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WHAT IS BUDDHISM?</td>
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by Charles and Tara Carreon
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Buddha Bugs Out
Buddha was born in Northern India
in 563 B.C.  His father was a small-time monarch of the Sakya clan, with
big aspirations for his son to become a "universal monarch."  An itinerant
fortuneteller told the Buddha's father that while the government career
path was a possibility for his son, he might also become a saint. 
Horrified by the latter notion, his father came up with the idea to
marinate his son in every pleasure, and insulate him from every
irritation, so that he would have no desire to escape worldly life;
Buddha's father thus entombed the young prince in a pleasure warren. 
Legend has it that Buddha sneaked out in the palace limo and took a cruise
around town, where he saw a decrepit senior citizen wheezing his last, a
leper counting his missing fingers, a corpse with weeping mourners, and a
monk who was the picture of serenity.  Buddha apparently felt betrayed,
like he'd been eating a yummy apple and discovered it was infested with
disgusting worms.  He considered his options -- and decided to go the
monastic route.  He cut off his long, beautiful hair that his mother loved
so much, and left the palace like a thief in the night, hooking up with
some rough trade at the outskirts of town that called themselves "yogis."
Buddha Rejects Spiritual
Authority
In his quest for "enlightenment,"
Buddha studied the teachings of the the leading gurus, pandits and yogis
then swarming the Indian jungles.  While seeking enlightenment was a
popular pastime, apparently Buddha found no successful practitioners,
because he concluded none of the available teachers had found the goal. 
In this sense, Buddha might be considered the pickiest of spiritual
shoppers, and indeed, an incredibly arrogant man.  After all, this was
India at the height of its spiritual development.  The term "Rishi," had
existed long before Buddha -- and monks, renunciates, fakirs, shiva and
vaishnava babas were thick as flies in the holy centers, as they are
today.  Buddha jumped the fence, an impatient upstart who was probably
secretly sneered at for being "the Prince," because of his royal
upbringing.  
Apparently running full-tilt for
the psychological opposite of being a spoiled royal scion, Buddha became a
severe ascetic .  Stone carvings of the Buddha in his sixth year of
renunciation show him in the advanced stages of anorexia nervosa, a
diagnosis common in the children of overbearing, wealthy parents. 
Fortunately, he found the path to recovery.  Buddha is said to have
"renounced the ascetic path" after he realized the futility of starving
the body to conquer the spirit.
Buddha Gets It
Of course, renouncing the ascetic
path didn't mean he walked into town, had a drink at the tavern and
checked out the chicks, like most Buddhists who are renouncing
asceticism.  Instead, he took "the Middle Way," and after having a good
meal of rice pudding, sat down on a comfy cushion of grass under a ficus
tree, and resolved to stay there until he achieved his goal.  Frankly,
this still sounds pretty austere to me, especially the part about staying
there until he "achieved his goal."  He hadn't done it in six years before
then, and what was the magic of resolving to stay in one place?  One might
question how much he had really renounced asceticism, with this kind of
resolve as his new point of departure, but  fortunately, he attained
enlightenment less than twenty four hours later, as he glimpsed the light
of the morning star after a single night battling the demons of his own
mind.    If he hadn't succeeded that night, of course, he wouldn't be
"Buddha" now, would he?
The demons of Buddha's own mind
are personified as Mara in tradition.  Mara assailed the budding Buddha
first with hostile arrows of aggression that turned to flowers as they
descended on the meditating sage.  Frustrated, Mara loosed his beautiful
daughters to work their charms upon Buddha, but again to no avail.  Thus
Buddha transcended hatred and desire.  The Tibetans will also explain in
detail how he transcended ignorance, pride and jealousy as well, resorting
to tripartite and five-branched analyses, according to their various
traditions.  Suffice it to say, it was a big night for Buddha, and for all
humanity when he sent Mara packing forever.  Hallelujah!
