streaming consciousness…

Tagged: craving Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  hardie karges 2:49 am on August 17, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), craving, death ( 5 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), language ( 146 ), meditation ( 192 ), philosophy ( 103 ), religion ( 158 ), skillful means ( 3 ), violence ( 7 )   

  Buddhist Skillful Means in the Material World… 

  

  Buddhism is a social paradigm, too, and a vision of a better world. How is that possible, you ask? How could it not be possible, if everyone could tame the violence that resides there in their minds, implicit in the language we use as operating systems? Because, if craving is the main cause of individual suffering in this world, then violence is the main cause of mutual suffering, and the means of spreading it is by means of language.

  And there is much of the problem right there, because violence is inherent to any form of language and maybe especially to the Indo-European base languages of Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, and German that characterized the early colonial world. So, meditation is the solution to that problem, certainly. The reason language was invented, after all, was for strategic advantage in the battlefield, so we’re lucky that it’s developed other uses and applications in the meantime.

  But Buddhism is nothing if not a philosophy of peace, and that is written into its precepts of kindness and conciliation, if not submission. Because our kindness should not be mistaken for weakness, remember, and that goes double for Buddhism. Skillful means are required to maneuver crooked paths. So, sometimes we have to do things that normally would be unacceptable, with the understanding that it is a measure of the moment, that there is no other option. Death is not an option, forbidden by precept. Everything else is on the table, with the understanding that it is temporary, as is everything.

   

  Reply Cancel reply

  Required fields are marked *

  Name *

  Email *

  Website

  Notify me of new comments via email.

  Notify me of new posts via email.

  Δ

• 

  hardie karges 4:48 am on December 22, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), capitalism ( 26 ), craving, Hardie Karges ( 242 ), language ( 146 ), Middle Path ( 55 )   

  Buddhism and the Middle Path of Least Resistance… 

  

  The Middle Path can be tricky, it seems, to avoid being sucked into the seductions of the sideline. Streams flow smoothest at the center. But the edges are where the fun occurs, apparently, giving rise to the word ‘edgy’ and the pleasures therein, pushing envelopes and sealing deals, and leaving nothing to the imagination but fantasy. Why do we love hot coffee or iced coffee but detest the tepid middle temps? We love extremes, even at the risk of self-harm. So, in a very important way, the Middle Path is not something tricky and difficult and a test to one’s patience, at all, but is really the easiest and most convenient path.

  We often make life hard in our quest for abundance and diversions, stacking up stuff in piles all the while with no real plan to utilize them, much less to ever dispose of them. But this is often unnecessary. I know it’s almost cliché by now, but how much do you really need? We often assume ‘the more the better’, but that puts all other clichés to shame, and nothing indeed could be further from the truth. For this I speak from personal experience, while passing no judgment against the predominant capitalist economies of the West and their wannabes.

  But it can be a trap and largely defines the Buddhist concept of ‘craving’, which is generally to be avoided. But that’s not just stuff in the closet but stock in trade. The first thought I had when starting to do business, was my exit plan. And, not surprisingly, that’s the part that I did best, defining the timeline as a function of the overall business plan, and therefore leaving with few regrets, and even less stock in trade, while being largely successful, for what I wanted to accomplish. The Buddhist Middle Path is not so different, really. To say that it is the path of least resistance would not say nearly enough, but neither would it be totally wrong. To go with the flow can be good sometimes.
   
• 

  hardie karges 3:49 am on March 31, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), craving, Hardie Karges ( 242 ), language ( 146 ), life ( 33 ), meditation ( 192 ), memories, memory ( 3 ), philosophy ( 103 ), POETRY ( 12 ), religion ( 158 ), thoughts, WRITING ( 13 )   

  Buddhism 499: Thought as Language and Memory…  

  

  The things we’re most attached to are our memories. If you can let go of them, then you can let go of anything. But the attachment here is insidious, because it is not strictly voluntary, but more customary, even essential. Because, like computers, we are in many ways defined by speed and memory, the two measurements which simultaneously both limit us and liberate us. What is more basic to our ability to think than language? Memory, of course, even if it’s always the past. Language is optional in the proto-consciousness of our lingo-less ancestors. Memory is not. 

  That’s the strict definition of thought, or awareness, but the sentimental attachments are more problematic. That’s when we become attached to our memories for purely sentimental reasons, or even worse: craving. Craving has long been identified as the chief cause of suffering in the Buddhist worldview, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. The memories themselves aren’t usually the source of craving, of course, but the objects they represent are, insomuch as all memories are memories OF something. 

