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.
