The Anatomy of Desire

It’s been said in many Buddhist circles that desires are what keeps us from realizing our innate enlightened nature.  It’s said that if we can eliminate desires, we will be free of attachments and suffering.  However, isn’t the desire to eliminate desires just another desire?

Maybe it would be good to investigate and contemplate the nature of desire. So what do desires do?  What happens when you are hungry, for instance? Your body has a particular feeling which you probably label as uncomfortable.  You then have the desire for breakfast or lunch or dinner.  

Is the feeling state the whole of the desire, or is there more to it?  I would say that there is more to a desire then just the feelings.  

Have you ever felt hungry for something but you didn’t know what it was? You look all through your pantry and fridge yet you nothing seems right.  Do you want something sweet, something savory? You just don’t know what kind of food it is that you want, but you do know that you want some kind of food.   So, although this would still be a desire its almost to the point that it isn’t. What if you just had the uncomfortable feeling but you didn’t know there was anything you could do or eat that would cure the feeling?  Would this be a desire? I would say it wouldn’t be because just having an undefined feeling without any idea of fixing the problem doesn’t have any motivational power over you.  As soon as you found a cure for the bad feeling then you would crave that cure whenever you had the feeling and then it would be a desire.  Desires seem to have a cognitive component to them as well as the bodily feeling state. 

Is the cognitive part of desire the whole thing though?  Without the feeling, is there desire?  Can you convince yourself you want an omelet when you don’t have feelings of hunger?  Maybe, you go out to the local diner and get an omelet and eat it but it probably wouldn’t be satisfying except maybe  in an intellectual way.  So without the feelings of hunger and the story of how to fix the feelings you won’t be in the grip of desire.  This being said, I have found that if you convince yourself thoroughly you want something even if you don’t have the initial feeling, then you can arouse the feeling, but it really isn’t a desire until both the feeling state and the idea of the “fix” are present together. 

Is there a link between the degree of hunger and the satisfaction one gets when the hunger is satisfied? If you waited 24 hours without eating anything and then you went to the diner and ate an omelet would your satisfaction be deeper than if you only had waited one hour and ate the omelet?   I think it would. There does seem to be a link between the degree of discomfort and the degree of peace one feels by “fixing” or eliminating that feeling. 

One thing I’ve noticed in this whole process is how I seem to have a strange illogical notion or unspoken belief while the feeling of discomfort is satisfied. I have the notion that by eating the omelet then I will be satisfied forever. I never seem to think or am aware of how the feelings of hunger will come again in a few hours even after I eat the food. From my experience there seems to be an assumption that this is a permanent fix because after I eat the omelet, and my desire is satiated, there is an unspoken assumption that there will be no need to worry or think about eating ever again. The feelings of satisfaction seem to have this belief built right in even if it is patently false and we know it. If I was worrying about where or when I would get to eat the next omelet I probably wouldn’t feel as satisfied after eating it.  So it seems that the satisfaction is the pleasurable feeling that I am really longing for.   

Pavlov did some famous experiments with dogs where he would condition them to salivate when they heard the sound of the bell.  An association between eating and the bell was made and it stuck. Maybe desires and the satisfaction of desires are what our bodies use to motivate us to seek out what we need, but is it the actual food or whatever that we long for, or is it just the feeling we have when we satisfy the desire?  I think it’s the feeling we crave but we assume it’s the food or the sex or whatever the fix is. 

Another aspect of the process of desire is how we can make associations just by repeating a process. If we drink alcohol and it gives us a good feeling after we drink it for the first time, are we then an alcoholic?  Probably not; it may take many drinks on many different occasions before we are hooked.  Smoking cigarettes was like that for me.  I think it’s true with any desire. The more we indulge, the stronger the desire, even if the process of satiating that desire becomes harmful or painful.  So desires seem to change over time. The amount of satiation needed to feel the satisfaction or the peace we initially had seems to increase when we do the deed enough times.  At first when I started smoking cigarettes I only smoked one every few days. Over time I was smoking over 20 a day. All throughout the day I would have cravings.  Even when I was in the movie theater watching a big blockbuster, I would be squirming in my seat thinking of when and where I could have a smoke.

 

Once a desire becomes strong enough, it becomes a lens through which we see the world.  If, for instance, we get a pleasurable feeling when we win money at a casino, it may take several trips to the casino before we are hooked on gambling. If we continue to satisfy that desire again and again, then eventually we will want to go more and more often and the stakes will get higher each time so we can get a bigger rush when we win or until we at least get the same feelings of satisfaction we had when we first started.  We may take out another mortgage on our house so we can have enough money to gamble with so we can continue to get that feeling of satisfaction. We will probably negotiate with ourselves to convince our more rational mind that we “need” to mortgage the house.  We may try to convince ourselves that when we win big as we most definitely will, then we can not only pay off the mortgage but all our other debts as well.  So we do it. We mortgage our house and go gamble it all away.  If gambling isn’t our addiction then maybe it’s a drug addiction. The story will be slightly different but the general plot will be the same.  Desires are a part of being human, but indulging them over and over can lead us to ruin.

