Well, this year has been bitter sweet, and has been a curiosity to mull over. I thought I would write a small essay to treat of this subject as recent events have really been bugging the hell out of me, until I discovered the root of the problem. I want to take you for a brief foray in to practical principles, so you can avoid making the same mistakes as me and guard yourself against straying away from the well trodden path of contentment.
On the face of it in 2013, I made loads of money, got a first class degree, and even bought a house. One might be tempted to say this was a very successful year for me.

This is not quite the full picture though.

All this was at the expense of actually relaxing and enjoying life. I look back at some great times this year, however, they strike upon my mind as faint now, and I have far too few to count. I spent virtually all my time working, studying, and missing out on social gatherings. I often fell asleep each evening whilst reading out of an academic text book. I focussed so hard on accomplishing things and was focussed so much on the end, that when I finally got there...

I felt nothing.

I actually had to pretend to be excited about getting my degree. I admit it, I lied to you all as I was rather unenthusiastic about it. I felt empty after I had done this and all I had was a meagre piece of paper to show for it (not really it is still in the post/ has not been posted yet). True, it can open doors in future and I am positive that it will, however, the error in my reasoning was to think that this was going to make me happy. I fell foul of that old trick and I assure you, I consider myself guarded to such fallacies.

I propose that you have a good think about these questions if you are not content right now.
Do you really think there is a magic 'on button' that you can suddenly just decide to press after any conceivable future event?
Should we really be waiting for some future event to make us happy, or should we be focussed on cultivating a rich and enjoyable life right now?

It is evident that I am not the only person to have made this mistake but I fell for this error and literally could not see the wood for the trees. Two years of immersing myself in my endeavours was long enough to blind me to reality, and I didn't realise that I was deluding myself as I was unconscious of this transition. But what really piqued my curiosity was that rather than fly headlong in to enjoying myself after my degree, I suddenly had solicitors bills to pay and renovations to save up for. I responded by volunteering for every bit of overtime I could. I figured that I could fly headlong in to this next project and I would be living the life of Riley. However, I found that I was discontented rather quickly and this led me to searching for answers as I had lost my way after foolishly thinking everything was going to be OK.

This led me to come up with some questions that we might ask ourselves in those times when we are unsure of whether or not we are on the correct path. I discovered that I failed to address logic and good reason and had become mired in folly and illusion. It was only when I turned to these questions it kicked me out of my dream like delusion and represented a welcome kick up the annus for me.

What good is money if you do not spend it, or have no time to enjoy it?

What good is owning a house if you are never there to chill or relax in it?

What good is there in missing out on socialising if you find yourself on your lonesome, or being so exhausted that when you do muster the effort to haul yourself out, you make poor company?

There is for most of us little solace or comfort we can find in paid employment, studying, or sleep. Of course, there is some mechanism or operation of the mind that makes us prone to resolve the drudge existence we might face, and this made me look to the propensity we have to orientate our minds towards the future. It is in this orientation to the future where we marvel at the fanciful ideas of our imaginations, and it is here that we can delude ourselves effectively and ignore the predicament we find ourselves in.

To yield the clue that we are actually doing this in real life, we can look for the form it most often appears in. If you find yourself saying a derivative of this following prefix to someone, you can be satisfied that your thinking admits of this error.

“I can't wait until _______”

If we are both completely honest, we know full well that when so and so does eventually happen it often fails to live up to our expectations.
This is because we have decided to place our happiness as a contingent factor upon this event and as such, we have placed massive expectations upon it and we expect to feel differently than what we do. For this reason it ultimately becomes a let down and we have failed to cultivate the happiness that we should have done by socialising and taking time out to relax in the mean time.

Do you ever notice that when unexpected events happen, we take far more pleasure from these impromptu occasions? One of the keys to happiness is to have no expectations or outcome dependence, and I flagrantly broke this rule when I placed expectations of happiness upon finishing my degree. We are all guilty of this vice in some degree or in past occasions. I was also able to focus on getting the keys to my house and delude myself in to ignoring the present moment which had become a rat race, rather than a chilled out lifestyle that I could have had. Instead of trying to address this I was fixated on the future and it is here that I fell in to error and became sucked in to the spin cycle of modern life.

