The Featured Post Blog

A collection of the featured posts as they appeared on mo'time

by: EmmaPele

It dawned on Emma this weekend how freakin' stupid she was to think that she could just remove herself from desire unless she became a forest monk or an ornamental hermit. It's not her own desire that is the problem. She spent eighteen months deciding to remove herself from that world, months in which she remained quite on her own before choosing this very reasonable course to inflict pain on no one and have no pain inflicted on her. But what completely escaped her was that other people would continue to project their desires onto her, and would not understand her choice. It is an unusual one, after all. Women, after all, are supposed to be desperate for mates, and if they were alone, it could only be out of cynicism, undesirability, or a bitterness that the right pursuer can overcome. Emma is not bitter, nor is she a cynic, nor is she undesirable. She simply believes that other things are more important, such as cultivating compassion for many people rather than passion for one. And yet even after removing herself, she managed to get tangled in an unhappy situation in which her pursuer projected a fantasy that she was having a nascent relationship with him when she just thought of him as an interesting person she had met among many interesting persons she met every week. Of course this was a blow to his ego, but was Emma responsible for this ego and the pain it had ultimately inflicted upon itself because it was acting, in Buddhist terms, as a "hungry ghost"?
Read more...

posted by: howard at 21:06 | link | comments |