As biological beings we need things to survive. We need energy, certain chemicals like carbohydrates, water, proteins, as well as oxygen.   We need warmth, and sleep too. Desires are our body’s way of motivating us to get what we need.  However some desires are learned and are not what we really need to survive.  Other desires are for things that we kind of need but could survive without.  For instance, the desire for sex is a desire which seems to be hard wired in us, but we don’t need sex to survive, only to procreate. Our notion that we need sex to feel whole or to feel the deep love we believe we are missing, is a part of the desire for sex that is learned.  Other animals have the desire for sex at times but they don’t seem to be tortured with self doubt if they don’t get it.  We do, however. There are some desires which are completely learned.  Learned desires like gambling addictions are almost always for things we really don’t need to survive.  

As long as we have a human body, and maybe afterward too, we will have desires.  So the notion that we should abandon all desires is not practical and probably in a truly honest sense, impossible until at least we don’t have a body anymore.   So how do we work with desires so that they don’t dominate our life?  

Being human means we will have desires.  If we didn’t we would likely not survive.  If you want to see how strong of a motivational force our desires can be, then go a day without eating, and watch your thoughts as well as your bodily feelings.  Maybe even write your experiences in a journal and record the time when you make entries.  It takes a lot of courage to do this, so if you can’t, then try it for 12 hours instead. Notice what thoughts you might have.  You may say things to yourself like, “Why do I need to do this again?” or you might think, “OK, 6 hours is long enough, I get the point.”  Noticing your self negotiations during a period where desires are strong is a powerful practice because getting into the habit of seeing your desires from a slightly more panoramic view can lead to all kinds of realizations over time as our self deception is revealed.  You can really learn a lot about yourself if you are able to see how you go about convincing yourself to indulge your desires.  

Refraining from an addiction seems to be a good way to lessen that desires grip on us, however is that the only way to be free of a desire, and are there any possible problems with this approach?  Is denying your addiction through force of will a good way to unlearn a desire?  When you make a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking, does it work?  It does for some people but for most, it doesn’t.  Most people can’t just stop their desire and habit cycle cold.  In fact trying and failing can make it harder to quit in the future because it undermines our confidence.  There are other major problems with the force of will approach, and I will discuss those later in this essay. 

Why is it important in overcoming a desire to have confidence?  What are you really having confidence in?  Is it your will power to scold your body into following orders?  No… that’s not the kind of confidence needed.  The confidence needed is the confidence you have in your ability to stay.  When you can stay with your feelings in the midst of a desire and feel your body fully with curiosity, compassion and resolve then you will be building your confidence.  If each time you waited longer before having the cigarette then over time you would have more and more confidence that you won’t explode or die without the fix even though it might really feel that way during the desire.  As your confidence grows you can stay even longer and as you can stay even longer your confidence will grow more.  

Eventually you will be so good at standing tall during the storm of your desire, you will realize that it’s just a feeling. You will realize that it has no real meaning and it will be easy to give up. In fact you might even see the whole desire-indulge cycle to be silly and laughable.   This approach of working with your desires can work if you have enough patience and compassion with yourself.  If you try to use the all at once approach you may end up believing you are somehow flawed, or that you just don’t have the will power to overcome your desire by force.  In the more gentle approach you learn over time that in order to stay with your feelings for longer and longer, you have to have curiosity and compassion courage and some self discipline but the self discipline is not the most important part, courage, curiosity and compassion for yourself are.  Know that habits are not formed in a day and so they can not be undone in a day.  

If you want to find peace, then how can forcing yourself into submission be a way to find that peace?  Won’t the desire just come back again and again in the battle between your good, wholesome, ideal you, and the slothful, sinful, lazy, indulgent you?  Which side usually wins in the end?  For me it was always the indulgent side, because even when I managed to go three years without smoking a cigarette, the desire was still there waiting for the right conditions to pop up.  As soon as my will was on the wane, and I was feeling stressed and sad, I gave in to “just one”.  Of course I was smoking a pack a day again in about a month after giving in to that “one” cigarette.  

Isn’t the force of will, simply the force of suppression? Isn’t the process of suppressing our desires simply the ego suppressing what the body is screaming for? When I am suppressing my desires through the force of ego, it’s like there is a war going on inside myself.  Isn’t suppressing our desires by the ego really a separation of mind and body?  Isn’t it simply learning to not pay attention to what the body is telling us? I think it is.

