Desire
With desire we find
yet another problematic term, loaded with repressive and antiquated
implications. Desire, attraction, lust are typically rolled out as the bad boys
of the emotional and feeling realm and it is no surprise that such terms and
their Buddhist definitions conjure up notions of chastity, sexual purity and
other dull nonsense considering the Church’s influence still drags on insipidly
here in the West. As anyone with enough life experience knows, passion drives
action, attraction leads us forwards and lust as lustiness is healthy and a
sane part of pleasure in this insane world of messed up ideas regarding sex and
sensual pleasure. If we set aside moral arguments and agree that safe sex is
healthy and a natural part of a healthy adult life, and that religion has no
place entering our sex lives, then when desire emerges as a fetter to be
removed, the question arises – to what is it really referring? Many of the
holier than thou are often the ones with the sexual hang ups and naughty
(abusive) behaviour, so assigning sexual repression the label of holy or
spiritual is deluded. Perhaps the real issue is not rampant crazy desire for
sex, or food, or the latest gadgets and so on, which are really manifestations
of something deeper. If a person has moved through the first stage, desire is
less likely concerned with simple addiction, but is instead bound to the first
fetter of self-identity. The desire to exist, the desire to continue, as we
are, the desire to remain the same, the desire to change as we would like, on
the terms we set out, the desire to be seen as we would like, the desire to be
loved and accepted, and all the other faces of the self seeking its own
recognition, validation, and ultimately, survival, are where the real work
should take place.
Desire is in great
part related to what we are willing to experience as it is bound up with being
obsessed with maintaining identity through the narratives that move attention
and thoughts towards the past and the future. This movement of shifting attention
is infiltrated by other desires for control, for familiarity and for
confirmation of what is assumed, believed and often hidden, often subverted
through distorted attitudes and assumptions. Much of our desire is rooted in
the urge to avoid experiencing a multitude of sensations that upset the
delicate balance we seek to maintain over our limited range self. The immensity
of the still moving present, which contrary to popular belief can actually be
uncomfortable and immensely destabilising when met, involves a particular loss
of the boundaries that occurs when the fictitious self is loosened or dropped
for a period. It can be blissful, we know about this through contemporary
Buddhist claims, but the unnerving aspects concerning lack of certainty is often
not. This is actually connected to a fear of annihilation, which is one of the
rawest faces of the fear of the unknown that we avoid both individually and
collectively.
This approach to desire also encompasses the establishing of boundaries between experiences and sensations. As we engage in attempts at controlling or fabricating specific sets of experience and their accompanying sensations. We are also often involved in attempts at controlling environmental possibilities in order to force or restrict what occurs. This happens primarily through the establishment of patterns that ensure consistency in the range of feelings and sensation we open ourselves to. The habitual behaviour of seeking to fabricate, control and avoid, limits our ability to experience an open relationship with a greater potential variety of experience. We are basically overly selective and afraid of what is unknown and resistant to what is new. Groups and societies function in the same way with fear of the unknown being one of the most powerful binding elements for a community and identity is not only informed by our particular narrative, but is also bound up in group and societal identities and their narratives. Needless to say, there are multiple core narratives that make up our identity and they are drenched in history and ethnocentrism.
This approach to desire also encompasses the establishing of boundaries between experiences and sensations. As we engage in attempts at controlling or fabricating specific sets of experience and their accompanying sensations. We are also often involved in attempts at controlling environmental possibilities in order to force or restrict what occurs. This happens primarily through the establishment of patterns that ensure consistency in the range of feelings and sensation we open ourselves to. The habitual behaviour of seeking to fabricate, control and avoid, limits our ability to experience an open relationship with a greater potential variety of experience. We are basically overly selective and afraid of what is unknown and resistant to what is new. Groups and societies function in the same way with fear of the unknown being one of the most powerful binding elements for a community and identity is not only informed by our particular narrative, but is also bound up in group and societal identities and their narratives. Needless to say, there are multiple core narratives that make up our identity and they are drenched in history and ethnocentrism.
A valid criticism
that is often aimed at spiritual folk is that they too often fail to realise
that they are not necessarily obtaining any degree of genuine freedom or
radical transformation when they engage in a new set of rules within an
alternative spiritual community; formal, traditional, modern or otherwise. They
are simply exchanging one identity for another. Does growth, change,
transformation, healing, etc occur? In many cases it is likely. Unfortunately,
most folk seem to be happy enough to take this redefinition of their identity
and their new shared narratives as the be all and end all of exploring the
dynamics of the self, existence, freedom and so on, and simply settle back into
a new, more comforting form of the status quo in which the new improved version
of self is better able to function. Ideally, shifting social roles and
narratives provides the means for not only finding some balance and sense in a
human life, but for more radical engagement with the edges of what it means to
be human. Too often in spiritual groups there is an inability to recognise
where blind spots occur, where certain sets of experiences, sensations are
avoided and others are solidified collectively. Unspoken agreements on which
behaviours are to be commended or avoided solidify over time into rules and
regulations that instead of guiding individuals to learn and discover
alternative possibilities in behaviour, thinking, feeling, and imagining,
become a gated reality in which the full scope of radical breakthrough
regarding ignorance and suffering and their causes ceases to go deep enough.
