whocoulditbe?

how indeed

This is how I try to approach most disucssions. Happy new year, btw!

If you had to suffer from any personality disorder, you'd prefer it to be the one with the same name as a flower.

The virtue is always with the followers, better to have imaginary or involuntary leaders.

Of course, but focusing too much on fast-moving international crises can make you forget the changes that need to be made on a personal level, and despair is a comfy excuse for apathy.

I'm not sure the news cycle makes people any less passive in practice.

In a way they are a result of those things, but Y being the result of X can be reframed as Y overcoming X, X revealing itself to have always been Y, and so on.

Responding to desire means responding to lack, distress, jealousy, regret, etc., but there are other feelings that call for action: duty, compassion, respect for beauty, etc.

Imo there are recipes for enlightenment. You wouldn't imagine that the knowledge of a cake recipe alone can create a cake, but it does help. The line drawn between the method we are given and the materials we come with is ultimately imaginary.

There are plenty of unenlightened beings who have denied the enlightenment of the Buddha, pickpockets who identify an innocent pedestrian as a pickpocket.

A more useful one than sloth.

@Daniel might be right, something the belief in universal ignorance adds to the realization of personal ignorance is protection for the ego. On the other extreme, you could meditate on the possibility that you are the only deluded being left in existence, and imagine that everyone except you is an enlightened being who appears for your sake. But that point of view would be less compassionate and equally narcissistic.

The appeal of the rhetoric about universal delusion is that it includes the speaker. It enhances the urgency of practice, while also providing built-in forgiveness for inadequacy to it.