This dualistic split in the quest to be a “better” person is not a viable way of working with your desires. Aside from the fact that it really doesn’t work most of the time, this approach can lead us further down the hole of suffering.  Either our self confidence is undermined and we begin to see ourselves as weak, and eventually we may even come to think of ourselves as “no good,”  or it will cause us to become split into two.  When we train our mind to ignore what the body is feeling it causes a dualistic split, or a mind-body separation.  What usually happens is that as we get better at suppressing or ignoring our feelings we slowly lose the ability to feel anything.  We can even lose the ability to enjoy life at all, or at least only on rare occasions.  We become more and more stoic and unaware of a dimension of life that only our bodily wisdom can know.  Emotional intelligence is one of the aspects of this kind of wisdom.  

Suppression of feelings also creates problems because when you suppress your feelings, that doesn’t mean the feelings go away.  They usually just pop up in some other place.  For instance in recent years it has been revealed that priests of the Catholic church sometimes sexually abuse young kids.  I am not alone in the belief that this is due to them suppressing their desires so that they can convince themselves they are “pure.”  If this is true, then it shows how following the path of ego, even in the pursuit of spiritual growth, can lead to the exact opposite. 

Being able to feel our feelings fully, is very important for our spiritual development because compassion and sympathetic joy both are experienced through being aware of our feelings fully.  This is because our bodies are like tuning forks in that we can feel other’s feelings in resonant ways.  Notice how being in a room with other people who are angry, often make us angry.  Being in a room with someone who is very sad, can bring us to tears as well.  We may not even be aware that we are feeling their sadness, yet how else can we explain it?  Sympathetic joy, or feeling joy when others are joyful,  is also a body based wisdom that is only possible if you are accomplished at tuning into your bodily feelings.  From a spiritual development point of view, dualistic mind-body separation through the practice of suppression, means we will probably have little compassion or joy in our lives.  

Wisdom without compassion is very dangerous and can lead us to be very cruel as was famously shown by the Roman emperor, Nero, who watched dispassionately as Rome burned.  Without compassion, enlightenment is farther away from you than if you were a squirrel or a raccoon.   Suppressing our desires in the quest to become “pure” can lead us down that path. Its not a path to liberation, it’s a path that either leads us to feeling increasingly weak and irresponsible or it’s a path of becoming cold to life.    

So if the approach of using your will power to change your habits doesn’t work, then what will?  The answer is not simple, and not necessarily easy, but I have found through my own trials and experiments that there is a way. 

First and foremost it’s important to realize that no one has ever been perfect and no one ever will be. Perfection is not really within the nature of how our universe works because perfection is an oversimplification.   Even Jesus farted from time to time.  The notion that you need to build yourself up to be great is patently false and in actuality leads to more ego not less.

The second thing to remember is that because a habit is learned over time, it can’t be undone in a day. It takes time and patience. The longer you have had a habit, the longer it will likely take to unlearn it. So its important to be as gentle and forgiving with yourself as you would be with your best friend or your child. If you scold yourself when you fall back into a habitual pattern of behavior then you are in effect training yourself to not notice the feelings the next time you have that desire.  Its important to rejoice in the fact that you are noticing the pattern in yourself rather than feeling bad that you have repeated the pattern.  Guilt has its place, but not in the process of unlearning a habit.  Remember, habits are not you, they are only temporary, so how could they really be a part of the you which continues?  Wasn’t there a time when you didn’t have the habit, and so doesn’t it stand to reason that there will be a time in the future when you don’t have it anymore?  Learn to work with yourself, not against yourself.  

When you are gentle and forgiving, you will be more likely to be able to notice the feeling of the desire when it comes up next time.  Simple noticing is what is most important with this approach.   

When you do notice that you are having the urge, such as the urge to gossip about others, then instead of immediately trying to fix that urge by blabbering the juicy gossip you are dying to tell someone, just take a look at the feelings you are feeling. Get to know the feelings you are having when you have the urge.  The curiosity part of this approach is what works as the motivating factor.

As soon as you notice the urge, then rejoice in the fact that you noticed the urge, or the feeling and assume that you don’t really “know” how this feeling really feels. Be curious about it and try to learn all aspects of the feeling. Feel your feelings as fully as you can and stay in this curious awareness as long as you want to and notice if the feeling gets stronger or weaker as you watch. Also notice what thoughts come up, and try to remember them for later contemplation.  Is there negotiations or internal arguments popping up?  Notice, but do not judge or use the word “should”, just notice as much as you can.  Remember, its not about being perfect, its about changing your habits.  