The releasing of
desire is in a way the surrender of the habitual conditioned responses to
stimuli so that we are in a constant process of rediscovering experience anew.
There is a constant opening to engagement with the unknown in which the
familiar reoccurs yet reveals a certain vivid uncertainty that runs counter to
expectant perceiving. This is an odd concept in many ways and it is often
coated in flowery rhetoric within spiritual literature. It is not necessary
though to add additional flavours to a description of what is in reality a
serious and honest acceptance of the implications of impermanence. Things are
never really the same twice. There are seeming constants, but they are never
exactly and precisely the same. Because we relate to people, places and
experiences as if they were, we become lazy participants, hooking our attention
onto habitual responses to what is known, shutting out a great deal of what is
happening around us in favour of reigniting familiar feelings, thoughts and
reactions.
Hopefully, it is
clear that this releasing of desire does not relate to intelligent decisions
regarding changes to life style, work, and necessary, pragmatic change. It
really comes down instead to the willingness to experience the loss of solidity
and seeming certainty that this moving present can bring up when experienced
more thoroughly and without the certainties of our contriving behaviour and
self obsession.
In sum, desire as a
fetter may primarily be all about wanting out of full participation in this
still moving moment and the random, multiple and unpredictable experiences of
life. It therefore takes time to loosen, weaken and drop this fetter because
the layers of impulses, aversions and fabricating tendencies towards what is
taking place outside of our control are so well established, and further,
mirror the same collective forces that move around and through us. If radical
change is to be achieved, then happiness, bliss and joy cannot be sold as the only
path fellows on the way. Letting go of desire may have as much to do with
sobriety and facing reality and its loss of enchantment than it does with
chasing after peak experience. Humility and sobriety often emerge as travel
companions yet passivity does not need to accompany them. Rather than consider
this reconfiguration of desire as an act of passive acceptance of everything as
it is, we might see it as an act of waking up to the real circumstances in
which we exist, whilst understanding the limits that are present in our lives
and bodies. This may help us to see what is actually possible in this world and
enable us to take real steps, rather than inhabit inner or outer lands of
escapist indulgence in utopian thinking, daydreaming, or a resignation to hopelessness.
Ill will
Whereas desire might
be understood as a pulling towards of the external in order to solidify one’s
self, ill will might be taken as a pushing against the external in order to
assert that same self. Ill will is interesting because it points to
intentionality and aggression and encapsulates a variety of meanness. In its
most gross manifestation it implies intending suffering towards others and
therefore it refers to an absence of care in our attitudes, thoughts, choices
and actions. Ill will signifies malice, rather than simply reactive anger, rage
or frustration. As it implies aggression, it is linked once again to the notion
of control. Ill will is another face of desire in some respects whether
expressed as the need to do harm, have harm be done, or simply shut down
another through aggression. Ill will often accompanies the need to assert
ourselves, our position and thus solidify cherished beliefs, ideas and
ideological positions: all the manure of the phantom-self. On a deeper level,
ill will is linked to an inability to cope with our sense of self being
challenged, usurped, undermined, pushed, tested, hurt and thus destabilised.
In considering ill
will, it is useful to leave behind the moral weight of Buddhism in order to get
a sense of what is being pointed to. The problem with moral commands and
ethical strait jackets that limit emotions is that they keep you from
understanding what is taking place within those experiences through personal
exposure. To refrain may be useful when our desire or ill will is creating
genuine problems in our lives and hurting others unnecessarily. But if we
simply shut off behaviour, feelings and the movement of expressiveness, we are
in danger of repressing, stifling and condemning what is a part of our very
human experience. Shutting behaviour down is at times an imperative, but is
dysfunctional as an ongoing exploration of the me-making process. As an act of
repression it is unlikely to produce any real insight into why such behaviour
emerges and what it is fed by.
Ill will is not
anger, it is more. Buddhists usually have a bad relationship with anger which
is often a rather unsophisticated approach to a primary emotion. There is often
a sense that passivity is preferable to angry outbursts. The problem with this
is that anger is, if stripped of its defensiveness, basically a form of fuel.
Such fuel is required to produce certain forms of change. Fighting against
injustice, defending yourself from attack, all require a healthy degree of
force. That fierce passion produces action and cuts through complacency too. It
can evolve and become harnessed more effectively, not as a destructive force of
asserting what I believe or sense to be true, but as a stronger participation
in what is taking place in the still moving moment.
Because these two
fetters are weakened at this second stage, but not dismantled, the sense is
that there is further work to do. Whereas stream entry implies breakthroughs,
dismantling and loss, the second stage of the model points to continued opening
to the insights from stage one and their practical application and the need to
engage actively with the obfuscating nature of warped desire and ill will.
