I AM, therefore, must be primary (philosophers call this "a priori").  Can it be separated from what it experiences?  Oops!  Any idea of I AM cannot be I AM, can it?  An idea cannot be the thing itself, any more than road signs can be the roads they point to.  You can't eat the idea of an apple.  So are ideas something or nothing?

What if all that exists is I AM?  Think of the implications!  If things and ideas have no intrinsic reality, then if we discount all objects of experience, the how is "your" experience of I AM different from "mine"?