Two thoughts occurred to Buddha
after he attained enlightenment.  "Wow, this is Great!" and "Nobody else
will get it, or even believe it, so I won't tell anyone."  We can
understand both of these thoughts without being enlightened.  Of course,
getting enlightened has gotta be Great, otherwise it wouldn't be called
getting enlightened.  Next, India's swarming with sages who claim to offer
paths to enlightenment -- there's gods everywhere decorating banyan trees
and temples, but here, a mere six years after running away from his
throne, this Sakya Prince is enlightened.  You can imagine a lot of hash
smoke being coughed out over that one!   So naturally, he must have second
thoughts about making his proclamation.  According to legend, he was just
going to keep mum about the whole thing and let his secret go to the grave
with him, like some old pirate with a stash of treasure.   According also
to legend, the gods gave him a nudge, too, pointing out that they
were interested in what he had to say, and actually there were a few
bright people who might get it.
Buddha Converts The Doubters
The first people Buddha met were
his old pals, some fellow-anorexics who were still nursing their brittle
bones and grasping at straws in the twilight of their meditative
ignorance.  They dumped all over Buddha, who by now was eating regular
meals and looking chubby by ascetic standards.  But he ripped right into
them with his incisive analysis of their folly, and pretty soon he had
picked up several new converts.  They cut their hair and started eating
and following the Buddha.  They all remained celibate, though, and agreed
to remain unemployed, making their living begging.  Buddha called this The
Middle Path.  Makes sense, right?  Not a breeder, not contributing to the
economy, but not an ascetic.  Just a guy who's free to be.
Buddha's Disciples Fail to
Take Notes
The Buddha's disciples apparently
never begged any pencil and paper from anyone, even though writing was
actively practiced at the time in scholarly circles, and many of the early
monks were scholarly.  You might almost think someone had told them not to
write anything down, because it took 300 years for them to even take a
crack at it.  Sort of a confidentiality agreement.  Well, you can imagine
after 300 years, memories varied considerably, depending on what part of
the jungle you had been camped out in for the intervening centuries. 
Naturally, the Buddhists fell to disputing and haven't stopped since.
As A Result, They Fight
The first big Buddhist dispute,
and the main one today, is between the tight-assed people and the
big-hearted people.  The tight-assed people are called "Hinayanists" by
the big-hearted people, who call themselves "Mahayanists."  The
Mahayanists are called "heretics" by the serious Hinayanists.  Now that
they are all here together in the USA, they try to paper over these
disputes, but the enmity is mutual and long-running among true partisans
of either disposition.
What They Fight About
What is all the row about,
though?  Just this -- the Official Tight Assed Buddhists (Hinayanists)
think that the Buddha really meant it when he said that in order to attain
Nirvana you need to extinguish desire, and they go around trying to stamp
it out wherever they find it.  They shave their heads, bind their breasts,
sit long hours trying to not want to stand up and move around, because
after all, that's wanting something, which is the whole problem.  They
sort of try to strangle themselves to escape the pain of living, which is
after all caused by breathing.  Occasionally they attain mental states of
great satisfaction similar to sheathing your entire body in a condom so
you won't get contaminated by desire or other disturbing experiences.  A
Hinayanist is sure that everything will be all right if he can just stop
being anyone at all.  This is an excellent religion for trust funders on a
budget, because you won't spend much on entertainment, or fall in love and
blow all your cash raising a family.  Actually, this sounds a lot like the
religion the Buddha really would have founded, given his proclivities. 
Which may explain why the Hinayanists are so damned mad at the Mahayanists
for hijacking their tidy little religion.
The big-hearted Mahayanists are
all over the map with their doctrines, by comparison.  But they all agree
that the sort of cat-washing-itself style of meditation practiced by
Hinayanists leads only to the minor spiritual achievement of "Arhat-ship,"
which is a classic of damning with faint praise.  The real heavy
freight-carriers in the big-hearted tradition are called Bodhisattvas,
"heroes of enlightenment," and far from stopping to consider their own
immediate release from suffering, they throw themselves immediately into
the business of placing other sentient beings in the bosom of
enlightenment, like firemen clearing out a burning building.  