All this toil and trouble we think is so important can actually become labour in vain if you stay fixated on the prize and forget about where you are right now in this moment. Fixating on the prize, instead of the moment, can only lead us to a palpable existence of emptiness and banality in its most extreme case formulation. Even someone like my good self who does not usually get caught up on the materialistic trip, can fall foul of this error too if the attention wanders and our spirits become lowered by the daily grind. When stuck in this cycle we often place importance to the ideas of the fancy and this blinds us to the unsatisfactory quality of our lives, which we should be addressing and taking steps to change.

It really hit me hard in the last few days that if I carry on heading on this trajectory, I would have made a good start to becoming the kind of man I never wanted to be. Luckily, I have jolted awake from my slumber and I leave this hazy dream with a sense of melancholy but also a great deal of hope, in that I have seen the error of my ways. Fortunately, I have had a great xmas and caught up with some great people, and have many others I will have to visit in January, as I had blindly prioritised work above all else.

Bizarre that it took me so long to realise this state of affairs, but so powerful is our tendency to get sucked in to focussing on wealth, tangible objects, and a future which does not exist yet, that we can literally become blind to that which is most important. Remember that material objects and wealth can never, in of themselves, bring us lasting happiness. My priorities were misplaced here and we must be vigilant that we are not treading fresh tracks in to the barren desert, running a fools errand towards a mirage. I have learned a valuable lesson this year, one I had to relearn again through valuable experience for good measure.

It was a 'materially successful year' for me but is that really the true measure of success?

Questions, always more questions with me and I will be treating this subject more fully in a future exposition in to human nature. I look forward to writing some more philosophy and starting my website up again in the new year, but most of all I look forward to focussing on enjoying myself again, which was the focus of four years hedonism, prior to returning to the UK! For now, I am going to crack another Stella open and leave you with the moral to this story.

'Life is a journey, not a destination' ( Ralph Waldo Emerson )

Happy 2014! xx

Of course we were not around in those days when we are asked to lay something on the line to defend our freedoms. It was a long time since we had anything to lose, perhaps the only time that as Englishmen we stood to lose anything was back in 1941 when we really had something to lose – our freedom. Those were the days of the blitz and the impending Nazi invasion that never came. I had always wondered what it was like to fight in world war II it was always a bit of a curiosity for me. 

Whenever I felt a little bit of fear I would always think back to what my granddad's life was like. When I was shoving drugs down my neck and dancing at illegal raves at the age of 22 in forests, barns, abandoned warehouses and the like, my granddad was probably sat in an underground bunker receiving his orders for the next bombing sortie. 

My granddad flew in the RAF over the Polestei oilfields of Romania - the most heavily defended airspace in the whole of Europe during WWII. It was the logistical engine of the Nazi war machine churning out virtually all of the oil that they needed for the war effort. As a result the average number of bombing sorties was four before you were shot down. If my granddad was alive today I would have asked him just one thing. How did you feel when you climbed in to that Wellington bomber knowing that the law of averages told you that you would likely lose your life? On your 12^th bombing run how did you feel when you stepped in to the plane knowing the law of averages told you that you would die? How did it actually feel, what was the experience like granddad?

I cannot comprehend what he did because I do not know what it is like to put my life on the line. I have nothing but admiration for what he did, the people he defended, the lives he saved, and the free world he played his part in saving. The fact that he climbed in to the plane knowing that he could die, his bravery leaves me in awe. He probably got back from a bombing run feeling relieved he had made it and then went to the operations room to look at which incoming planes made it home, hoping in the back of his mind that his comrades would return, waiting anxiously, sometimes knowing that after a while he would never see his friends again because they had perished fighting the evil of the fascists, and had laid down their lives so we could enjoy the freedoms we enjoy today. I salute you granddad you really are a hero in my eyes.

To put it in perspective my granddad was just one man. One of many who fought against the twisted evil of the Nazi war machine, so in that respect he is not unique, chances are every one of you is somehow related to someone who put their life on the line so we can enjoy these freedoms we take for granted everyday.

That was then though and this is now, back then some sacrifice from everyone was required as we were at war at the time, it was right that everyone stood up and did their part. Now we are left with the legacy, the absolute paragon of human civilisation through the ages. We live in a free global market economy that, barring certain dictatorships, has the most personal freedom that has ever been known, the greatest amount of prosperity at any time in history, and the greatest democracy that this money can buy us.

Stop for a minute and soak it up. Do you actually think about how bad it could of been, or perhaps how great, and what a wonderful place the world is right now? How we have no problems whatsoever and everything is perfect and right with the world as it is? Do you ever stop and think about this? Stop for a minute and reflect on what you really have. What do you have to show for the fruits of your life? Lets face it, without friends and family we would have nothing of value.

