reflection wrote:Some love their sex drive, others would rather not have it and try to diminish or remove it. Is that hard to understand? Apparently so. Still I wonder why these threads always tend to turn into some discussion about why we should or shouldn't. I mean, if somebody opens a thread about how they'd like to stop eating chocolate and that they'd like to have some support for that, I'm also not jumping into that saying "Listen, I love chocolate, nothing wrong with it if you have the right kind of chocolate" or "sorry, no, you can't stop eating chocolate". In my eyes it's just not very respectful towards the one who wants to stop.
I think that there is
a lot of support on this board in general, for how to deal with sex desire, which is of course a problem for almost all of us. I think the issue here is this idea of wanting to 'eradicate' it, as if one could just get rid of it quickly, so it can stop being a nuisance, and one can get on with the business of being in detached bliss (sorry to the OP if this is a misrepresentation, but that's the feeling I get, possibly because I used to have this attitude). As it's not going to go away all that easily, and will probably remain a pesky irritation for most of us even into our next birth, I think that it would be more skilful to focus (for now, in the immediate present) on
management rather than eradication. When sex desire arises, what are you going to do with it? What strategies can you employ? etc. But this wish to eradicate it sounds to me, like a desire to avoid the tiresome reality of having to
deal with it, over a long period of time, which is the reality for most folks, even monks. Just look at how many quite advanced monks even, end up disrobing and getting married...it's not so simply eradicated, it has to be
managed... That's not discouragement, it's just being realistic. (imho)