  So, here we are, featherless bipeds with a difference: we think like crazy, literally, mostly through the medium of language. In fact, in some people’s eyes, thought is indeed identified with language, as if no thought existed prior to language. I’m not sure how to prove it one way or the other, but I take it as an act of faith that that is not the case. Surely the animal kingdom conducts activities that can only be regarded as thought-driven, given the logic and forethought inferable.  

  Certainly, they have memories, and just as certainly, they have no language. But can we say that they are happier because of their lingo-less existence? Maybe. As always, the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle. Dogs won’t cure cancer, but they may have less of it to begin with. Still, they’ll likely never live to the ripe old ages that we now consider normal. So, the best bet is to stop the thought stream periodically with meditation, and use memory as a substitute sometimes, but not as a practice of sentimental craving. Bingo. Sounds like an enlightened practice to me.  

   
• 

  hardie karges 3:25 am on January 14, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), craving, discipline ( 4 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), meditation ( 192 ), mindfulness ( 35 ), religion ( 158 ), suffering ( 28 )   

  Buddhism 102: the Cessation of Craving  

  

  If you indulge cravings, then there’s no end to them, just mindless consumption. It’s better to cut them off at the source, your mind. This lies at the heart of Buddhism and is enshrined in the Second of Four Noble Truths as the primary cause of suffering. There are other causes, too, and so other forms of suffering, but this is the main one, and the one for which Buddhism is famous. After all, what is more insufferable than craving and its deleterious effects? 

  Well, that is a debatable point, but most importantly, craving is the one cause of suffering that we are most able to do something about, in order to effect a positive change in that status. Old age and many forms of sickness leave us at their not-so-tender mercies to live or die, but craving is just a clownish monster, mocking our every move, and our every intent to free ourselves from its hideous grip, adding insult to injury, when what we really need is encouragement to succeed.  

  Because craving is akin to addiction, and this is one of the most hideous of worldly phenomena that we must deal with in the course of our short lives, the inability to free ourselves from the grips of habits and substances which are harmful to us, even when we are fully mindful of that fact. But the craving is mindless, not mindful. And so that is where we must nip it in the bud, at the point where the mind has made an unconscious allowance that facilitates this perversion of intent. 

  It is of no importance that the mind may have no more intrinsic importance than the craving, either, or ourselves, for that matter. What is important is that we cease the defilement at the source, rather than make excuses for our failings. And the source is will or lack thereof. If you are willing to allow cravings to control you, then they will do so, without fail. Only if you are willing to exert some discipline can you truly defeat the monsters that inhabit the subconscious realm of craving. Only then are you truly a disciple of the Buddha.  

   
• 

  hardie karges 3:38 am on December 23, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), craving, Hardie Karges ( 242 ), meditation ( 192 ), mindfulness ( 35 ), philosophy ( 103 ), Science ( 25 ), suffering ( 28 ), Zen ( 31 )   

  Buddhism and Non-Possession  

  

  I travel these lands as if I owned them, when in fact I own nothing, not even my own body parts. And that’s good, because if I owned anything really and truly then I’d be attached to them, till death do us part. That’s no good, because attachments are tantamount to craving, and clinging, Buddhist no-no’s from the word ‘go’. Why? Because they’ll always cause suffering, later if not sooner, and that’s gospel, according to the Buddha. But that’s a sharp contrast, of course, to the typical Western habit of consumption and possession, as if the more we purchase, then the happier we’ll be. 

  Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. In fact, the truth is probably just the opposite: the more we possess, the more miserable we are. But don’t try to convince a rich person of that—or a poor one. Because the truth is not to be found in stats or specs, but in the internal subjective application of deep feeling to the miscellaneous circumstances of life. Scientific proof, and much less truth, can only go so far. You can’t prove happiness, any more than you can prove compassion. But you can feel it. And you’ll know it when you feel it.  

