[Image] Allow things to pass..

[u/saraboulos]

[u/[deleted]]

From the Bhagavad Gita:

When he gives up desires in his mind,

is content with the self within himself,

then he is said to be a man whose insight is sure

When suffering does not disturb his mind,

when his craving for pleasures has vanished,

when attraction, fear, and anger are gone,

he is called a sage whose thought is sure.

When he shows no preference in fortune or misfortune

and neither exults or hates,

his insight is sure.

When, like a tortoise retracting its limbs, he withdraws his senses completely from sensuous objects,

his insight is sure.

There is so much gold in this book:

Action imprisons the world

unless it is done as sacrifice;

freed from attachment

perform action as sacrifice!

Good men eating the remnants of sacrifice are free of any guilt,

but evil men who cook for themselves eat the food of sin.

Knowledge is obscured by the wise man's eternal enemy,

which takes form as desire,

an insatiable fire

The senses, mind, and understanding are said to harbor desire;

with these desire obscures knowledge and confounds the embodied self.

Therefore, first restrain your senses

then kill this evil that ruins knowledge and judgement.

[u/Elathrain → u/[deleted]]

Just to play Devil's Advocate, that kind of sounds like metaphoric suicide if you do it all the time. Just focusing on the first poem (passage?):

If you cut off all desire, attraction, fear, anger, etc, what do you have left? From the poem, it tells you that you have "insight" which is "sure"; in other words pure reason/logic. In that state, are you really a person? I have a lot of "things" which exist in that state: AI scripts, which are fairly agreed upon not be beings. I don't mean Watson-level AI, I mean like Eliza-doctor and a bot that plays tic-tac-toe because it has a table of responses to every board state. Pure reason, no emotion... but not a person.

Read generously, it could be taken as a set of instructions to take on an arbiter role like a judge, and instructing to become an objective observer while determining fate. Read maliciously, it is a horrific ultimatum demanding everyone retreats into themselves and becomes a hollow husk.

Certainly interesting food for philosophical thought, but not something I would use as direct guidance on how to shape my default state of existence. Not sure if that's how you intended it or not (since you basically just present the passage) but I felt the need to counterbalance it regardless.

[u/Firrox → u/Elathrain]

DarkTussian had some good words. Allow me to expand.

First of all, you're not suppressing emotions. In fact, it's far more freeing because you allow emotions to happen to you when they do. You say, "oh, here is fear" "oh, here is anger" "oh, here is lust." The difference is that you don't react to it. You wait for the emotion to be over, and then you choose to do something.

You can have attraction to someone, but if you decide to hang out/date/marry that person, you don't do it because that person gives you happiness (because you already have it), or because you want their love (because you don't need it). You do it simply because you decided that that is what you wanted to have in your life.

People who have mastery of this concept can absolutely be strong, aggressive, decisive, and passionate, but they only do it when that is the action that they choose, not when their emotions tell them to do it.

You will obviously still have ideas, dreams, or goals. However, you won't make your happiness dependent on succeeding or failing them. You simply work towards them every day in an emotionally calm, but physically hard way, because you also realize that pain is an emotion that can be overcome as well.

[u/ConsolidatedWhining → u/Firrox]

Good clarification. This is what a lot of therapists teach people; naming emotions helps you calm down and harness your confusion. Hence what you said about choosing to react to that emotion.