The hunger ends not because we’ve simply decided that there really is nothing out there worth feeding on, so we might as well not feed anymore. The hunger is still there. The Buddha's approach totally satisfies it.

"I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people depict the Buddha’s teachings like this: There really is no happiness in the world, and contentment lies in just admitting that fact and basically giving up on the search for happiness and learning how to be equanimous and unaffected by anything. That’s the best that can be expected. There is no transcendent. There’s nothing unconditioned. It’s just a matter learning how to accept where you are.

That’s almost too depressing to think about, if that’s what it was all about. But fortunately, it’s not.

The Buddha did find an ultimate happiness, one that is totally satisfying — so totally that it’s more than anything you could think about, more than anything you could imagine. Can you imagine not hungering? For most of us, just that idea stretches our imagination a lot. We’re used to being hungry and we find satisfaction in things that seem to satisfy the hunger, at least for a while. We forget that a lot of the things that are appealing in life are appealing only because we’re so hungry that we go after them. This happens as we’re alive. This happens as the body dies.

There’s still a hunger in the mind that’s going to go hungering on for other things; other lifetimes. So we’re working toward a happiness where that hunger ends — not because we’ve simply decided that there really is nothing out there worth feeding on, so we might as well not feed anymore. That doesn’t work at all. The hunger is still there. The Buddha’s approach was to find a way to put an end to that hunger by totally satisfying it.

So always keep that in mind. There’s a very positive thing that we’re working toward here. And the human mind and human effort are capable of obtaining it."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Brightness of Life (2011)"

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