The best things in life are free.

But why is it that we can say this to ourselves like a mantra and it does not really seem to do much apart from divert our attention away from the fact that we are all struggling somehow? Why is that we are never completely content and why is it that there is something we can never quite put our finger on, that bugs us? It need not be all the time or it may even be a preoccupation for you, but all through your life there was something just that slight discontent, that little nagging doubt that you cannot quite put your finger on. Lets just outline it for you with an example. Perhaps you are about to get a new promotion and you get it and life is great. Then after the initial buzz you are left feeling some how a little hollow and empty. Not depressed or miserable, but slightly discontented like you did not feel as though you expected to feel. Like you expected a little more from this situation and now you are slightly dissatisfied again.

Appearances are a funny thing.

Appearances are what we seem to place most of our trust in but I am not talking about our visual capabilities as such, I am talking about the way we construe things, how we see them as in “I can see what he is saying” and “I can see how that would pose a problem”. There is a subset of appearances that we see everyday and this is built on top of a framework of concepts and assumptions. It is funny really, we can turn to look at the appearances of our lives but that is about as far we ever look.

We never scratch beneath the surface and on the level of appearances we are happy to ponder over superficial things, take moral postures on issues, criticise peoples actions, lay down our insights, or have a bit of banter and make light of things. However, something is always lost here and whilst we can be accused of taking life too seriously the truth of the matter is that we seem to be more engaged in this level of appearances rather than the actual substance that underpins these appearances. 

Style over substance every time.

The way you view everything is inside a predetermined conceptual framework, every facet of your life is within a framework of right and wrong, should do and should not do, have to , must nots and various other constraints which can take many different forms. There are social expectations imposed by your friends, there are different social constraints imposed by your family, your grandparents etc... Your work place behaviour is different again, you probably feel that you hold back at work and some of you may even feel like you live a double life as such.

From this we can already see that we, at least to some varying degrees, conform to other peoples expectations of us and in a sense there is a societal code that we are obeying. We restrict our behaviour in that respect and this is one of the things that is just below the surface of our lives that does not get a look unless it is bought to your attention. This is trivial though and you could find it in any sociology text book, this really is not a new level of insight in life, however, it does represent a glimpse of the white rabbit scurrying towards the hole. Only, you never dared to follow it you always turned a blind eye.

There are certain patterns at play in your life.

We all know someone who is struggling to get by and forgive me for being so forward, but I know that you are probably not particularly happy either. Lets have a look at your life, all we have to do is scratch beneath the surface and we can see how shallow it really is. So here goes, this is what you do with your life and it is pretty obvious to anyone looking in from the outside. You believe that by buying certain products or waiting for certain events to happen, whatever they maybe, they will make you somehow complete and happy.

This is a simple as we can boil it down this is pretty much the core pattern of your life.

You actually have the beliefs deep down that you actually need these things and your happiness depends on them. Deep down underneath it all, you are bouncing from one thing to the next expecting to find happiness but instead you are finding fleeting feelings of happiness. Then you become disgruntled and try to find the next big thing that is going to make you happy. 

Then you simply rinse and repeat.

You cannot win and the fact that you tell yourself I can't wait until X, or I'll be better when Y happens is self evident. If you are stuck in the same space you become unhappy, if you keep moving you are trying hard to find the next thing that will make you happy and when you get it - be it a new promotion, a relationship, a car, whatever your focus is on, you find that once you get it the buzz wears off and you are left yearning for more. You are trying to fill a gaping void with material goods and validation and you do not even know why.

If you can drop your jumped up pretentious little ego for a minute this is actually your life isn't it?

Even when you look back as a child you used to bug your parents for the latest toy and then a few weeks later you would be bored of it and cast it aside, once you were sucked in to the next advertising campaign for the next hot product. This pattern was started when you were younger and the tragic thing is you did not choose to do this you were simply manipulated in to it. Fast forward a few years and you probably think to yourself that you are above this mentality and likely some of you are even conscious of this but just stop for a minute.

Just stop and look at your life for a minute. 

I want you to be honest here not with me, but with yourself. Just look at your life right now and look at the goals you want to achieve. Try to visualise them and ask yourself will I be perfectly contented once I achieve these goals? If this is the case then what is stopping you from being contented right now? 

How do you expect to be contented then in the future if you cannot be contented right now? Do you think you can just flick a switch?

