Sunday, October 16, 2005
Patiently Desired
Patience is important because reason is only a sense. The ancients emphasized temperance, but temperance and patience are not the same thing. We have a desire for something now, and we have a desire for something that can only be attained by suppressing the desire of the moment. Both are desires, and they are separate, except that the consequences of the first happen to interfere with the second. Patience, which is really the strength of the second desire, restrains us from satisfying the first. Temperance by contrast is the complete suppression of desire by something other than another desire. There is actually no such thing.
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3 comments:
Agreed. Although there is a belief that the mind can be conditioned to deny desire completely.
Although unproven, it has yet to be disproven especially with eastern philosophies teaching the denial of desire. Denial is not removal though.
Anyway, on a lighter note, Alchohol Free Beer, usually has 0.01 percent... but it's still alchohol free apparently. So maybe removing all desires, but the desire to not desire is temperance in that you only contain 0.01 percent of desire.
What would be left of the mind if you conditioned it to deny desire? I think you would have to define it as something else.
Hmm... that's something I need to spend time on. Without desire you would function in a logical fashion to achieve an end goal. However, how that end goal would be determined would be the difficult part without desire.
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