desire primer

Alan Watts once told me, “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” I have been struggling with one such question which is how do I transcend desire? I have tried everything. I tried asceticism and I became a renunciate of all worldly pleasures. When these methods only temporarily worked and postponed the inevitable return, I tried the path of tantra and embraced all my desires. Out of all the paths I tried, tantra seem the most natural however going into the nature of my desires did not allow me to transcend them. The path of the tantric is to eventually transcend desire because you play it all out to its conclusion. You get your fill and are then ready for your beatitude. However, I’m positive you will just find new desires. You can play the part of the hermit on the mountain under the old adage, “out of sight, out of mind.” It will work to a degree however you’re just running out the clock on desires. You transcended nothing.

I’ve embraced my shadow over the last year and from this liaison have entered into a student/teacher relationship. Instead of giving me all the lessons at once and overwhelming me, I get a few at a time which allows me to process them little by little and move on to the next lesson at hand. The teachings include the nature of self, culture, and power. He has taught me who he is and how he became perceived as such. It’s fascinating stuff and I recommend getting in touch with your darkness and starting a dialogue. Because we have buried him deep, non-ordinary methods may be required to start the conversation. Anyway, I have been struggling with desire pretty much all my life and since I’m in this life class I was hoping to eventually take the course on desire and learn from the master how to transcend it. After repeatedly getting beat down by failure to live up to my intention of freeing myself from desire and watching my teacher laugh as I miserably succumbed over and over again, I finally had to ask, "Why can’t I transcend desire?"

My teacher had let me come to the journey’s end. He let me exhaust all avenues and see the futility of the quest. He reminded me of Alan’s quote and then left me to figure out the answer on my own. It was pretty easy once I connected the dots. I can’t transcend desire because I am desire. Ha ha I got myself good. I’m smart enough to realize I can’t transcend myself. I can transcend identity; I can shed the idea of who I am but from this I’m left with a biological form just birthed from the mother’s womb. Who is that? It’s desire come forth, reconstituting itself into a new form in order to chase desires and make more forms. Of course, as the coming forth of desire into this macabre carnival called life, I’m easily addicted, hypnotized, enchanted, and fall for seduction with ease. That’s what desire does. And when desire tires of the lure, Eros looks for the next adventure to leave him spellbound.

We created all needs and wants in order to play a high brow derivation of the canine game of chase because as desire it gives us a hit of pleasure to get rewarded with a successful outcome of the game. This in turn creates suffering when we don’t get what we want. Is this what we want? The chase, the quest, the suffering to propel us along, the capture, and then the boredom and strife so we can move on to a new adventure. I think so. Imagine always getting what you want and fulfilling every desire. Once again here’s Alan:

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say, “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be.” And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say, “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further and further out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream, where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.

My fondness for Alan Watts is part in part because of my relationship with my shadow. Like my shadow, Alan is the joker; the self-styled philosophical entertainer with a love of good food, wine, women, and song. Alan knew of all the spiritual paths and yet stayed clear of committing to any of them. He saw the truth of the situation and didn’t require a discipline. If you are it why would you need a path?

One more from the genius of Alan Watts about desire:

So anyway, then, this is a drama... I'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it; I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities. I'm not trying to prove it, I'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, this means that you're not victims of a scheme of things, of a mechanical world, or of an autocratic god. The life you're living is what you have put yourself into. Only you don't admit it, because you want to play the game that it's happened to you. In other words, I got mixed up in this world; I had a father who got hot pants over a girl, and she was my mother, and because he was just a horny old man, and as a result of that, I got born, and I blame him for it and say, "Well that's your fault; you've got to look after me," and he says, "I don't see why I should look after you; you're just a result." But let's suppose we admit that I really wanted to get born, and that I was the ugly gleam in my father's eye when he approached my mother. That was me. I was desire.

We are desire and we have the ability to stack the deck in our favour in order to make all our dreams come true. We have been playing the game long enough we don’t want determinative outcomes anymore and thus here we are.