The Nature of Desire
Consider desire as an emotional energetic experience to be your resonance with the foundational and core energetic of the universe.
The universe exists to spend its energy. In the jitterbug jive two-step tango of molecular and atomic vibration and gyration, the universe spends itself, shares itself outward from every particle within it. Each particle is sharing energy towards every other, sharing by spending, by giving away. Thus Desire’s physical twin, heat, is contagious, passed from one body to the next ad infinitum until the party winds down and the party-goers descend into sleep, blissful sleep, satiated sleep. For the mortal and aware, perhaps this describes a good death.
Desire as emotional energy drives us outward, into life, into relating to others, into making and doing, into parenting. Without desire, nothing happens, and though joy does not depend on desire, for joy itself does not require anything to happen, desire as the pro-creative engine of the universe contributes to joy, both directly and circumstantially, from all perspectives of being – consciousness, spirit/soul, sensual experience, biology, and human enterprise as endeavors and callings.
I consider it possible that the commonly held western understanding of the Buddhist concept of desire as the root of all suffering is a mistranslation of what Buddha would intend, in two ways.
First, that Buddha intends us to understand that expectation, rather than desire, leads to suffering. If I understand that I am fully responsible for my desire, as its creator, and that the universe itself is not an agent of cause that can respond to my wishes, but rather an engine of possibility, and that no other being owes me anything, ever, then desire itself is exquisite, and yet almost painful in its urgency to outwardly express, its urgency to leave, and be spent. If, on the other hand, I understand the universe to be responsive to my wishes, that I can know as factual/true/certain that my desires will be fulfilled, especially by other beings…and the moment does not arrive…I have created my own suffering from my fully-believed expectations.
Second, if I image the experience of desire as if it is a type of wave I might ride forward from one moment to the next, then ask myself, what part of the wave of desire am I riding? Desire points towards a future event or experience to fulfill it, yet when that arrives, the experience of desire is extinguished as satisfaction arises to replace it. If I ride the back of the wave, not fully in the experience of desire yet knowing its presence and following it forward, I miss most of the experience, its juiciness, its joyfulness. I may stay to the back thinking I can steer the wave (ha ha ha, very funny) or get a better view of the “goal” ahead. I’m in the past, in the future, and in my mind, instead of in my body in the now of desire. This is the second type of suffering associated with desire, the suffering of calculation and control, the suffering of tension in the self, all the result of my choice or compulsion to avoid the sweet spot of the wave, to avoid being one with the surge and spray and curl.
What will you choose?
Evening. The sun
Leaves heaven to die within
The ocean’s bosom.
Original post by, Shawn King.
