Buddhism ultimately strives for individual freedom and emancipation. The way Buddhists aim to achieve this goal is through the denial, and ultimately, the ending of desire. Desire, so they say, is the lock to our prison cell and keeps us in thrall to an imaginary and evil world. I have no problems with acknowledging this description of reality, but I do disagree with their analysis of desire and suggest that desire is in fact the defining and most essential characteristic of our humanity. To eradicate desire is to commit spiritual suicide.
From the outset desire guides our first relationships and identifies those areas of personality that we lack. As we develop we gravitate towards other beings who possess characteristics we do not. We desire these characteristics and by contact we hope to absorb them and make them our own. We call desire love or friendship in order to refine its status and disguise its purpose. But the magic we feel in the company of a best friend or first love is the resounding of their efficiencies within our own previously undisclosed deficiencies. Desire is the driving force behind our growth and self-discovery.
Desire is the constant need to acquire new things, sensual or intellectual. It is animal hunger elevated, abstracted and multiplied into many, often conflicting, psycho/spiritual hungers. They may be superficial or sublime, but they are unavoidable, necessary and always in the end dynamic and transformative. Desire maintains the integrity of the human experience and rather than being a barrier to freedom, like o-zone, it shields us, while it can, from the entropic universe that extends beyond us.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
You are dying
So what’s the good news? There is no good news I’m sad to say. You are dying in a universe that doesn’t care about you, a universe that, well, doesn’t think or feel at all. You can’t talk to it, pray to it, or beg that things will become any better than they are. There is no morality in the universe, no right and wrong. The universe doesn’t reward good and punish bad. You can’t change the composition of the universe by thought alone, you can’t visualize a better future nor can you think yourself thinner or richer. The only thing you really share with the universe is entropy. You are both dying, both gradually degrading and losing function.
Do you think about death, do you try to imagine it? That moment when vision and thought stops – forever. You can’t really do it effectively can you? The thinking mind can only contemplate objects. Death, although the name of a thing, is not an object or thing at all, it is the absence of objects, the loss of awareness. By definition you can’t think about nothing. You can stop thinking, or have no thoughts, but nothing cannot be a thought, cannot be contemplated. When we approach this edge of consciousness, this event-horizon of personal nothingness, we feel a moment of uncertainty, of fear. We experience vertigo and feel the truth of our predicament and the essence of our nature.
Do you think about death, do you try to imagine it? That moment when vision and thought stops – forever. You can’t really do it effectively can you? The thinking mind can only contemplate objects. Death, although the name of a thing, is not an object or thing at all, it is the absence of objects, the loss of awareness. By definition you can’t think about nothing. You can stop thinking, or have no thoughts, but nothing cannot be a thought, cannot be contemplated. When we approach this edge of consciousness, this event-horizon of personal nothingness, we feel a moment of uncertainty, of fear. We experience vertigo and feel the truth of our predicament and the essence of our nature.
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