Learning to stay with my feeling for a while then giving in to the desire seemed to be a better approach  because it wasn’t so much of a battle I was having with myself as it was a journey born as much out of self improvement as it was out of curiosity. When I used this approach to quit smoking 14 years ago,  I wanted to live longer, and this was part of the motivation,  but I was also curious how much of the raw desire I could stand before giving in. I was on a journey of discovery and I was in no hurry.  When I finally did decide to quit for good, it was a decision which I knew was right on a very deep level.  It was an easy decision which almost made itself, and most importantly it was a decision which wasn’t dreaded, or forced in any way.  It was like I had used up the “need” for tobbacco and had no need for cigarettes any more.  

One day my inner wisdom realized that the desire was caused by the cigarettes not the lack of them.  It seemed like the cigarette was the solution to the desire but once I had enough clarity and experience with the process of the desire then it was easy to see how the desire was just something that happened for a while but didn’t need to continue anymore.  Once the wisdom which can see the desire from farther away, became predominate, then quitting was easy and all I had to do was go through the painful part of physical withdrawal. 

During withdrawal, I meditated a lot. While meditating I was trying to experience the feelings of withdrawal as fully as I could without the notion that there was a fix.  It was a lot like having the flu. Deep down I knew that cigarettes were the cause of the desire, so I didn’t even see them as the fix anymore.    After about three days the feelings of physical addiction subsided and went away. There was peace underneath the desire.  The peace had been there all along. Since I quit  I have only had one or two brief spats of desire which lasted only seconds.  The peace I had when I smoked a cigarette is there all the time now and nothing needs to be done to have it.  When I took the approach of suppressing the desire by using force of will, the desire was still there waiting to come out and take hold at the first sign of weakness in the will.  When I took the approach of learning the desire and contemplating it, and staying with the feelings more and more, the desire became meaningless.  A meaningless desire is no desire at all.

Once you notice the urge and you stay with that feeling as long as you want, out of curiosity, then notice the feelings you have when you are doing the deed, and notice the feelings after the deed is done.  The important thing to remember is to do it out of curiosity not out of some need to be great. Experiment with how it all plays out and be thankful of your awareness of the desire.  A habit is not really a habit if you are aware of it while you are indulging.

Each time you are aware of your habitual urge before you indulge it, try to stay with the feeling a little longer than the last time just to see how long you can go without indulging the habit. For instance, the next time you feel the urge to get a bowl of ice cream, stop and stay for a while as you get to know that feeling.  When you do get the bowl of ice cream eat it slowly and feel all the feelings as fully as you can instead of wolfing it down as fast as you can.  Notice all thoughts the come up as well without judgement. If the thoughts that come up as judging thoughts, then for enlightenment’s sake don’t add another layer of judgement to that.

The condensed process is: stop, stay, feel, do it, feel it more, contemplate and learn.    If you miss noticing the pre-habit process then be aware when you are aware, instead of scolding yourself.  Be as curious and aware as you can be and be joyful for that.   

If your habit is one where you harm others, such as stealing, then instead of going through with the action of stealing, try to fantasize that you stole what it was that you desired.  Try to feel the satisfaction you get by stealing, without really stealing.  If you don’t notice the feeling of the urge until after you have done the deed, then feel the feelings of remorse without the guilt. Know that you are not your habits, but also be aware of the harm you have caused and feel compassion for those whom you caused harm to.  If possible apologize and try to rectify the harm in a way that will hopefully right the wrong as much as possible.   Guilt is not nearly as useful as feeling compassion for those who were victims of the habit and for yourself for having the habit.  Make a wish or have an aspiration to notice before you do the deed next time.

If you follow the path of increasing your awareness and staying with the feeling again and again for longer and longer, then over time, the courage and ability to fully feel the pre-habit body state will increase. Also your need to fix the habit by doing the deed will diminish. Know thyself more and more each time and slowly, slowly you will become more and more free of the habit until one day, it means nothing at all to you. You may one day have an epiphany that you really don’t need those cigarettes or whatever it is that enslaved you.  This is what is called renunciation.
   

Renunciation is a process where desires are seen for what they really are, and giving them up when they are all used up, is easy.   It has nothing to do with building up your force of will or your “angel” side.  It has everything to do with seeing the situation more clearly and being able to work with your mind and your body in the process of that seeing.  We have all renounced many things in our lives. We used to be so attached to our toys when we were a child, but at some point they meant nothing to us. We renounced them without even being aware that we were.  How funny is that? We are all renunciates and we didn't even know we were. 

Through this process I have overcome many desires, however I still have some that will need to be fully seen through at some point. There is no hurry as I see it, as long as I am working with those desires and learning them more and more, I will be knowing myself better and better, so there is no need to eliminate them as long as they aren’t hurting anyone.  If I tried to eliminate the desire as some form of self improvement program then I would fall right back into the ego battle where the force of will is trying to dominate the other more “animalistic” parts of my being.  Not only will this method eventually fail for most people, it will also separate the mind from the body, which is a very detrimental thing to happen on anyone’s spiritual path.