Is this a paradox, or am I misinterpreting/oversimplifying the semantics?
AFAIK, the goal of a Buddhist aiming for Enlightenment is freedom from desire.
My question is: isn’t the wish for ‘freedom from desire’ a desire in itself?
But when you obtain “freedom from desire”, then it is no longer a desire. So, when you have eliminated desire for more tangible stuff, then you’ve automatically achieved this last piece of the puzzle.
I guess it’s one of those enlightening moments.
I’ll try to make this explanation as simple as possible, thus confusing you more.
Attaining enlightenment also includes the elimination of the “me,” so, by the time you get there, it’s not a wish so much as it is a path. You are reincarnated as another being if you do not reach enlightenment, and that cycle continues and continues until all reach enlightenment…
No, I can’t answer this simply. I’m just confusing myself.
In the (OK, some) Buddhist interpretation(s) of existence, we are all connected, and there is no enlightenment unless we all are enlightened. Imagine a big ball made from string. Each strand that you see represents a life, and the beginning and end are buried by other strings, the ball itself. In fact, it is all one string, so when you die, you pop back up as another being.
Still simplified. It’s been years since I took Dr. Sponberg’s Buddhism class. I’ll say that the paradox you present lies much in the problem of language though, and also that different variations of Buddhism have different answers.
“Ahh Jjimm, a very wise question…”
At which point the Zen Master takes a big white stick and hits Jjimm over the head.
And Jjimm acheives enlightenment
Thanking Zen master I am.
Nobody seems to mention that freedom from desire and/or attachment necessitates starving to death…
Since most people’s minds don’t even go there; the religion has been pretty safe from critisism…
One could argue that a truly enlightened being doesn’t require food; therefor those who starve to death were not truly enlightened.
This works about as well as the old witch tests… except inverted
(bound up and thrown in a body of water)
If you drown, you were not a witch; God rest your soul…
If you don’t drown; you are a witch and must be burned at the stake immediately!
do as i say, not as i do
-Justhink
Give me a Bhoddisatva any day.
I always interpreted it as the bit where the corporeal state is no longer relevant (i.e. the supernatural bit of the religion). Mind you, since the cycle is one of death and rebith, death might not be seen as negative.
Mu.
MRO said it best. Mu.
THe short answer is yes, seeking freedom from desires is a desire.
The longer answer is that seeking enlightenment assumes that enlightenment is a state of being somewhere else. That freedom from desires means being different than we are. This is no different than hoping that there is a place called heaven where we will have only the good feelings and none of the bad.
We are enlightened now. There is no other place, other time or other thing to get. It is all right here right now. LEt me ask, where is this desire? Where do you put it? Where would you go to get away from it? And who is going there? WHat are “you”?
De3siring food for your body is not really what you are trying to avoid. It is the “I want, I want, I want” that your ego self is constantly repeating. It wants things to take i somewhere else where things will be better. IT may be a house, or a spouse, or a better body…or enlightenment. Whatever it is, it wants to stop suffering. Teh trick is that in order to stop suffering, you do not escape suffering. Rather, you accept suffering.
No one can tell you to your satasfaction what the state of freedom is. You will have to do that yourself. It is not an intellectual understanding, which is why no one can explain it very well. You just get it one moment.
Lao Tzu says it better:
"hence alloways rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets
But always allow yourself desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two seem the same but diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same, they are known as mysteries.
Mystery upon mystery, the gateway of the manifold secrets. "
DC Lao’s translation of the Tao Te Ching
“De3siring food for your body is not really what you are trying to avoid. It is the “I want, I want, I want” that your ego self is constantly repeating. It wants things to take i somewhere else where things will be better. IT may be a house, or a spouse, or a better body…or enlightenment. Whatever it is, it wants to stop suffering. Teh trick is that in order to stop suffering, you do not escape suffering. Rather, you accept suffering.”
Since humans are exhibited to be animals of habit, and the brain itself is exhibited to simulate and flashback habitually; the idea of ‘accepting suffering’ inevitably becomes a re-inforcement of suffering. When in a state of non-suffering, the ‘enlightened brain’ will suffer an anxiety attack, and call upon the flashback mechanism re-inforced through the focus. Suffering habitually is not a recommended state to train/burn on the re-call mechanism of the brain. The mind is ultimately paradoxical, it can always posess a self-recursion that even takes on infinite regression.
