Of Mindsets and Monkeypots: And Other Essays

De: Petr Karel Ontl

Narrado por: Avia Rose Livni

Excerpt from Of Mindsets and Monkeypots by Petr Karel Ontl.

"This business of letting go is so easy, and yet so hard, for monkey and for human being alike. We are both caught up in the same predicament. The details may be different, played out on higher levels of sophistication or complexity, but the end result is the same: Enslavement by concepts and conditioning. While the monkey is done in by its greed for a few nuts, we humans are done in by our greed for wealth, fame, power, status, pleasure, and shiny trinkets and toys which we believe we absolutely must have, and cannot live without. Even more fundamentally, we become enslaved not so much by the material objects themselves, but by our attitudes and feelings toward them.

Craving is a normal, basic part of our conditioned nature. There are certain things that are necessary for our physical survival and mental well-being, and others that are detrimental. The mind of every sentient being discriminates, putting these things into convenient categories, labelling them "good", "bad", and "indifferent" according to how it perceives them. And there are, of course, gradations within those categories.

To put it simply, due to ignorance of the nature of the ego, we fail to make the distinction between “This is needed” and “I want”. Through ego-motivated thinking we create a great deal of unnecessary suffering for ourselves, and we sacrifice much, even most of the quality of our lives."

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