Stage three: non-returner
The third stage of
this model points to the elimination of desire and ill will, although frankly
the idea that a human can exist without desire in some form appears deluded. If
a human animal had an absolute absence of desire, wouldn’t they be reduced to
function as a human automaton? Isn’t desire also the wish to be free of
physical pain and discomfort and to want the same for others? Desire is clearly
a multifaceted term, expressing the want to end pain, care for another, learn,
understand, reach out, connect and so forth. If, as has been proposed in the
exploration of the first two stages above, awakening to freedom from emotional
and psychological suffering is rooted in our ability to be in full
participation with the moving present and be devoid of the foundations for
emotional and mental suffering, then desire and ill will necessarily concern
the degree to which we participate and the degree to which the phantom-I is
destabilised, uprooted and eventually shed. Stage three may then be envisioned
in its foundational result as the destruction of impulsive grasping onto what
is not present, and the impulsive pushing away of what is present: it is in
this sense the completion of the second stage.
If there is a
complete absence of these two tendencies then we are basically left with a
quality of sober and direct engagement with whatever is taking place. At this
point, intent arises as a fundamental decision making apparatus and intelligent
choices based on a measured response become the standard for engaging with the
world. We are perhaps left with a question of how to participate, and how to
help if we so choose. If participation is in part to experience fully an
unpredictable and uncordoned range of sensations, then we are without
restraint, more connected to those around us and their poignant plight: others
who, like us, are human animals, all too familiar with suffering, confusion and
the rest.
The third stage of
this model may then imply the culmination of a sufficient amount of work on
unknotting the layers of impulsive reactivity to stimuli that we might define
in terms of attraction and aversion. As we release these knots we become
increasingly cognisant of how those knots are formed and how they are linked to
a need to sustain the phantom-I. These layers are both individual, and
increasingly collective. As we are rebirthed out of this knotty self, we
release the basis for habitual repulsion and pushing away of sensations that do
not fit our previously held list of what was and wasn’t acceptable, we get less
and less concerned about attempting, or for that matter, needing to maintain
any particular state of being, and allow greater and greater freedom to be a
natural expression of ever fuller participation in the moving and shifting
moments and events of the days of our lives. As we open into that freedom we
come to understand that to participate is genuinely to care and that to respond
to the situation of the world is not really a choice. At this point what is
holding us back we might wonder. Onto the fourth stage we go.
Stage four: arahat, awakened person
The final stage and
the goal of sorts is this. It is to be awakened from the illusion and sleep of
the suffering-self and to live free from it within the confines of this world,
this life and this body. It does not seem such a big deal after all and I cannot
help but wonder whether the superlative descriptions, increasingly complex
cosmologies, elaborate descriptions and subsequent social and political
trappings emerge over time in Buddhism as a response to the question of why
bother to go through all this. Dismantling the narrative onto which our sense
of self is grafted is hard work. It places us into conflict with the roles and
identity that are bequeathed to us by the society we are born into. It takes
great effort to see through the claustrophobic walls of the phantom-I and
courage to attempt to break them down. When we are birthed into a world where
the suffering self is a collectively agreed upon modality of existence, albeit
an unwitting one, the project of freeing ourselves from the matrix of interwoven
webs of deceit, inauthenticity, entrapment, frustration, inequality,
confusion, denial and the rest becomes an immense task of shedding the false,
and of deconditioning our thinking, breathing, feeling self from all of the
muddy mess that constitutes the atomistic, phantom I.
I think that the
reification of the awakened state has damaged what is a perfectly human and
perfectly achievable phenomenon. In many ways, it is incredible how we as human
animals have needed to elaborate a relatively simple conclusion into an
immensely elaborate fiction. It is stunningly unfortunate how the machine of
awakening that is Buddhism, has become so incapable of actually freeing people
and how it is even implicit in the act of entrapment and in creating and
sustaining new means of entrapment. To be free of suffering is possible, to be
awakened out of the illusion of separation from this world is possible and
hardly such a big deal in the end. What is left is how to proceed afterwards.
Can you make your life worth a damn? Can you contribute to reducing suffering
and ignorance in the world? In a sense to be awakened is to be liberated into a
full participation in the zeitgeist without you as an atomised self being the
locus.
The final stage has a
series of fetters that are removed. They are in part concerned with desiring
specific realities to exist. The first two sound grand:
1. Desire for existence in the fine-material sphere
2. Desire for existence in the immaterial spheres
3. Conceit
4. Restlessness
5. Ignorance
The knots of the self
are fully undone at this stage and we no longer experience emotional or
psychological suffering and we participate fully in the still moving present.
We no longer wish to fabricate experience as there is no longer a need to
satisfy the phantom-I by affirming its existence through the maintenance of any
sort of norm. Therefore experiences and their basis within sensations are
allowed to exist on their own terms. These are the first two fetters of desire
for a particular form of existence gone. Restlessness is gone because it refers
to needing to be elsewhere, or to force anything in particular to occur.
Ignorance about the nature of suffering, impermanence and the nature of the
human suffering self is no longer an issue, but ignorance about so much else
continues: how could it be otherwise? Or does any remaining reader believe in
omniscience? Conceit concerning itself as it does with exaggerated claims and a
high opinion of oneself seems misplaced here as a fetter, but perhaps it simply
points further to the very human nature of this accomplishment and the fact
that if there is any residue of self-importance emerging in response to
perceived gains that delusion continues to be a bedfellow and we are still
fostering some special mini-me and therefore have more work to do.