In practice, this leaves the
Mahayana much greater scope for imaginative expression, and opens the door
to a less prissy ethical approach.  A Jew would always have to wonder if
he was safe hiding from nazis in a Hinayanist's basement, who might feel
compelled to tell the truth to keep his karma clean, but would feel
comfortable hiding in a Mahayana basement, knowing that a Mahayanist would
relish the opportunity to tell a meritorious lie.  On the other hand, a
Mahayanist might also find an excellent reason to screw your wife, for
everyone's benefit.  It's like that.
The most-often cited sources of
Hinayana Buddhism are The Dhammapada and the Sutta-Pitaka.  The practices
of these Buddhists are often marketed in the U.S. as "vipassana" or
"mindfulness" meditation, supplemented with the practice of "mehta," the
cultivation of positive feeling toward all beings.  These practices
emphasize, at least at the beginning stages, reducing the traffic of
conceptual thought by resting the mind on simple sensory stimuli, such as
the feeling of your ass sitting on your cushion, or your diaphragm rising
and falling with each breath.  They really work.  These practices have
innumberable adherents, and are often presented with less packaging than
Mahayana schools.  There are probably lots of big-hearted Buddhists
practicing under cover of the Hinayana method, ignoring their purported
dispute with the Mahayana.  On the other hand, the heartlands of Hinayana
Buddhism are repressive regimes like Burma, and Sri Lanka.  Thai Buddhists
are also allegedly Hinayanist, but their food seems very big-hearted.
The resounding sources of
Mahayana Buddhism are the early Chinese Ch'an Buddhist texts like The
Sutra of Hui Neng and the Diamond Sutra, and the Third Zen Patriarch's
Sutra on Faith in the Mind.  These sutras are easy to understand once you
stop trying too hard.  To explain them here would not be half as helpful
as for you to read them yourself, but in brief the idea is just this: the
nature of your mind is clear and without substance, like space, and all of
the experiences you have arise and subside within that clear nature,
having no origin and leaving no trace.  You are ultimately free, and have
no need of anything.  Everyone is in this same condition.
Since the Mahayanists burst out
of the Hinayana coccoon, they have turned into all manner of butterflies,
from the garish million-winged Tibetan doctrines to the simple moth-like
Zennists who haunt Sung Dynasty ink paintings and Japanese Sumi sketches. 
Mahayanists have made a practice of virtually anything, encouraging people
to memorize 100,000 stanza poems like the Lotus Sutra, then boiling the
whole sutra down into a single phrase, that can be endlessly repeated as a
mantra.  Tantrics from Tibet and China created covens of sexual magic, and
were repressed, sometimes with "extreme prejudice," to use CIA-speak, by
their fellow-Mahayanists of a more blue-nosed orientation.  Japanese Zen
teachers blended the philosphy of "sudden enlightenment" with elements of
Shinto and the ancient code of bushido, the warrior way, to create the
most fearsome soldiers ever known.   Remember the "Kami-kaze?"  That means
"the wind of the gods," the old Shinto gods, made more fearsome by the
serene acceptance of eventual death, made deadly by the certainty that
only honor, now, is worthy of protection.  If you haven't run your finger
along the sharp edge of military Zen, you haven't seen the full sweep of
Buddhism in action.
Stuck At Step One
So what did Buddha teach?  What
is the true Buddhist path?  It depends on who you ask.   The usual
approach at this stage in the narrative is to start ticking off some
numerical lists -- The Four Noble Truths, The Eightfold Path, the
Twelve-fold Wheel of Interdependent Origination, the Five Skhandas,
etcetera.  If you get involved with the Tibetans, their lists start to
proliferate like the United States Code, with subheadings, sub-subheadings
and footnotes.  We're not taking that route here, because we're gonna get
stuck right at the First Noble Truth.
