Bound No More: On a Verse from the Dhammapada

"Abandon anger,
Be done with conceit,
Get beyond every fetter.
When for name & form
You have no attachment
--have nothing at all--
no sufferings, no stresses, invade."

-Dhammapada 17, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

I believe this, but I also give thought to what Ra says about it being (1) counter to evolution, at least as we understand it, and (2) all but impossible and has an aspect of being irrelevant or trivial personally, in the context of sustaining it in "the real world."

Counter to evolution: That is for another post.

All but impossible day to day, yes. I could do nothing better now than abandon anger. But I cannot. I despise conceit, yet seem to build everything I do out of some flavor of it.

Seems like at best, renouncing the self, emotion, attachment, etc, it becomes a dialectic, a path that you pursue, sometimes well, sometimes not at all, and draw enlightenment from but only ever understand partially.

The state of non-attachment is also similar to what Bohx talks about as "the void"-- and reminds me also of his post about Kingsley.

The mental "place" written about in the Dhammapada, where, through meditiation or snap enlightment or whatever, all attachment is surrendered and one really does "have nothing at all" is very like that place in Parmenides, where we long to go

" 'down to the world of death while still alive' (30), to a transformation and vast awareness most of us have long since denied."

It seems like a common primordial instinct and longing, for some kind of an escape from the material that shockingly illuminates things on return.

[I, mystic, now await castigation from the realists.]