Desire
a. The fact or condition of desiring; that feeling or emotion which is directed to the attainment or possession of some object from which pleasure or satisfaction is expected; longing, craving; a particular instance of this feeling, a wish.
We all know what we mean when we use this term. We want things to be different than they are. We want our world to include something it doesn’t presently include so that we can experience this pleasure or satisfaction connected to its being in our world. Attaining these experiences is what gives meaning to our lives and so we don’t question where these desires come from and busy ourselves with finding ways of bringing about their fulfillment. We don’t question why this experience is so compelling because the answer is self evident. It just feels good. And feeling good is what really matters.
If you are a human being, then you know this experience. Its attainment is what motivates you from the moment you awake in the morning to the moment you fall asleep at night. And because this experience is always dependent on the attainment of what it is that you desire, you come to believe that it is connected to this thing that is attained. But if this were actually true, then you should be able to continue having this experience as long as this thing continued to be in your life. And we all know that this is not the case. This experience is fleeting. How long it persists is a function of how strong the desire was but this only means that the stronger desires will result in more powerful moments of pleasure that will last a bit longer but will also leave you more despondent at their leaving.
Even in light of this contradiction, we still don’t question the mechanism because this would require us to actually define what being satisfied or pleasured actually means. We would like to dismiss the query as problematic because it’s just a feeling but even feelings have known connections to actual events in our lives. We experience pleasure when things are the way we would want them to be but what actually defines this situation as opposed to one where things are not the way we would want them to be. It is, of course, defined by the presents of that which was desired but we already know that it cannot be coming from that thing because the feeling vanishes even when the thing does not. The only other thing that defines this situation is that when the thing is attained, the desire for it to be there no longer exists. We are, in that moment, desire-less.
When we are able to acknowledge that this experience is not connected to the thing that is desired but rather to our no longer desiring it, everything changes. Before this realization, our lives were a constant search for what it was we desired or a search for a new thing to desire when all of the old things had been attained and, having been attained, lost their ability to bring us pleasure. A roller coaster created by this idea that it needs to be different than it is. We are up when this thing shows up in our lives and down when we think it needs to be there and it has not yet shown itself. A roller coaster that we can now see is of our own creation. It doesn’t immediately stop us from wanting it to be different than it is because we have not yet identified this place we access when the desire is no longer there. But we know it is a place within and so the journey changes from this constant search for things outside of ourselves to a search for a way to understand the nature of this place we long to be. By being fully present in the lives we lead, we begin to notice that these moments of being desire-less are defined by our being fully in the hear and now. A place devoid of thought where past and future do not exist. But staying in this place is easier said than done. We have been hard wired to think that we need to pay attention to our thoughts because they will alert us to what actions need to be taken in the present to insure the correct outcome we desire in the future. Overcoming this wiring requires our belief in the possibility that it is all perfect all the time and that all that is required of us is to be present in the moment so that the nature of reality can be known to us. And out of this knowledge of how it all is, the correct actions will happen naturally on our part because they will be in sync with the forces at work in any given situation.
If we can continue on this journey, we will eventually come to understand that we are not the doer we thought we were. Our belief in our ability to alter our circumstances by an act of will was all an illusion born out of our sense of being real and separate from everything not us. We come to know that this separateness is not real and can begin the next phase of our journey. We can acknowledge that we are not who we though we were and wonder about what then we really are and begin the journey to self-realization.
Snake Metaphor
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