Maybe for a slow moving mind, this will not be a problem, but for those who process at speeds much faster than they can speak or act; a desire will always be calculated somewhere in the backround. With rapid processing speeds, this scenario is unaviodable. The only way to reconcile non-attatchment is through non-attatchment (which incidentally, on the outside looking in; looks a whole lot like starving to death).
It goes like this:
Wow, I want food sooooo bad; I’m soooo hungry, my stomach hurts sooo bad, it would feel sooo good just to have a sip of water…
I will not be attatched to this desire… I will transcend this pain and suffering… while there are many more to conquer; this is the strongest and most presently influential in my current spiritual journey to unnattatch myself. I need to transcend this lesson before even moving anywhere else… I will transcend the moment and unattatch myself from the mimcry of nature’s burden…
Basically, buddhism is what we now call a recovery program… Except, buddhism does not write into its ideal that the recovery regains functionality of this life; but rather that individual lessons accumulate and must be ‘conquered’ in many lives…
Also… screw one up? What’s the big deal? Make mistakes for a google trillion years… so? What’s the big hurry? Not even Buddhism will claim that there’s some ‘big rush’ to enlightenment.
Like the ideal of heaven, enlightenment cancels all of the time and effort needed to arrive; because the state is considered transcendental of means, and inevitable within the context of eternity. The difference between the heaven/hell story is that you only get one shot there… eternal suffering or eternal bliss for what occurs in this one life (which is why the means are so much more violent). Niether of these scenarios provide for any sense of morality or need to eat food. Eating food (particularly in the Biblical faith) is the very anti-thesis of the devout and holy. There can be nothing more hypocritical about believing absolutely in God, than eating food… praying comes in close second though…
Most people don’t go into Life Addicts Anonymous; and endure the withdrawl symptoms of dying so that they can be free from the addictive cycle… they usually pick something more like Alchoholism or Gambling…
Religions like buddhism and biblical theologies rely on people not parsing the logic of starvation and its correlation to its faiths purest expression.
-Justhink
“Freedom from Desire” – I never understood this as meaning anything supernatural, although many people do. My interpretation is that when you have attained “Freedom of Desire” your actions are no longer being forced upon you by any “desire”.
Desires are the internal agents of your mind that coerce you to do things. Thus many people eat because they are hungry, or because they are in the habit of eating. The Enlightened One eats at a given moment because he chooses to eat at that moment. He is free from the desires of hunger and habit.
In this context, “Freedom from Desire” is not a desire (i.e., it’s not an internal agent coercing your actions), it is a choice (i.e., a decision made free of coercion). The distinction is a fine one, but Enlightenment is not easy. 
All you have to do is extend the system from hunger and habit of eating to hunger and habit of life… eating is a pro-active endevour. You eat because of your desire not to have to ponder the idea of living or not living more acutely. You are attatched to ‘not going there at all’. Attatchment by avoidence, by pro-activeness… cancelling the recognition of the lack of choice by putting yourself in a situation where you mitigate the possibility of confronting it. Do you choose to live every moment?
At what point do you make a choice?
At what point does a choice become a one time thing? “I made the choice to live 55 years ago… that’s done and over with…”
Non-attatchment can also be utilized to aviod going into treatment for alcoholism… as it is ambigious in nature.
“I am unattatched to the ideal of recovery… I am unattatched to the need to unattatch myself from unattatachment… I am unattatched to the idea that people can become addicted to substances, or that I am losing any functionality with life by using this substance…”
The list can go on forever…
Buddhism contains loads of mystical brew-haha… Buddha himself has many correlations with the powers of deities found in Hinduism.
-Justhink
Justhink, I don’t get where you’re coming from.
When a Buddhist has a desire for food, the problem isn’t with the food, it’s with the desire.
The goal is to get over the attachment, once you accomplish that, abstaining from food is no more holy than eating food.
Rejecting food is just as much of an attachment as craving food.
Are you saying that one should fast as a way of directly confronting the desire for food and, by extension, the desire to live? That would make sense, but I think that once the lesson is learned one should stop the fasting. In fact, that’s what the Buddha did, right?