  So, that’s what’s important, and that’s all that we should expect from any religion or philosophy. Because science is better equipped to tell us what the universe is composed of, and how it works, so Buddhism probably shouldn’t waste its time rehashing old themes and memes from two to three thousand years ago as if deep introspection were capable of the same rigorous experiments as science. It’s not. Buddhism is here to tell us how to live our lives. Be kind. Reduce suffering by reducing craving. That’s all. Merry Christmas… 

   
• 

  hardie karges 11:34 am on February 18, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: awakening, change ( 5 ), craving, desire ( 4 ), enlightenment ( 13 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), lovingkindness ( 16 ), metta ( 25 ), Middle Path ( 55 )   

  Buddhism 101: Metta and Karuna, Love and Compassion 

  

  

  When your burdens become blessings and your hatred becomes love, then you are truly enlightened. And ‘enlightened’ may be a loaded term, filled with false promises and moronic miscalculations, but still it is frequently found. So, I use it, as do many others. Is the Buddha’s ‘awakening’ really any more accurate than to refer to his ‘enlightenment?’ I suppose that ‘awakening’ sounds self-motivated, while ‘enlightenment’ sounds as if a light is being switched on somewhere, but that might only be a difference more apparent than actual…

  But the point is to make some adjustments to your current internal conditions, rather than insisting on changing something else, or someone else, to suit your requirements, which are likely nothing of the sort, but instead desires and cravings and itches wanting scratching, for lack of a better metaphor. And as always, I take the middle position, or path if you prefer, that sweet spot between naked aggression, on the one hand, and passive submission, on the other, such that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the apparent compromise is in fact a fresh and superior synthesis. We should be open to change, not scared of it.

  But love is not as tricky as it seems, requiring flowers in February, ribbons and bows in December, and God help you if you forget the anniversary, not to be confused with the birthday in another Indo-European language. It’s confusing. But Buddhist love is not. ‘Lovingkindness’ is a Hebrew loanword via Christianity, but metta simply means brotherhood, or sisterhood, as the case may be, universal in its scope and nature, with passion distinctly optional. After all, passion originally meant suffering, and that is the starting point for Buddhism, but not the final word, which is always metta. Most important is to forego all hate…

   
• 

  hardie karges 6:54 am on April 10, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), capitalism ( 26 ), craving, Dawn of Everything, gluttony ( 2 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), judgment, lust ( 4 ), Middle Path ( 55 ), philosophy ( 103 ), tanha ( 4 ), upadana ( 3 )   

  Buddhism 101: The Difference Between Cravings and Needs–and Karma… 

  

  

  Be careful with judgments. The craving for food of a wealthy person is different from the craving for food of a poor person. If that means that there are good cravings and bad cravings, then we are simply getting bogged down in words, because the craving to be avoided is for something beyond what is necessary. Thus, the craving for food of a starving person is not a craving in the sense that Buddhism abhors. That is a need, not a craving. The craving that Buddhism abhors is the incessant call for more, more, and more far beyond what is needed to sustain the life of someone and his significant others.

  This is implicit, of course, in the Middle Path between luxury and lack, which is at the heart of original Buddhism, before the re-birthers decided that it was always all about that: rebirth, past lives, and the generation-jumping karma of retribution. And that original impetus is definitely what we need now, in our economic stage of advanced capitalism, to be reminded that craving is at the heart of our problem. There is even some scientific evidence coming out now in the best-selling book ‘The Dawn of Everything’ that gluttony and craving are at the heart of certain violent and slave-trading cultures.

  Suddenly it all starts to make sense, doesn’t it? The lifestyles that reward gluttony and craving demand violence and other defilements to sustain them. The one feeds the other in a never-ending cycle of degradation, and our lives suffer as a result. Life is not so difficult, after all, certainly not as difficult as the ‘multiple feedback loops of karma’ invoked by some high priests of reincarnation might make you think. Just be kind, and gentle, and respectful to the rights and dignity of others. The rites and rituals can come and go, but what you don’t do is sometimes more important than what you do.

   
• 

  hardie karges 5:39 am on March 20, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), capitalism ( 26 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), craving, demmocracy, desire ( 4 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), triple religion   

  Caveat Emptor: Buddhism’s Fine Print… 

  

  

  You can spend your life pursuing objects of craving, or you can reduce your need for them. Christianity or Buddhism? Your choice. And yes, it’s really that simple, almost. The Buddhist Precepts and the Christian Ten Commandments are almost exactly the same, after all. And other differences purported if not actually reported are a little bit harder to define, like the bit about passion and dispassion. Now I fully trust my sense of that, but it is a harder point to sharpen, and anyway doesn’t make so much difference for the average individual living his daily life.

  Then there’s the question of a creator God, which is probably as much a thorn in the side of many Christians as the question of rebirth is for many Buddhists, which is the role of belief and superstition in the practice of either. And so, once again, the similarities abound. But the opposites are palpable. To crave or not? That’s a real difference, and lies at the heart of Buddhism, the disavowal of that. And the desire for that lies at the heart of the Triple Religion that we might call Christianity-Democracy-Capitalism, my term, not to be confused with the Triple Religion of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, which is often invoked for China and sometimes Vietnam, at least before Communism.

