Desire not to Desire

Wednesday, May 24, 2017 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

All human activity is ruled by desire. Every action is performed because of desire, and every wish-fulfillment activity made because of desire.

We can name the specific desires, of which there are six main ones, each tied to the other with no end of one and no start of the other, but all of them depending on each other and fueling one another.

These are:

Continuation

Possessiveness

Vanity

Competition

Influence


But that's five, right? What's the sixth?

Continuation is the most basic and ties directly to our will to live and continue our existence. We shape our lives around the constant desire to continue our existence. We don't want to end, and we don't want our experience of the self to end.

To continue our existence, the desire to possess things and hoard them inside of us and around ourselves arises. Inside we hoard and possess ideas, concepts, and outside we hoard and possess food, drink, partners.

To attract partners especially, and to incite what we call love, we employ the third desire: vanity, which is a way of acting. Vanity is anything that makes us go “look at me.” Our actions towards our partners are always in some way cantered around what we get out of this relationship. Love arises as a result of knowing our actions can lead to benefits for ourselves. When this is no longer present in some way that seems meaningful to us, love no longer arises. To this you may say there are people that love boundlessly and get nothing in return. They do, they get the sensation of love, contentment, or feeling better about themselves. Self-love is just as much a form of vanity as any other.

Competition, the third desire, arises out of every human endeavor, a desire to be a step higher, morally superior, physically more capable, better lover, bigger bank account. This desire is so strong you will want to outdo and out-compete even your own brother. All of these stem from the desire to be better and create competition and rivalry.

The last one is the desire for influence. All of us, on some level, either directly, philosophically or metaphysically, know our mind is shaped by other minds. And above all, consciously or unconsciously, we too begin to desire to have influence over other minds.

But there is one desire that is hidden. It is hidden precisely because if the conscious mind knows about it directly it can cause problems in the fulfillment of all the other five desires.

You may call this desire the desire for freedom, but a better way of describing it is:

The desire not to desire.

All of our mental and physical activity is cantered not around the five basic desires, but on the sixth desire, which is our desire to be free of desire.

Very early in our lives we figure out that no matter how many things we get, how much stuff and possessions we buy, how much food we eat, how many women or men we get, how many minds we influence, or how much better we are at something than someone else, the same desire for all of these things always remains. On some level we all figure this out very quickly, that these five desires are infinite. We are glad, for a time, that we have gotten the object of our desire, but never manage to figure out what we would have to get for that desire to cease.

Because the object of our desire is in the forefront of our mind, we are constantly fooled by the object, negating the subject and the psychological process of attainment of desire.

We fail to see that the contentment and peace, and indeed the freedom we experience when getting the object or subject of our desire comes from being free of desire. Which lasts for however long the previous desire is not replaced by a new one, and our desire to be free of desire begins again.