As far as treatment for alcoholism goes: If a person said, “I am unattatched to the idea that people can become addicted to substances, or that I am losing any functionality with life by using this substance.” I would counter that they are rejecting treatment (in order to continue their addiction). Rejection is NOT non-attachment.
Now all the Buddhists can say that I’m over-simplifying things, and Justhink can tell me that I’m refuting a position that he never really put forth.
Justthink is relying on the notion that his intellectual mind is MIND. He has not yet seen through the illusion of thought.
we are simply not our thoughts. What can be observed is NOT the observer.
If one does not understand this, discussion is futile.
Ok, ok, ok…
Looks like I’ve been at fault for moving the focus of the question outside its parameters… into actually arguing whether Buddhism is logically valid as an endevour. We may need to re-think this line.
First off; to move back to the central question…
Is freedom from desire actually a desire? (is this a paradox?)
Is acting towards balance meaningful in an ideology that sees all of nature as being ultimately balanced anyways?
With these types of questions, it seems that the word paradox may be being mis-used by the poster. The poster IMO is asking whether these are system collapsing inconsistencies; which would render all logic of embracing such system null and void.
(Like the endevour of creating a 500 sided triangle.)
That articulation significantly changes the scope of the question.
To parse the abiguity of these statements:
“We are simply not our thoughts.” That is probably the most critical philosophical question out there right now, and as mentioned earlier; really moves this into the free-will vs. determinism question in great debates. This observation is validated by observing braindead coma patients, or noting that we have bodies that exist without mind… (dig up a grave).
“What can be observed is NOT the observer.” This is not validated. “What can”, implies all possibility… I can observe something that is the observer. This would need more articulation IMO… the idea that I need to see the truth of this to even go further is a bit silly. It’s like saying that I need to understand Christ as the savior in order to discuss biblical theology.
“Rejection is not non-attatchment.”
Non-attatchment looks a whole lot like rejection though…
-Justhink
This is a question that comes up quite often. The answer is that it’s not desire that’s bad – it’s unhealthy desire. By definition, simple desire for enlightenment is not unhealthy. Simply desiring to have enough food to eat isn’t bad either. Desires are more like obsessions or addictions, not simple “wants” or “needs”. In the latter sense, a Buddhist desires to have time to meditate, and shelter, and peace, and enlightenment. However, should he desire any of these unhealthily, then it becomes an obstacle to enlightenment.
“the way that can be spoken of is not the costant way”
–lao tzu
fluiddruid wrote:
“This is a question that comes up quite often. The answer is that it’s not desire that’s bad – it’s unhealthy desire. By definition, simple desire for enlightenment is not unhealthy. Simply desiring to have enough food to eat isn’t bad either. Desires are more like obsessions or addictions, not simple “wants” or “needs”. In the latter sense, a Buddhist desires to have time to meditate, and shelter, and peace, and enlightenment. However, should he desire any of these unhealthily, then it becomes an obstacle to enlightenment.”
You’re defending an open ended question though. It’s like watching a news report on the leading cause of death amongst teen-agers… we already have an idea that the report is not going to be about:
The leading cause of death for anything is being born.
You assume that life itself is a measure of health; where in this model… life is seen as an unescessary causation for a ‘undesirable’ state. Not everyone, and certainly logic itself; concludes that anything having to do with life, has any bearing on what constitutes ‘health’.
As for Mr. Zambezi’s ambigious and undefended statements as replies to this topic:
“the way that can be spoken of is not the costant way”
–lao tzu
Lao Tzu in that same silly book also chasizes people who are not on the path as those who ‘laugh’/ridicaule at the words he wrote. All religious ideations possess one of these forms to intimidate anyone from commenting on the source in a critical manner; without being excluded by the source itself as having the ability to comment coherently. All you did was replicate the condition I eluded to earlier… about needing to believe in Christ as savior in order to have an opinion on the Bible.
This is not as much a discussion about human desire being god or bad, rather, it is a discussion as to what constitutes the ability or inability to achieve that desire. If such a path can be shown as unable to produce the effect sought, then one either has to change the desire or the path.
-Or just remain ignorant and hopelessly wandering… detatched from cause and effect mechanisms for greater ideals while ultimately using them to support their lives. Hypocrites down to the bone.
-Justhink