Hi Everybody,
I have to say when I type that 99 it seems like a very big number to me. I can't remember quite when I wrote number 1, but it's been about as long a journey as it was to write the book. It took a year. When you start out you are never quite sure where it is going to take you, and for how long. I'd done a lot of research but even so the eventual journey was very different from the one I'd envisaged. The human brain is simply amazing. That's what the new book is about. Well mainly. That's how it started out, the extraordinary evolution of the human brain, that we first acquired on the East African savanna's about 70,000 years ago, and that we now take on the District Line every morning to go to work. Same brain. Different world. But that's altogether another story. Where are we? Well we're just launching out on the brilliant, literally brilliant Buddhist analysis of the 10 worlds. We're spinning through the thumb nail portraits that Buddhism provides for us so that we can easily recognise where we are from moment to moment. And we've looked at Hell. Next up is Hunger.
' We've already touched upon Hunger briefly when we were looking at the desire for wealth which is so ubiquitous in the modern human character, but just to paint it ina bit more detail, hunger is essentially a state of constant dissatisfaction with where our life is now, because our wants and our desires have got out of control, and it's the out of control but that's the problem. Desires are of course fundamental to our human nature, and essential to life in many ways. They motivate us for example towards satisfying our basic needs for food and warmth and love and friendship, and move us on to satisfy the need for recognistion and reward and pleasure. Once again as you would expect, there are many gradations of this life state, from a more or less constant low-level itch to have some new thing or experience, all the way up to the stage where the hunger in a sense has become an end in itself, so that it can never be satisfied. We end up chasing one desire after another, and yet experiencing no real sense of fulfilment or satisfaction. As soon as the desire has been achieved, the compelling hunger seeks out another object to be possessed. a more common term for it I suppose might be good old fashioned greed. Since what ever we get is not enough, we end up trapped in a world of frustrated yearning for more stuff, another kind of hell. We are in the grip of a genuine addiction, and like most addictions, it is the source of a great deal of suffering, not just for ourselves, but for all those around us.
What about the positive dimension of hunger? It lies in the fact that there is often a huge amount of drive and energy locked up in the hunger state. If that energy can be re-directed or re-channelled away from satisfying our own selfish needs, towards meeting the needs of others who may be severely deprived in various ways, then such hunger can move mountains and achieve great good.'
That's it for today. Be back next week with a look at Animality, the third of the four lower worlds.
See you then.
Best wishes,
william
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle as a download.
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