How do you deal with the ten
thousand shouting doctrinal assertions?  Our crazy idea is to emulate the
Buddha -- to reject everything that everyone is selling and try to take a
first look at the problem with our own eyes.  Is there a problem?
Buddha said there was a problem,
a huge, insurmountable problem.  That is his First Noble Truth: Life Is
Suffering.  The next three Noble Truths assert that the Cause of Suffering
is Desire, that Desire Can Be Stopped, and that The Eightfold Path Leads
to Stopping Desire.  This follows the ancient Vedic tradition of medical
diagnosis -- "the patient has tonsilitis; the cause of tonsilitis is
infection; the infection can be cured; and, the cure is the administration
of streptomyicin."  
Obviously, step one is to
diagnose the disease correctly.  So what do you think about Buddha's
diagnosis?  Before you accept his solution, I suggest you agree on the
problem, eh?  If you don't think life is suffering, you're on the wrong
bus.  Because this one's going to Nirvana, the end of the road, the last
stop right after No Desire.  Hardly anyone goes there.  Still interested,
or you wanna think it over?
Think of how much time people
would save if they just thought about that.  "Do I think all  life
is suffering?"  Most people, being honest with themselves, would have to
say, "Hell no, I love drinkin' and screwin' and eatin' good food and
reading good books and watchin' Winona Ryder on TV, and I love Angelina
Jolie and that Andy Kaufman was so funny -- whatever happened to him?" 
But once you become a Buddhist, you'll learn to lug around this heavy ball
and chain of simulated misery with you everywhere.  When people ask how
you are, you'll smile like a weary Bodhisattva (or Arhat), point at your
portable ball and chain, and shake your head in a mute sharing of
knowledge.  The wan smile that passes between you and your Buddhist
brother will say it all, "Samsara," the painful cycle of life and death. 
But as soon as the other Buddhist walks away, you'll just deflate that
ball and chain, pack it in the trunk and drive home not thinking about it
again.  You go back to being normal.  Nobody can be that good all the
time. 
Until of course something awful
actually does happen.  Then it's flop back down on your meditation
cushion, seeking shelter from the winds of your insane mind.  You can see
her flirting with that guy, god you hate him.  Concentrate on your
breath.  In - out, in - out, in - out.  Oh he is such a phony prick.  Five
minutes later, concentrate on your breath again.  He has money.  That's
it, he's got money, and chicks always go for that.  Being spiritual gets
you nothing.  Except of course inner peace.  Concentrate on your breath. 
In - out, in - out.
And people complain about this
all the time.  They say, "Oh, I was so much happier before I started
meditating.  Now I just sit down and as soon as I try to control my mind,
it goes crazy!"  They view this as a problem, of course.  They came to
find inner peace and they got inner turmoil.  Most teachers say, "stick
with it, it will get better," and most of all they say, "actually, you are
now simply becoming aware of how turbulent your mind always was." 
Frankly, I think this is bunk.  Your mind will in fact become more
turbulent when you start watching it, just like a three year old kid.  The
kid's mom will tell you, "Don't encourage him, or he'll never quiet
down."  When people meditate in the Buddhist fashion, it disturbs their
natural way of being.
You know why?  Because they were
getting along just fine not watching their thoughts, or second-guessing
their motivations.  Things were actually going along okay.  But they
weren't satisfied with that, noooooo.  They wanted to make their life
incrementally better -- more peace, more happiness, less stress and fear. 
They wanted to improve the situation, but they didn't want to discover
that the situation was fundamentally screwed up!  I mean, my life has
problems, but it's not so bad that I want to get rid of life itself.  I
just want fewer bad things to happen, and more pleasant things.  A child
wants more ice cream and TV.  An adult male wants more money and sex.  A
budding young woman wants romance.  People in jail want to be out -- they
think they would be happy then -- but they get out and they're still
unhappy, and they end up back in jail.
