Zen attitude

Buddhist apathy does not consist in a desire unsatisfied, or a want, but well and truly in the absence of desire, which stifles the want, thus suffering or pain, at the root, as one no longer desires. One must desire to suffer, one must be in want of a good, even on the physical level, for bodily pain is the absence of health, thus a physical want which, if not satisfied, produces suffering.

The same holds affectively, and if for example I grieve over the death of my friend, it is obvious that if I manage to forget him, I will not suffer! For that matter this is why sleep, ultimately, be it physical or mental, enables not to suffer, since our desire and suffering are also put to sleep. Doctors today know how to relieve 95% of physical sufferings; for the remaining 5%, they put the patient to sleep, at which time any signs of suffering on the patients face vanishes. Thus suffering implies conscience, and more particularly the conscience of the unsatisfied desire and of the want. Behind this unsatisfied desire is hope, or despair if we persuade ourselves that the good we hope for is not attainable. This is what despair is: the certainty that a good has utterly escaped us.

Buddha was a prince, rich, capable of having more or less anything he wanted, women, horses, music etc., and he realized that he always desired something more, indefinitely, that he was never satisfied, never in rest, never serene, he saw that his soul was always in a state of agitation, thus in a state of suffering. He thus set off to meditate in the mountain to understand and experiment how not to suffer, and one of the things he understood is that suffering proceeds from desire, and therefore if one no longer desires one no longer suffers. Buddha was quite preoccupied, I believe, by the question of suffering. He saw that by anesthetizing passions, suffering was also anesthetized, for suffering is a passion!

One must distinguish and highlight the difference between not loving and not being (sufficiently) united to ones good whilst desiring to love and be united with ones good (typically suffering), and not loving because we desire nothing, and it is this last state which is Buddhist apathy. Yet passions are not good or bad of themselves, it all depends what the aim is. Thus, anger can be just, where not being angry would be a raging fault, or the sign of an incapacity or debility of the heart and reason! I say this because nowadays we oft hear that one must remain "zen" in all circumstances, and that anger is the sign of a person who doesn't control himself. Yet when one becomes angry, in particular, this shows where one is wounded, thus where one "loves". I am obviously not speaking of an infantile burst of anger, but of a just anger. And yet we are oft told that one must not demonstrate anger. Thus we are told not to be affected by anything, in other words we are told not to love... keep cool, do not love! Lol

Passions are neither virtues nor vices, they proceed from our capacity to suffer. I don't know if one can say this, but it seems to me right at this moment, in some sense, that passion is almost the opposite of virtue, for virtue does not in the least consist in suffering, and I think that many have moralized passions.

There is another thing that is very important, imo, that must be closely scrutinized, and that is what bad/evil is, which thus produces suffering, whichever angle we look at it, physical, affective, intellectual, spiritual. It is a big bone, upon which many a neuron has stumbled, sometimes without surmounting the obstacle, other times only doing so after ten or so years. Bad/evil is obviously linked to suffering, and depending on how we answer the question "what is evil", the consequences are immense downstream. The zen tendency, in fashion, likes to infer that evil does not exist, or that it is equal to good, in brief fashion is misguided. Nietzsche would say, "beyond good and evil", which is rather a Buddhist attitude for that matter, necessarily, for if good has something to do with love, evil has to do with suffering, the two having to do with desire, be it satisfied or not, but with desire. Thus if I no longer desire, I do away with good or evil. The philosophical question of "what is evil" is the real foundation of ethics, there can be no other, the rest is for suckers. But one must treat this question radically, as far upstream as possible, well before morality which is one of the consequences of the answer we arrive at or not.