You are still going to be the same flawed person with more more trivial goods. You have the mind set of a consumer because even though you are above yearning for mummy to buy you the latest thing, you still have this goal orientated attitude to life. Even now you are following the same predictable pattern but you have just lied to yourself and replaced the toys with something more tangible. Really, you are just clinging to hope blindly aren't you?

You actually think everything is going to work out for you eventually don't you?

You actually believe that once things calm down you will just be able to chill out in a few years, be comfortable, life will be calm and relaxed, you will have more time to do those things you wanted to do and more time to spend with your family. You keep clinging to this blind bit of hope like a lifeboat instead of facing up to the reality you live in now, right at this moment. You do everything you can to avoid facing up to this reality right this second. It is never going to work out any differently for you, even if it does you will be the same flawed person you always have been.

I know what you really want, deep down, lurking inside that disturbing little mind of yours.

I know that what you really want is to have the admiration of your peers. Yes, you even fantasise about people standing in awe of you, you even fantasise about your boss congratulating you on your latest project, your friends telling you that your ace, I bet you even compare how many people turn up to your birthday party so people don't think your a loser don't you? Yes, I am talking to you. You are floating around in the endless cesspool of failure you call your life, which is lived in the service of what you revere as the absolute paragon of human accomplishment; vanity.

'Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.' (Ecclesiastes)

In fact, you even give people the power to have this opinion of you and enslave you in to the social hierarchy. Yes, you care so much about what people think of you and your life is based around this game of vanity. Every time you get dressed you look in the mirror and wonder what people will think of you. You walk around the street looking at everyone else or averting their gaze wondering what they think of you. You spend all your life wondering how people perceive you, and trying to impress them, and this is pretty much the primary focus of your life. Oh what? You have other interests as well? Sure you do, but just try and notice how many times you think about other peoples opinion of you. If you actually tried to notice consciously, you would find that this represents one of the driving forces of your life. Why? Because you have been socially engineered this way.

What is it like at work for you?

How many people do you see with a smile on their face? How many people look glum on your way to work, those empty grey faces staring down the road, how many times do you curse the car in front of you just because they miss a two second gap in the traffic and it threatens that you will be a minute late for work. Yes, I am talking to you. Would you choose to do it if you had to? Would you choose your shitty £10 an hour job if you didn't have to? And what about those of you who earn good money and don't enjoy your job? What excuse do you tell yourself? Do you tell yourself that your family needs this money, do you set yourself little goals to work towards and think I'll be happy then, like it is something you can just decide to be at the flick of a switch? You actually do this don't you?

You see friend, the problem is that we have lost sight of what really matters. We actually believe money is the ends in which we have to work towards, when in actual fact it is merely the vehicle that we are supposed to work with. You have not thought long or hard about this have you? Either you are enslaved wishing you had more money or you are enslaved to the thought of having more money for its own sake. You get more and you just spend more, you are never any better off you are just treading water doing the same thing following the same pattern you have been programmed to follow.

The thing is, if you take a step back out of it for a moment you actually think this is a hard earned freedom the really ironic thing is that you actually believe this is a fundamental freedom that you have been afforded. I cannot begin to tell you how naïve and brainwashed you are. You think that if you pay out some money for the latest product then everything will be better, you even turn a blind eye when it is pretty obvious that the world is not going to be able to sustain this level of consumption for too much longer. No, you would rather spend your life working a job you hate to buy things you do not need, to fight each other over scrambling up a ladder that leads to a mountain of bull shit with a bunch of feckless morons who you secretly despise, and all for a boss who you wish you could tell him to shove his job right up his arse.

This, incredibly, is the very thing that you hold as a sacred freedom and as something of value.

This vacuous routine that you never once stopped to question whether it was a worthwhile pursuit, you just went along with it because you followed the rest of the sheep. John Keynes, the guy who you know as the Keynesian father of economics stated 'The market was made for human beings - not human beings to serve the market'. This is where you have failed to see what is happening but don't worry it is not your fault, we were all sold this lie. You see, we are blind to this unless we take a step back, the adherence to this system is indoctrinated in to you at school, many of you (although I believe a few of you will have done) have never even stopped to question this framework that structures our lives to a large degree.