Most beginning Buddhists want to
improve their view.  They're a little subtler than the average guy, and
they want to be freed from the turbulent flow of conflicting thoughts. 
They want to see their fellow beings with love and understanding, not
poisoned by the flow of jealousy and hate.  They credit themselves with
being good people, with wanting good things, and they want to build on
this foundation of goodness.  They do not want to find out that their
existing structure of thought is out of control, chaotic, and
self-defeating.
Because of this, frankly, we are
not on the same page with the Buddha.  He was burned out on palace life,
and burned out on spiritual life, too.  And he knew we wouldn't
understand his point of view.  Remember, right at the beginning, after
he realized Enlightenment, he almost didn't bother to teach.  Why? 
Because we can't get on the same page with him.
Meditation will, perhaps, if
practiced correctly, put us on the same page with Buddha.  Because, while
we are unhappy in part, but not wanting to discard the whole, he was fed
up altogether, and relieved himself of his ignorance once and for all.
Buddha's First Noble Truth is
usually translated as "Life is Suffering."  But I really wonder.  Because
if that were the case, then suicide would be the solution, and universal
annihilation of all life would be total success.
Let's go back and join our horny
meditator, trying to watch his breath while chasing girls in his mind. 
What's this guy learning?  He's learning that he can't escape his mind. 
This fact may make him very unhappy, but he will refuse to blame, or
credit, Buddhism for his condition.  Nope, he will blame his "inability to
meditate."  He will reject the conclusion that the data compels -- that
his mind is suffering.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a
Tibetan teacher, explained what this poor guy is going through:

We expect the teachings to solve all
our problems; we expect to be provided with magical means to deal with our
depressions, our aggressions, our sexual hangups.  But to our surprise we
begin to realize that this is not going to happen.  It is very
disappointing to realize that we must work on ourselves and our suffering
rather than depend upon a savior or the magical power of yogic
techniques.  It is rather disappointing to realize that we have to give up
our expectations rather than build on the basis of our preconceptions.
But this is not bad news. 
Through disappointment we make progress:

Such a series of disappointments
inspires us to give up ambition.  We fall down and down and down, until we
touch the ground, until we relate with the basic sanity of earth.  We
become the lowest of the low, the smallest of the small, a grain of sand,
perfectly simple, no expectations.  When we are grounded, there is no room
for dreaming or frivolous impulse, so our practice at last becomes
workable.
And what is this mysterious
"practice" he refers to?  What is this grounding you get?  You accept the
First Noble Truth -- which I would prefer to express as "My Mind is
Suffering."  If you speed right past this point, and just go on trying to
implement "the magical power of yogic techniques," you will blame "Life"
or "The World" or "Samsara" for your suffering.  You will think that
Buddhism is your ally in the war against the ordinary existence we all
live.  You will think that nature, the force of procreation, sexual
impulse, simple hunger and intellectual curiosity, are the problem.  You
will view innocent children as the hapless playthings of a cruel,
manipulative force called "Life."  You will try to stamp out your own
impulses, thinking that this is how you put an end to suffering.  And this
is totally wrong.  It is not Buddhism.
Getting to Second Base
Ignorance -- did someone say
ignorance?  When you accept that First Noble Truth, you discover your
first level of ignorance -- you did not realize that your mind is the
source of suffering.  Initially, this is a very painful discovery, and you
want to run away from the experience.  Many people attempt to flee
Buddhism at this point, and doctrinaire Buddhists do little to help,
telling them that they just need to "tame their mind" and the magic will
take over.  It can be a lot like a bad psychedelic trip, a "no exit"
situation that keeps ratcheting up to a higher level of tension, or like
the mind state of a person who suddenly realizes they've been locked into
their room, and keeps trying the door, becoming more desperate every time
they find it still locked.
You're not going anywhere.  The
door really will not open.  It is not even a door.  You just painted it on
the wall so you could think you could leave.  You used to dream that you
sometimes left, and went outside.  But that was a dream.  You may weep,
realizing that you were dreaming all that time.  You may miss the dreams,
the illusion.  You may wish you could go back, curse the Buddha, and take
another path.  Back into town, wherever, anywhere but here.
