"The Riddle of Desire" and a new find

I was wandering, taking a break from studying. I found myself at "I Speak of Dreams", clicked on a few links then back to find this post which I read the other day, but didn't have time to check the article referenced.

Dharma 101 is a good read- the anger article of course, but also all of them. "Meditate because you are angry, not to eliminate it. Thich Nhat Hanh says we must learn how to hold anger like a baby: we need to learn how to be angry, not how to express or repress it. Whenever we take any emotion and make it into an It (as in "I can't stand it any longer" or "I have to get it out of my system"), we are in trouble."

From there I decided to wander around the Tricycle site. I like it by the way. Just the pieces I was reading were stimulating thought of all kinds, in the areas of - desire/emotion.. the quest for balance.. more thought on nourishing soul..   Thanks Liz.

This was where I wound up:

From The Devil In Our DNA: "In other words, as long as the Buddha was still in his body, he was still subject to the "residue" of his previous karmic conditioning. Only when he died, and entered parinirvana [the complete cessation of personality and sensory experience] was his freedom no longer restrained by residual karma. This suggests that as long as one is living in a body, in the sensory world, one is still tied in some way to the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion—even if one is a Buddha. Otherwise, how do you make sense of the numerous passages in ..."

This article, The Riddle of Desire links long parts of the others below; all of this unfortunately incomplete, but still interesting reading.

From Working with Desire: "The desire for food when one is hungry, the aspiration to work for peace in the world, the thirst for knowledge, the wish to share one’s life with dear ones, or the yearning for freedom from suffering: all of these can contribute to lasting happiness as long as they are not tainted by craving and grasping. Like the other emotions, desire can be experienced either in a constructive or in an afflictive way. It can be the catalyst for a meaningful life—or the maelstrom that wrecks it."

This brings to mind Fromm's distinction between having and being.. "Being" as an active mode, an experiencing mode for a start, but not limited to those; having as trying to possess, own, hoard, keep, accumulate.. In some respects like the differences between feeling loved, loving, giving love -and- having love, keeping love, owning, possessing, etc....

From Making Room For Desire "As I practiced experiencing these feelings without judging them, I could begin to explore them further. What lay at the core of this desire? What was I really longing for?"

The Merry-Go-Round of Desire: An Interview with Mark Epstein (who I think I have read on Edge from time to time) on the same topic. "The same thing happens in meditation: having that first bit of bliss, then it’s gone. You want the perfection back. But you’re chasing something you’ve already lost. If you stay with that widening dissatisfaction and think, "Oh, yeah, of course," then insight can begin to happen. In that gap.

The whole Tricycle site is worth perusing. I found many thoughtful articles there. I quit subscribing to almost all magazines years ago, but I am thinking about subscribing to this one.