Shelly Parker-Chan

She Who Became The Sun by Shelly Parker-Chan is a kind of Dickensian saga set in 1345 China. The following is a quote at the end of chapter 3. The heroine has escaped starvation and landed in a monastery. She takes on the identity of her brother who died of starvation and is in the male section of the monastery. 

"Denying desire only made yourself vulnerable to those who were smart enough to see what you couldn't even acknowledge to yourself." (p.61 Hardcover from the library)

There are quotes in the Pali Canon about being desireless, but I don't think it's the complete absence of desire. The Buddha continued to eat and sleep and preach after he became enlightened, so you know, something was driving him even if it was wholesome and purified and focused on the path. There is a lot of religious rhetoric and mythological speaking in the Pali Canon. I mean the Buddha came out of his mother without any fluids, and began walking and talking. I take that to point to a special being, but not literally true. How do you communicate things that are beyond words? One way is to speak mythologically. I've never been around anyone who really talked about Tusita heaven and the devas present in the early accounts, but I have an attitude towards them I have around the ancient Greek gods, the Celtic gods, the Norse gods. They are early human communications about existence. 

I have a modern western worldview, and because I've come across all kinds of mythology I find them interesting and a projection of psychology. Reincarnation might be part of this, a mythological way to talk about conditionality. I mean you can imagine other ways of being, hopefully you witness other ways of being, but you can also see personality and other aspects of what makes up a human and the vectors they pursue. 

What do all the miracles in the Pali Canon point to? The amazingness and awesomeness of the path. I don't think you need to hype it, and Buddhism does the least proselytizing of the major religions. Maybe that's why it's only 0.7% in the USA.

My friend asked me why it was so important to me. It's hard to really describe how a system and culture get absorbed into one's being through sangha, reading and study and meditation. My life hasn't been great since I found it, so one could even argue that my finding the Dharma, sangha and the Buddha hasn't been great for me. It has made me feel more healthy and whole, make the mistakes I need to make, the fortunate falls, so I could learn. We all hurt each other accidentally, but the hope of waking up is to minimize that, and points to a path of proving good into the world.

To me the point is to channel and consciously direct one's desires into positive outcomes. Act in your own best interest. I know I haven't always done that and I wish I would have done that more throughout my life. Self sabotage and not giving credence to my shadow has had disastrous consequences for me and the people I've hurt. My goal as a parent and as a human being is to not hurt others, but it happens. Insects are killed driving vegetables to the market, but it's still the least harmful thing you can do to be plant based.

I think a lot about how on The Good Place, they come to the conclusion that you can't be good any more, you're embedded in so many systems of torture and bad. Just look at your phone. And yet we like to think of ourselves as good, and the desire to be good is a healthy thing.

With the support of the sangha, through meditation, you connect to the bottom basement of information and information--your experience. Being connected to your experiences, you're harder to manipulate. The forces of capitalism are harder to force feed to you if you're attempting to wake up. The anti-woke people can't be conscious of their motives since they're against any introspection, insight or avoidance of hypocrisy. Human beings with all their messy complications can't be as easily fed into the capitalist grinder. Substance abuse helps to numb you down. The fear of communism is part and parcel of capitalist lovers, the way Putin's fears of NATO provoked NATO expansion. Against wokeness to the unintended and paradoxical consequences, prefer just to act righteously, boldly and confidently, like a man. The internalized systems of self oppression are hard to shake off.