A person is mostly made of small motivations. Not the large ones we write down and call goals, but the steady low-level supply underneath them: the things that interest us, the things we are grateful for, the things that quietly stir ambition. The range runs from the barely perceptible to the completely obvious, and most of it never rises to the level of a decision.
Behind any goal there is a wanting, and the wanting is what actually moves people. It moves them toward building things and toward wrecking them, and if you look closely enough at the two they turn out to be relatives — the same mechanism pointed in different directions. Wherever there is movement driven by what we want, there is room for suffering.
The obvious objection
Buddhism proposes stopping the movement. This is the point at which many people decide the whole proposition is either incoherent or morbid, and the objection is a fair one. How do you stop the thing that keeps you alive? And why would you want to? Why not simply aim the movement somewhere better — keep going, but toward good ambitions instead of bad ones?
The answer is that the moment you ask which ambitions are the good ones, you are already doing it again. What one person is certain is good, another is equally certain is not. What is plainly justified from here is plainly unjustified from there. Opinions arrive, then perspectives on the opinions, then positions taken about the perspectives. All of that is movement, and all of it produces what the original wanting produced.
Redirecting the current does not slow it down. It gives it a better story about itself.
Stop
Stop for a moment. Stop your opinions. Stop your desires and your ambitions, your thoughts and your emotions. Stop all of it, sit down in an empty space, and watch — without judging what you see, without analyzing it, without trying to improve it. Simply watch, in the dark of the calm, in the inactivity, in the absence of movement.
This is one of the load-bearing pillars of the whole tradition, and it is what contemplative practice is for: stopping the constant movement long enough to begin to see how foolish we have been for most of our lives.
Stopping is not dying
The fear underneath the objection is that stopping means ending — that a person who wants nothing is a person who is no longer quite there. It is closer to the opposite. Stopping is transformation, and it is refuge.
What happens is unremarkable and takes a long time. You begin to understand your own nature, and understanding your own nature turns out to be the only reliable route to understanding anybody else’s, because everyone is running the same machinery. Out of that understanding comes empathy, and out of empathy, compassion. None of it is available from inside the movement, because from inside the movement other people are mostly either obstacles or instruments.
The other pillar, and why it is the popular one
How we act, and what we intend when we act, is the second pillar — sīla, moral conduct. It is far better known than the first, for three reasons. It is easier to understand. It is easy to approve of. And it does not directly contradict the incessant movement, which means a person can adopt it wholesale without giving anything up.
That is not an argument against it. It is only worth noticing which of the two pillars gets talked about, and why it is that one.
How it is actually done
Because Buddhism understands people, and understands precisely how stubborn we are, it arrives with practical components. We are so thoroughly constituted by volitional action that stopping all of it is not a plausible first assignment. Neither is enlightenment. The first task is much smaller: stop the volitions that are clearly and easily identifiable as bad.
Not the subtle ones. Not the ones that need a framework to detect. The ones you already know about, and have known about for some time.
Then, having stopped those, do the things that are clearly and easily identifiable as good — again, the ones that require no argument from anybody.
Then keep looking inward. Keep looking until you understand something about the fundamental reality of good and bad: that the ground the two of them stand on has been the same ground the entire time, and that the only thing which is genuinely pure is the absence of that ground, and of the inner movement built on top of it.
And when the inner movement finally stops, that is the point at which action becomes pure. This is the part that sounds like a contradiction and is not. It is exactly there that a person begins to do real good — unattached, unmotivated in the literal sense of the word, and for that reason genuine.