So, I will ask you what happened when the Iraq war kicked off, where were you and what did you do about it? Did you go to work and ignore the protest, or did you jump on a moral grandstand and try to tell everyone about the lies the government told. I mean lets face it, the government clearly lied about weapons of mass destruction whichever way you look at it and then in order to justify their lie they focussed on the morality of freeing the Iraqi people from the evil tyrant Saddam Hussein. True, he was an evil man but the government does not have a track record for doing nice things. We need only look at the times when we have stood aside while genocides happen to see that humanitarian aims are superfluous next to the goals of the big oil companies. Lets look at who won in this war, the arms companies and the oil companies, all at the expense of you, yes you the British taxpayer.

What is striking is that you did nothing, you just shrugged your shoulders and carried on going to work. You did not even flinch when Tony Blair's grinning, conniving face appeared on your TV screen telling you one of the biggest lies to your face. You just went to work and wondered which new thing you were going to buy. Or failing that you cared about how people would think about you if you jumped on a moral grandstand and started talking about it.

Amazing that most of you just stood aside and allowed this to happen and you did not even bat an eye lid. You just shrugged your shoulders and pretended it was not happening. You lied to yourself and started to believe something else to divert your attention away from the fact that you had just been lied to and you swallowed it straight down without the slightest bit of resistance.

Or you just shrugged your shoulders even though you knew it was a lie.

What you did not realise is that this is not the only time you have been lied to. As a result of you turning a blind eye every time you have been shafted you have simply got in to a pattern of repeating this behaviour. It really does boil down to elementary psychological techniques, you are just being manipulated like a pawn. You will never achieve anything of value because it is all based on lies. This system forms the fundamental basis for your life and it is a vacuous, empty lie therefore, a life in servitude of this is worth nothing. I am not judging you, the point is you have spent your whole life looking at appearances when underneath it all underpinning it, is a toxic and foul bunch of lies that have never been challenged. These lies are the worm that is eating its way in to the very fabric of our society and the trouble is some of you even know this is happening.

You need to look at the substance of what your life is based on because appearances are deceptive. Look at that TOWIE program for all that is wrong with our society for instance. The tragic thing is people hold this up as a shining example of the absolute paragon of human accomplishment. A bunch of retarded fucks who would lose a battle of the wits with a cheese sandwich, yet people actually aspire to be like them and (god help us) even try to imitate them. I am not here to bag these people in particular but in many other areas of our society we have other lies such as religion, propaganda news broadcasts (admittedly not as bad as America), companies feeding us with sugar laden chemical crap, need I go on? Start to look at your life and you will see the lies you blissfully ignore or actively pedal to yourself everyday but it takes a shred of courage to face up to the truth.

'The opposite of the truth is not a lie the opposite of truth is cowardice' (Stepvhen)

How do we change it? We change it from within, we move to a new paradigm where capital and its influence is rendered inert. Money is not the problem and neither is capitalism. It is simply our greed and vanity that has been socially engineered in to us. We spend our lives working for a market that was originally supposed to distribute goods among us. The power of the market has simply become too great and we are subservient to the very mechanism that is supposed to work for us as human beings. That is where we went wrong. 

What we need is to be the change we wish to see in the world. Now this is a big ask but it is not impossible any more. How do we just change to a paradigm of no greed?

Instead of making our world a better place for all of its inhabitants, all your hard work currently goes to things like this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18944097

Maybe we will never get it perfect and there will be some disparities but when we see this kind of thing, it shows you that this is what we have really achieved. This is the sum total of all of our hard work, to support the lifestyles of leeches who have never contributed anything. That is exactly what you are achieving now, whilst blindly clinging on to the hope that everything will work out for you eventually. You have just been duped your whole life but the thing is it is all based on a single lie that underpins this society, which once challenged, means you can step out from the machine and live freely. We can create a world in which we are truly free and we can live without being in service of a lie.

You can walk away in denial but why change the habit of a lifetime? Once a failure, always a a failure and for the rest of your days you will live a life blind to possibility and carry on the self serving greed and hopeless vanity as you have always done. Is that the shallow endeavours of your life, did you ever want anything better for yourself and the human race?

If all you ever do is live in servitude of a lie how do you expect to achieve anything of value?

You are achieving nothing with your life but perpetuating the problems as they are currently. Maybe my harsh critique was unfair on you but the fact remains you live your life in service to a lie, that requires your active participation to maintain the façade. You are the problem truth be told, you let it happen willingly.

What can one person do? Well imagine if my granddad and all his comrades thought like you. We would be eating sourkraut and speaking German by now. I know he and his comrades would probably turn in their graves knowing what a legacy of putrid, dishonest weaklings who let themselves become enslaved by their vanity and greed thinking they were free.