  But few choices are truly binary in real life, even if the issues involved often are. To desire or not desire? I think that I might be able to divide my time appropriately between the two. After all Buddhism is built on a Middle Path between extremes, the worst of either to be avoided, while the best of both are to be imbibed of judiciously, with neither lack nor excess. And if this ultimately involves the mixing of religions, then so be it, as long as it’s articulated, so that we’re not pretending that grace, forgiveness, and passion are at the heart of Buddhism. They aren’t. That’s Christianity. So mix in equal portions, like salt and pepper. And there might even be a new Triple Religion possible, Buddhism-Democracy-Socialism, sounds good to me.

   
• 

  hardie karges 7:45 am on February 13, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: craving, dukkha ( 15 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), impermanence ( 6 ), Science ( 25 ), suffering ( 28 )   

  Buddhism: A Noble Truth or Two (and a few lesser ones)… 

  

  

  Buddha in his Four Noble Truths didn’t say that craving is THE (one and only) cause of dukkha, i.e. suffering. Pali and Sanskrit have no definite articles. But it is certainly one of them, and by the fact that the Buddha mentioned no others right then and there, it certainly seems logical to assume that it is perhaps the greatest of them. He did mention others elsewhere, though, and impermanence comes quickly to mind as one of those that he specifically wrote about in that context.

  Perhaps impermanence was Buddha’s first encounter with dukkha? I know that it was mine, at the ripe old age of eight years old, in Jackson, MS, USA, as my parents prepared to migrate from the Big City out to the nearby countryside, and all that I knew and loved would change overnight, perhaps more than can be easily imagined here and now almost sixty years later. Because not only was that my first encounter with suffering of the existential sort, but it was also my first encounter with culture shock. I cried for days, and not only survived but thrived.

  I even started to like that culture shock around the time I visited my twelfth or thirteenth country a few years later. Similarly, the Buddha did not say anything to the effect that ‘all life is suffering.’ But as he listed the various manifestations of suffering, e.g., birth, old age, disease, and death, then that might certainly be implied. That’s what he was obsessed with, most likely, because that’s what he was shielded from for most of his life—until he went outside. And so we must all go outside to find what is inside each of us.

  And what we find inside is another world, a different world, almost another dimension, as different as Virtual Reality from our modern materialistic world of Science. And it is a world of feeling and perception, the only world that a sentient being can truly know. Everything else is only a likely story, and a likeable story at that. You shouldn’t have to choose between Buddhism and Science. You don’t. And sometimes short-term suffering brings the greatest long-term benefits. Don’t panic. Be patient. Be kind and adapt to changing circumstances. Impermanence shouldn’t be a cause of suffering.

   
• 

  hardie karges 6:07 am on December 26, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anger ( 6 ), Buddhism ( 431 ), craving, dispassion ( 3 ), lust ( 4 ), passion ( 9 ), spiritual bypassing ( 5 ), Three Poisons ( 2 )   

  Buddhism Unmoved: in Support of ‘Spiritual Bypassing’ 

  

  

  Anger is an object lesson, not just about hatred, which seems obvious, but lust, craving, passion, and all the rest. It feeds on itself until it destroys something, if not everything. This is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism, along with greed and ignorance, and it would be hard to decide which is worse. Because they all destroy whatever is in their path, like fires burning endlessly and mindlessly, when the obvious solution would be to simply let them go, to burn themselves out. If any three words could sum up the message of Buddhism, it would likely be, ‘let it go.’

  But it’s not always so easy, of course, given the nature of the beast, its very nature being its difficulty to let go. So, in a sense, they are all one, that fire burning, which we Westerners like to immortalize as something romantic called ‘passion,’ while conveniently forgetting that word’s roots in suffering, as in the ‘passion of Christ,’ nothing romantic about that. But so we fantasize, that our greed is our glory and our lust is our love, when nothing could be further from the truth, from any metaphysical viewpoint—at least, not in Buddhism.

  Because Buddhism is a religion and philosophy of dispassion, in both the traditional meaning of ending suffering and the modern meaning of avoiding strong emotion. This drives many Western psychologists crazy, of course, because they sense any emptiness as a cause of alarm. The first thing they teach in photography class is to ‘go for peak emotion.’ And the psychologists want all potential conflicts to be met head-on. To not do so is something they call ‘spiritual bypassing,’ with obvious derision. Well, if avoiding anger is ‘bypassing,’ then I heartily recommend it. For nothing good can come from anger. One man’s religion is another man’s aversion, I suppose.