Comments | erudito: The wisdom of desire

erudito

The wisdom of desire

Mar 14, 2006 20:02

One of the long-term blocks for me against Buddhist thought has been that I was not interested in renouncing desire, which always seemed too much like renouncing one’s humanity. But that, as therapist Mark Epstein shows in Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught, his latest rendering of the insights of Buddhist psychology for Western ( Read more... )

books, self-help, buddhism, depression, psych, sexuality

Comments 6

tooticky March 14 2006, 09:57:36 UTC

For some reason, this reminds me of an idea of CS Lewis'- that desirous love as an end in itself, or worshipped for its own sake quickly becomes a demon. Only when it's harnessed as part of a whole, or given context does it become an "angel".
Something that feels so powerful and all-encompassing sometimes feels as though it demands everything of you- and that your reward will be to exist in that state forever. But that's when you run thr risk of being "run by" or "used by" passion. We all know past a certain age from our own experience that that peak moment of passion waxes and wanes for a great many complex reasons- an elusive, maddening hint of the divine, or of transcendence.

Apposite erudito March 14 2006, 12:52:35 UTC

Yes, that seems very apposite :)

Re: Apposite tooticky March 15 2006, 00:00:48 UTC

Good! :D
For a stuffy medievalist Christian from the early 1900's, the man often has some useful and interesting things to say. The Four Loves has dated in a lot of ways (don't get me started on what he made of homoeroticism in Greek Lit!) but is still a worth-while read in that he has a nice way of pin-pointing the human-ness of our loves.

Re: Apposite erudito March 15 2006, 00:08:36 UTC

Quite. You can tell he is a medievalist: early Christians would never have used a lion as a symbol of Christ :)

Though his notion that romantic love was invented in Languedoc in about the C11th is deeply silly--hadn't he read any of the Greek myths and legends? (Or, for that matter, any doomed lovers story from any culture one cares to mention.)

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Re: have you ... erudito March 14 2006, 23:53:04 UTC

Thanks for the tip, no I haven't.

Buddhism anonymous March 14 2006, 20:11:31 UTC

One only has to live in a country like Thailand for a few years tomrealse that desire and belief can happpily co-exist.