I think letting go of desire is a terrible description of the insight. I still feel like a normal person, I just suffer a lot less. There’s a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of changes in their close aftermath. It takes a few years before the mountains truly are mountains again.
It’s not the magnitude that repulse me, it’s direction. Well, I think I could accept the death of some little fraction of myself in exchange for a lot less suffering for the rest (with a lot of caveats), but “let go of desire” is never (I think?) presented as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice, it’s presented as something good.
I don’t think you need to take any of the Buddhist claims seriously, just do your own investigation. I think it’s much closer to something like ‘people take instrumental goals as terminal, then twist themselves into knots over this error’.
You may be ahead of me along this path. This story happened two years ago, and distant space dissolved even more recently than that. The mountains are not yet mountains again. They’re just shadows on a cave wall.
I think letting go of desire is a terrible description of the insight. I still feel like a normal person, I just suffer a lot less. There’s a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of changes in their close aftermath. It takes a few years before the mountains truly are mountains again.
It’s not the magnitude that repulse me, it’s direction. Well, I think I could accept the death of some little fraction of myself in exchange for a lot less suffering for the rest (with a lot of caveats), but “let go of desire” is never (I think?) presented as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice, it’s presented as something good.
I don’t think you need to take any of the Buddhist claims seriously, just do your own investigation. I think it’s much closer to something like ‘people take instrumental goals as terminal, then twist themselves into knots over this error’.
It’s a sacrifice.
You may be ahead of me along this path. This story happened two years ago, and distant space dissolved even more recently than that. The mountains are not yet mountains again. They’re just shadows on a cave wall.