#philosophy ### Learned from experience, not from some "magical" revelation There are many different stories of Siddhartha Gautama, I love the one from [[Hermann Hesse]]: Born rich, he was temporarily blinded by the whole material world, as we are today by social media, video games, porn, etc. At some point he saw that there was this thing he had to understand: dissatisfaction, he tried the systems of the gurus: extreme asceticism [[Fasting]], [[Meditation]] ...) until he decided to seek the truth according to its own system. He finally saw the world as it, he saw the ultimate **TRUTH**. ### Try to solve suffering or better translated, dissatisfaction The root of dissatisfaction is desire, to limit it, you must control your desires, not delete them but limit them, be smart. Warren Buffett said something like, list 30 desires and focus on the top 5, completely discard others. *Pick one desire, and one desire only. The universe will help you get it. Let go of everything else.* ~ [[Naval Ravikant]] *Let’s go back to desire…this is old, old Buddhist wisdom…Desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want, and I keep that in front of mind…Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one* ~ [[Naval Ravikant]] #### Dissatisfaction is in our genes Dissatisfaction is quite common nowadays in the [[Hedonic Treadmill]] of society. It seems that it's impossible to have no desires, maybe nature learned that it have to inject this thing in us to keep us pushing forward the evolution of the gene pool. If we had no desire, we wouldn't do anything, we would just die. #### Book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1146101.Life_of_the_Buddha" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Life of the Buddha" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347683623l/1146101._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1146101.Life_of_the_Buddha">Life of the Buddha</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/185434.A_vagho_a">Aśvaghoṣa</a><br/> My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3628909957">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /> A poetic ballad in the field of truth.<br /><br />Siddhartha is a young man born into luxury, overwhelmed by pleasure and entertainment, which most humans desperately crave for.<br /><br />He freed himself from this game by using powerful tricks: reflection, fasting, meditation. <br/><br/> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/103091881-louis-beaumont">View all my reviews</a>