Depending on luck and
disposition, you can make things a lot worse at this point.  You may
grimly force yourself to "face reality," by which you mean exerting
continual effort to oppose the impulse to escape, and taking all of the
"blame" for the unpleasantness.  You may overdo it, thinking that the
doctrinaire approach means denying that life has any pleasure in it, or
labeling the pleasure as sinful.  By doing this, you quite miss the point
of the First Noble Truth, which merely defines the problem.  To solve it,
you must move on.
Moving on, you start to relax. 
You sit down, and use some simple techniques to just stay there.  You sort
of mature into the situation, becoming a "lifer."  This is it.  You
believe it.  And strangely enough, the dreams resume.  A breath of
ventilation sneaks in.  The room becomes less solid.  Light shines in. 
People come visit.  Sounds disturb you.  Sights intrude.  You laugh. 
Suddenly you realize "I'm no worse off than I was before.  I'm in exactly
the same situation.  I'm still having dreams, but I'm noticing that
they're dreams."  You realize, "I was all worked up over nothing!  Of
course it's all my mind.  Of course I suffer because of my mind.  Of
course I enjoy because of my mind.  And also, I am here."  You laugh.  "I
am here."
And you will start to realize the
meaning of the Second Noble Truth:  "The Cause of Suffering is Desire." 
Because you will notice that whims, inclinations, notions, little wisps of
desire, get you going.  You're just sitting there in your cell, looking
through the transparent walls, watching the ghosts come and go, and then
you'll think, "I should go and do this or that."  And you'll run down that
mental path, and then you'll notice that everything's become quite solid
again.  Your dreams are so solid when you believe in them.  Then you'll
wake up in your cell, suffering.  You cannot fail to observe the
connection.
The Wheel Stops
So now we've found the culprit --
desire.  So we pull out our telescopic rifle and sight in on the little
devil.  Pow!  One more gone.  That much closer to Nirvana, right?  You can
try it, and these varmint-hunter Buddhists can be found everywhere. 
They're about as good humored as ranchers who want to kill off all the
coyotes and mountain lions.  They figure their virtues are like tender
calves that need to be protected from predatory emotions.  So they put out
poisoned meat, leg traps, whatever it takes.  Their minds become
mine-fields, and their meditation is like a fortified location.  Inside,
they're safe from desire, but it lurks everywhere around them, an enemy
that will never be subdued.
Do not take this approach to The
Third and Fourth Noble Truths, which taken together say that "Desire Can
Be Stopped By Applying the Noble Eightfold Path."  Because the force of
desire is so vast and powerful that the ocean waves and the winds that
howl through the mountains are weak by comparison.  The force of desire,
you will observe as you sit in your cell, is coextensive with your breath
and your mind.  Some traditions of Hindu mysticism say you need to
actually stop breathing to stop thinking.  It's probably true, but the
Buddha tried that, and he always found he had to start breathing again. 
We do not stop desire by jamming a stick in Mother Nature's spokes, for
she will blithely break all sticks.
At this point, more subtlety is
needed.  Just as we penetrated the notion of "life is suffering" to
unearth "my mind is suffering," we need to take a look at the meaning of
"stopping desire."  Let's look.  If we try to stop desire, first there is
the concept of desire as separate from ourselves, then there is the notion
of needing to end it, then there is the effort to end it.  Hence the
analogy of the varmint hunter, who sights, aims and shoots.  If we turn
from this outward-oriented analysis, and look at where desire  truly
resides -- inside ourselves -- we realize that stopping desire is going to
be the biggest journey of self-understanding that can be made.  For to
find the foundation of desire within ourselves is to journey inward,
seeking to understand what has animated our first movements, from when a
baby first reaches for a mother's breast, or young people seek out their
first sexual encounter.