'None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free' (Goethe)

If he knew that he was going to put his life on the line and endured all that hell just so you could live your vain life, I would not expect him to step within 10 miles of an airfield. Is there a shred of humanity left in you? More to the point, do you even fucking care?

The new paradigm is a life without self image:

www.truthstrike.com

Part I here

Having highlighted our differences between the Eastern traditions, we are now in a position to consider the next part of the question. Been busy writing, so my blog has been neglected of late...

You asked me what I think you are doing.

I think you are going down the same route many Eastern philosophies are. You are trying to reach Nirvana by rejecting the 'I'. If this is indeed a faulty assumption on my part, then I am more than willing to be corrected.

It seems in the last part, I have unfairly put all spiritual seekers in with the annihilation mob. This is not true simply because not all seekers are trying to annihilate all their thoughts and emotions, it seems some misguided people are trying to do this but not all. Thanks for pointing that out to me, you know who you are :)

So if we were to be rejecting an I, we would have to identify exactly what it is we are rejecting. This is not really possible though since 'I' refers to nothing. In order to reject something it has to exist. In order to reject an 'I' which our accuser is suggesting here, assumes that we have identified something that needs to be rejected. This gets tricky here quite simply. I sit here writing and using 'I' as a valid pronoun but as the man says:

“One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'” (Wittgenstein)

What we mean is that 'I' has no meaning other than as a pronoun. Like the hand gesture towards me in sign language, that is all it really represents. 'I' does not refer to the self who is behind the thinking or actions, we just take it to mean that it does because we tack on extra semantic meaning on to it.

Now, one cannot deny that the thoughts about an 'I' exist. Its true really when we start to think of no self people often believe that we are rejecting an apparent part of our reality. This is simply not the case and is a misconception. 'I' is a thought, it is not real. Thoughts are real, 'you' are not. 'You' is merely a disposition to think in terms as though there is some entity behind those thoughts and actions that arise from the body.

That is as simple as we can boil it down.

The whole point of looking is to see this is a fundamental truth in real life. It requires rejecting nothing apart from faulty beliefs you can discard after empirically falsifying them for yourself.

Next we start to move on to the idea that we are rejecting something that doesn't exist, which of course makes no sense. I guess certain people must generally assume we are trying to reject the thoughts that we encounter? 
This would amount, from our point of view, to denying a fundamental aspect of reality that is blatantly in our awareness. This in itself would be the very epitome of delusion. So know the last thing anyone should be trying to do is rejecting thoughts. This would merely be resistance to what IS.

So from this position, we can start to look at the supposed 'achievement' we are supposed to be chasing. What is Nirvana? Can we really conceptualise it? It seems that there are various definitions of what it is, from the literal translation of Heaven in Hinduism, liberation from Samsara and karmic bondage, It is also Buddha's description as:

'The state of mind free from craving and an enduring transcendental happiness, [that is] qualitatively different from transitory happiness derived from impermanent things' (Buddha)

With this in mind, we have a variety of ambiguous terminology we should pick apart.

• On the definition of heaven, the Hindus refer to the realm of Shiva. Of course if you believe in gods then good luck to you but we can say we are not searching for a god, this is simply a representation of belief.

• Assuming there is such a thing called Samsara and Karma, we would simply be trying to escape from metaphysical dogma. This would make us no different from some deluded religious believer.

• Perhaps Buddha's definition would be worth investigating here, although I am led to believe that our friend here was referring to the former definitions. Needless to say, if I am going to pick a suitable position then it is incumbent on me to demonstrate why I would say that this would be a better description.

A state of mind free from craving would be desirable of course. Whilst I could say that I am free from craving this is only true in a strict sense, where craving can arise but I am free from it. This sounds like a weird contradiction in terms, so let me elaborate further here and define what I mean.

Desire is a natural part of human nature that is essentially part of our goal seeking mechanism which is not inherently bad in of itself. 
We may say I want to go to a party and then we describe this as having a desire to go. This seems to be accurate but it is not for the simple reason that intention and desire can be read differently. I have an intention to go to a party.

I define desire as having the intention to go to the party but having a further contingent goal in mind. For example people may go to the party and hope people think they are well dressed or they will meet a girl/ guy there. 
The mental object in these cases is representative of desire. Now we could add further conditions to this and then literally fantasise about the outcome of the party even to the point that we convince ourselves that we must achieve a particular outcome, which in this case is our object of desire.

