It can be eliminated when one no longer seeks any personal reward in the values that one is pursuing.David, the only way to eliminate the "crude concepts of gain and loss" is to cease valuing [anything] altogether.
These are imperfections. To the degree that I display any of these emotions, I am falling away from the path of true insight.Your being one of those cognizant people who transfers immediate sensing to the values offended or served beneath them is how you serve truth (your uber-value), after your manner. That light-to-nothing remains of the register of your senses/feelings is what enables you to serve truth here, where you are "indignant" with a poster's prattle, or "bored" with someone's one-liners or "impatient" with the lack of evolution in someone's path or "happy/satisfied" when a poster has rendered something the way you see it.
A sage doesn't have to kill it. There is nothing inside him to kill. He is entirely empty.That the husk of immediate sensation that exposes these values to you falls away imperceptibly does not render them useless, au contraire. Truth (your sense of things) is first registered/felt, before we re-adorn it with more words. It's unfortunate such an allergic reaction to the word "emotion" prevents you from seeing its most subtle workings in both life and reason. Killing the messenger (sense-ation) is the work of paranoid and petty kings. Why kill it when it means to dissipate anyway . . . . and so we let it go . . . .
The idea that one has to kill the emotions in order to become a sage is misguided. It is a case of grabbing the wrong end of the stick. The emotions disappear in and of themselves when one reaches true insight.
It is impossible for us, as conscious beings, to cease valuing altogether. An egotist necessarily values happiness and security as a result of his falsely believing in his own existence. A sage necessarily values wisdom as a result of his lengthy path to wisdom.When you cease to value anything, most especially truth, you will find the utter end to your feelings, or your life.
What we can do, however, is cease being attached to anything. When a person abandons attachment to everything in the world as a result of his attachment to truth, and when he then abandons even his attachment to truth, he becomes a sage.
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