We then regard desire far more
tenderly.  No metaphor of surgery or war is suitable here.  Analogies to
removing tumors and overcoming enemies abound in Buddhism.  I reject them
as misleading and violent.  To stop desire is so much more subtle than
that.  For that part of us that "desires" is no small part, not even an
expendable Siamese twin that we could kill and yet keep our own heart
beating.  Desire is inseparable from us like salt is inseparable from
blood.
So what is this Eightfold Path
that will end desire?  Literally, it is a list of eight things that
everyone does.  We all have views, but if you have Right View, you will
see your way to the end of desire.  We all have intentions, but if you
adopt Right Intention, it leads to the end of desire.  Similarly, we can
have Right Speech, Right Discipline, Right Work, Right Effort, Right
Mindfulness, and Right Meditation.  Obviously, the important term here is
"Right," and that is subject to interpretation, so let's get the best one
we can, from Trungpa Rinpoche:

In order to see what this is, we
first must understand what Buddha meant by "right."  He did not mean to
say right as opposed to wrong at all.  He said "right" meaning "what is,"
being right without a concept of what is right.  "Right" translates the
Sanskrit samyak, which means "complete."  Completeness needs no
relative help, no support through comparison; it is self-sufficient.  In a
bar one says, "I would like a straight drink."  Not diluted with club soda
or water; you just have it straight.  That is samyak.  No dilutions, no
concoctions -- just a straight drink.  Buddha realized that life could be
potent and delicious, positive and creative, and he realized that you do
not need any concoctions with which to mix it.  Life is a straight drink
-- hot pleasure, hot pain, straightforward, one hundred percent.
Does this seem like no help at
all?  Like you should just go have a drink?  It doesn't sound like this
Buddhist would mind if you did, so by all means, don't let me stop you. 
Just come back and sip it while you read the rest of this, because it's
actually going to tie up very conveniently.
Okay, got your drink?  Let's just
go back to our cell and see how this works.  You stop seeing "out there,"
and start seeing the whole experience as "my world - my mind."  That's
part one.  You start to get some ventilation, because you perforate the
claustrophobia of being stuck "in here" and trying to get "out there." 
It's all in here.  Then you find you have a modicum of control over what's
in here.  You can't stop desire, but you see it come and go.  Sometimes
you manage to sidestep an incoming impulse, and you laugh as it goes
blindly by.  Sometimes you see a huge roller of desire coming in, and you
paddle out to meet it, and surf it all the way in, arriving wet and
exhilarated.  Your relationship with desire develops through acceptance,
and surprisingly, you find yourself observing impulses with an unforced
detachment that becomes more natural the more it develops.  As you become
accustomed to watching and experiencing your impulses, you will realize
their wholesome, developmental aspect, because they no longer dictate your
reality.  Your cell, far from claustrophobic, will become interesting,
intricate, fascinating, a laboratory for study, experiment, and discovery.
You don't have to do anything
else except develop this comfort level with your reality.  Right View? 
Just see it straight, and drop the preconceptions as you note them
arising.  Right Work?  Just get out of bed and go do it.  Right
Meditation?  Your cell is waiting.  Right Effort?  Just keep it up,
without any frills or expectations.  It's like sawing a piece of wood --
you don't have to visualize it cut in half -- just stroke it with the saw
until it falls off.
The experience of living can
begin again.  Most of us in adulthood feel as if our learning and
development ended about the time we left high school or college.  Since
then, it's been one disillusioning discovery after another.  Traveling
the Noble Eightfold Path is something like becoming a child again, because
once we learn that our style of perceiving the world determines our
experience, we realize we are best off using our mind in its fresh,
unobstructed condition, allowing knowledge to stream in through our
senses, and trusting the way in which the world takes shape in our mind. 
We see the painful sense of restraint felt by the mind trying to escape
itself gradually diminishing.  The Buddha says that by following the Right
Path, our pain ultimately comes to an end -- for most of us it will be
enough just to get pointed in the right direction. 
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