This cascade of mental phenomenon, one encounters related to this perceived outcome, is what we can correctly call craving. I am sure you can think of times when you have craved food and cigarettes for example. Craving is simply a temporal perpetuation of this desire.

My view now, is that craving may slip in to my thinking now and then but it can simply be seen as transparent. For instance, I am looking for a job at the moment, so my intention is to get a job.

If I had a job my life would be 'better' for x reasons. This is a healthy level of desire, there is nothing wrong with this in of itself. 

I used the term better in the sense that having more money enables me to do more things. This is preferable to being able to do less things, despite the futility of this state and exchanging my time for money, we find ourselves inextricably bound to obtain money to go and do certain things. Within this you could identify with 'the position I get' but for me that level of identification has fallen away and there is just a desire to get a job.

Now, perhaps the job is not forthcoming at the moment and my salience could focus on the 'negative' aspects of not working. Perhaps I could focus on how dire the employment situation is in the UK and of course the thought 'will I ever get a job?'

This mechanism can be seen through but it may not be believed, be believed for a few seconds, a minute, or if Maya really creeps in a few days before it is seen as fantasising. So in that respect, this would be where liberation would not be abiding for me. 
However, once it is looked at, the structure collapses and it is seen as inert. It is just a force of habit that these things are identified with briefly and I sense it is slowly unraveling of its own accord.

This then leads us to question the next stage of inquiry. What would be beneficial now? 
Would it be to never experience these thoughts again, or to automatically see them as inert?

This I think highlights the dilemma of the annihilation mob. There seems to be a school of thought that has mistakenly taken the words of the Eastern philosophies literally. In my experience I have come across various people whose goal it was to destroy the capacity to think.

First, a Cambodian meditation school in Pnomh Penh, where they told me their ultimate goal was to slow down the chain of thoughts until they stopped completely and they had no thoughts. 
Secondly, I learnt meditation and martial arts in Thailand. My Kruu was preparing to go off in to the mountains in China to burn his ego in a few months time. He literally planned to be a solipsist cave dweller. Then of course this memorable quote by the guy who asked me these questions.

“You are voluntarily reverting back to a vegetative state. No, that is not even true. Plants learn and adapt as well. You are reverting to a pre-vegetative state”.

What the guy said there was true. If you do not think then you are no better off than a plant - that is what the message is. This I think is the mistake that an alarming amount of people seem to make in thinking this is what enlightenment actually is.

I will tell you categorically here that this is nonsense. We are not trying to annihilate all thought, this is not actually what enlightenment is. 
By trying to annihilate and run away from your thoughts you are resisting what happens in real life. What we are trying to see is that we are of a disposition to think in illusory terms and really, these thoughts are merely fantasy.

This is where I think Ciaran fell short in his search. Ciaran heralded the 'heresy of annihilation' as something that was to be avoided. This guy here even sees it as:

'The problem with both Enlightenment and Liberation, is that it takes you out of the world. And you can read that in any way you want.'

I even believed it to start with but it seems to me that it is an inevitability of this journey whether I want to cling to it or not. It is plain that the construct is weakening bit by bit as time goes on and the egos ability to con this biological machine in to believing that it is controlling life is lessening. It just seems to be more in line with servicing humanity these days.  
Since there is nothing to annihilate I don't forsee a problem with this, the only way it cannot happen is by clinging and identifying it would seem. Since this is what we are weeding out, there is no rush to be enlightened this will come naturally as the illusion fades away.

So what else is there to say on the matter? Well I was going to lay in to karma and Samsara but I feel I have covered this eastern angle for now and I am at a loss to explain how since there is no division that anything can have a foundation to carry the karmic conditions that loop round in Samsara. 
That is a real mystery perhaps I will look in to it one day but there again, we all have better things to do than talk about metaphysical conjectures ;)

In this series I think I have unravelled some of my perceptions of the Eastern traditions and how they relate to us, and also from the exchanges I have had with various people my thinking has been corrected and my misconceptions have been highlighted to me. 

Part III saw the RT dogma surface but I am thankful that was highlighted to me and it seems that it was misdirected but there was an element of truth to it in the sense that we are inevitably breaking our conditioning. 
This has opened my eyes alot more for sure and I am not anti spiritual as I was initially, however as a caveat, if you want to discuss spiritual notions they have to be grounded in reality!