ZD's Mistake

Satchi: I cannot agree. I think the Buddha nailed it by identifying suffering caused by craving and grasping. Even if there was no suffering there would still be curiosity about the world. There will always be curiosity about making discoveries and inventing stuff and learning new things just for the sake of it.

But curiosity as a driver of the search? What would the search be for? If there was no suffering then there would be no feeling of lack and unfulfillment. There would only be a search if you felt you had to find something. But if there was no suffering you would be complete and fulfilled and there would be nothing to look for.

Muttley:
In a relative sense the roots of suffering do seem to be complicated and obscure, but answer the question "what suffers?", and it ceases, completely.

ZD:
Well, some of us who were driven by curiosity did not think that we were searching for some ultimate truth about ourselves. We simply wanted to understand things that we saw that didn't make sense. As one trivial example, in a logic course the instructor explained that good decision making requires listing the pros and cons regarding some decision, and the preponderance of items on one list versus the other list would make it clear which decision to make. I knew, from my own experience, that his assertion was absurd because people frequently choose to do things despite a preponderance of reasons NOT to do those things. It seemed to me that the entire field of logic was floating in mid-air, so to speak, and that there must be something fundamental and unseen underlying it if there were any validity to it. As another example, a physics professor claimed that subatomic particles sometimes move from point A to point B without crossing the space between those two points. What could explain that kind of statement? There was also the observer paradox that permeates all of the scientific disciplines. There were dozens of other issues of a similar nature, but they all led me to intuit that scientists were overlooking something fundamental, but I didn't know what it was. I didn't feel that I was lacking anything other than an explanation that might resolve the paradoxes that I saw.

You wrote, "Curiosity isn't suffering." That was my point. I'm well aware that a lot of people searching for the truth are driven by suffering, but that's NOT what drives the search for people whose motivation is solely curiosity.

Zendancer:
I wasn't interested in a search for liberation because I didn't feel bound. Only after an initial kensho event, during which the Infinite was apprehended and several of my existential questions got answered, did I realize that my search for scientific truth had actually been a spiritual search in disguise and hadn't been recognized as such.

Your path was different, and that was another point I was making. Someone who wants to understand scientific paradoxes at a deep level may, without any intention to do so, penetrate the consensus paradigm and discover that reality is NOT what one has culturally been conditioned to imagine.

It bears repeating that many different paths can lead to Rome. One size does not fit all.