Sunday, March 30, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 393: Sakadagami, Ceasing Desire

wikimedia commons, alexisnyal
Sakadagami
Ceasing Desire

Our yearnings produce our sorrows. We know it. We have come to this understanding not only with our rational mind, not only with our emotions, not only with our bodies or souls, but with our total self and not-self beyond. We comprehend this truth utterly.

We practice letting go of wants. We test our abilities. With repeated letting go of desires, with experiments for longer lengths of time, we improve. We become skilled at discarding desires. We release them. We let them drift away altogether.
 
We want nothing.

We can sit. We can smile at the lightness of existence, at the ephemeral nature of ourselves, our bodies, our lives. We are empowered, weightless, because we have let go of a burden. Our lack of clinging, our lack of resistance to the currents of life, lets us drift free. Our spiritual liberty suffuses us. We can let go even of the mind, of the concept of self.  

Once, there were scenarios in our heads, our human ability to say 'what if,' and with that ability, a tendency to focus on hypothetical cases, on status, on circumstances, on imaginary rewards that produce actual disappointment, on imaginary failures that aim us toward real failure.
 
Once, we were the cause of our suffering. Having realized our responsibility for our travails, we have let go of human desires.

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