Do you make a distinction between desire and need?
Is me desiring money to provide food and shelter to my family wrong?
How can I go about in this competitive world without desiring something I need to survive?
Who wants to pick this one up?
Desiring money.
I don't think it's wrong to be providing for your family.
It's very good to be providing for your family.
It's very wrong if you're not providing for your family.
I don't know whether the word desire is correct.
Maybe a must to...
go out and work and provide for your family, to feed your children, to provide a shelter.
If there's an excessive want in there where you want a bigger house and you want a bigger car and all the other things then there's a bit of a problem there but it's not wrong to provide for your family, that's for sure.
If we had gotten to that yesterday, maybe we would have answered this question.
It's actually one of the six directions.
We were talking about the six directions and revering, venerating the six directions.
Well, one of them is your family, and so you need to provide for them.
Remember that not everything is done with desire, and Arahant doesn't just sit there in a pool of their own urine and feces.
and veg out until they die.
They might.
They might sit until they pass away.
But, sorry, an Arahant would actually pass away because they're... It's interesting.
In that case, you might have an argument that it is wrong to want to provide for your family, that an Arahant might not even do it.
So wrong in the sense of still involved with clinging, that an Arahant would be unable to go back to work to provide for their family.
They just wouldn't do it.
They would say to their family, look, here's the practice meditation with me, and so on.
but I don't know and it's just the theory but the theory goes that an arahant if they're a lay person they will either ordain or pass away they can't possibly live in the state of a lay person because of the profundity of the state they're totally free from samsara or any desire to support their family for example I mean there's no concept of people in the mind of the arahant they understand
that people have this concept, but they have no concept.
They have no idea of the necessity to provide food for your family.
The death of any other people is not really intrinsically... I mean, what I mean to say is it's not an impetus for them to go out and work.
It's not an impetus for them to go out and do something.
They certainly wouldn't want to bring
suffering to other beings, but I think there's an argument for an enlightened person to not go out and do it.
This means a fully enlightened arahant, which of course is totally beyond the comprehension of an ordinary person.
What do you think of that?
It's not a very fun thing to hear, no?
An enlightened being would just abandon their family?
I don't know.
I guess you only know if you become a... Tough.
Yeah, tough thing to call there.
Yeah.
Is that dispatch?
Is that not compassionate?
Are you not being compassionate?
Or are you... I think what they would do is... Just not wanting to do it.
They would find a way to...
make sure their family was provided for, right?
Or do the best that they could.
Say, look, I can't do this anymore, but... I don't know if I can say it exactly like that, but it would at least be in the sense of encouraging or doing the most appropriate thing within their power or within what was appropriate without actually giving rise to desire, which of course would be impossible.
So...
They would maybe encourage them to ordain or to, you know, let's go ordain in the monastery or at least finding a way for them to live without the support of this person.
It might even be impossible for such a person to become an arahat until they had worked that out.
You know, how somehow your situation can get in the way of your progress.
I think that's one important thing that you find in the practice is that as you progress, you actually pull people along with you.
So the people who are close to you change based on your practice because of how intertwined their destiny is with yours.
So it may just be a pointless exercise to even ask what an arahat would do
in that case, because they would also bring their family with them.
It's hard to say.
I mean, there's just other things at work here, that the arahant understands karma, so they understand that suffering comes from our own deeds, that it's never cut and dry like that, where you abandon people to suffer.
And that death is not, and suffering are not intrinsically wrong.
What's wrong is the attachment to things.
People don't fall into suffering because they're suffering.
They fall into suffering because of attachment, because of desire.
And if they can let go of desire, they can be happy in any state.
So the idea that people might suffer because of your actions is actually something that an Arahant has come to see through.
But it's just so difficult to explain.
It sounds kind of horrific to even say such things.
But you can't sugarcoat reality.
It may very well be the case that that's what it means to be enlightened, that they do, in some cases, give up.
Because they're not going to stick around, and their hunt is not going to be reborn again, right?
They're not going to cling and to worry about their family.
So if they happen to be in a state where it's either go out of your way to give rise to the desire to help these people or...
or they'll suffer, then it may be that the arahant just allows them to suffer.
So all I meant to say with that is that potentially it is quote unquote wrong, but it certainly isn't wrong.
It's not like you're going to go to hell or something because you're feeding your family.
This kind of desire is so benign, so incredibly benign,
And the good karma associated with feeding your family and with supporting people is so intense that it's an incredibly good thing.
But all I meant to say is, technically speaking, the desire there may be wrong.
in the sense in the very limited very very limited sense that it may be conducive to further rebirth it may be conducive to clinging it may be conducive it seems like there's a case for that but it's so benign it's so incredibly benign that it's not even worth worrying about never worry about such things do your duty help people be kind be generous do good deeds
And practice meditation.
When the time comes to be an arahant, you may not do such things.
That's all.