I think the Buddha did not mean that one should maintain such a motivated mood forever, and I think that would be impossible. I guess the motivated mood would ideally end when it has reached its purpose (i.e. nibbana).lostitude wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 8:02 pm Thanks a lot everyone for your kind answers. I have follow-up questions/comments:
This makes perfect sense, but how do you maintain such a motivated mood for ever?JamesTheGiant wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 12:44 am It's not very helpful in terms of concrete advice, but on at least 5 occasions the Buddha recommended people "practise as if your head was on fire!"
Really? You are that? And what is nibbana?lostitude wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 8:02 pm I know I want nibbana, I'm no longer scared of it, I perfectly understand that my existence is just an accidental side-effect of the workings of this universe, that everything I feel and think is ultimately a by-product of natural selection, that I'm nothing more than a more developped expression of my own DNA, i.e. a string of atoms.
Meditation is not the only kind of "buddhist practice", and maybe not of any use at all until a certain point where one has cleaned one's room and is able to "put aside greed & distress with reference to the world". Can you really at any point "put aside greed & distress with reference to the world" and thus really practice meditation as it is described in the suttas?lostitude wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 8:02 pmYet I can't bring myself to practice, I'm convinced that I have more chances of winning the lottery than stumbling upon any fruitful meditative state (because I can't help thinking meditation is all about chance, fumbling in the dark until you are lucky enough to find that needle in those massive haystacks). That's what I mean by ambivalence.
I know that I can't. I have other stuff to do, always dealing with greed and distress of one kind or another that I just cannot put aside.
Those quiet moments when "sitting in meditation" would be really possible to me usually happen when there is some kind of great "disappointment", i.e. some sort of unusual unexpected suffering, and resulting hopelessness. Maybe similar as you say that when you are depressed might be the only time where you could imagine sitting still for a long time without hope for any kind of gratification. That "hopelessness" is the "setting aside grief and distress with reference to the world", or it could be, I think, if developed correctly.
I think in order to practice meditation one has to first be quite hopeless (but also distress-less to some extent: not having reason for a bad conscience concerning this or that, and not worrying too much that there is no hope). Then one acquires a taste for that hopelessness (non-craving), recognize it as something peaceful. And then the goal is to attain complete hopelessness. If one is trying to "attain" something other than complete peaceful hopelessness, by practicing meditation, then what should one really get out of sitting around?