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awesome, watch motion comic
This thirst for experience reminds one of a person stumbling in the desert without water, yearning for satiation. Again and again, we view the mirage oasis, shimmering just over the next dune. We see the objects of desire and run toward them, forgetting all else, imagining that at last the thirst will be slaked. We run to the mirage only to find there is no end to this thirst. Each desire seems like another mirage beckoning just over the next rise.
Each mirage only intensifies our thirst, only sharpens our desire. We see that the satisfaction of desire does not make desire disappear but only hones its cutting edge. Eventually, like that man wandering in the desert, we come to see that the mirage is a mirage. Only a dream of satisfaction. Even as we awaken from this dream, seeing that lasting satisfaction is not to be found in the ever-changing mind, the mirage yet remains. Though we run to it less often for satisfaction.
When at last we recognize the emptiness of such visions, though desire still arises in the mind, we no longer cling to it as the only reality. We notice how our thirst creates the mirage and maintain our direction without falling, without losing our path.
When desire is present it narrows the mind’s capacity. It causes mind to contract in expectation to a single goal. Acquisition of the objects of thought and imagination causes temporary satisfaction and increasing thirstiness. Letting go of thought and imagination is called freedom. It is a going to the wellsprings within, in which satisfaction may be found. Freedom seeks to satisfy nothing. No thirst.
Desire is unfinished business. Whatever has its goal in the future is an incomplete transaction with life. But if thirst is seen as thirst, business becomes finished in
the moment of letting go. The mirage is broken. It no longer seems like “my” desire. Something solid about which something must be done. Seeing the impersonality of desire, we are less likely to become lost in the compulsion to satisfy.
An interesting quality that can be noticed about desire, about wanting, is that what is called satisfaction only occurs in the moving from not having to having. Satisfaction is a moment of release from the pressure of wanting.
Indeed, when desire or any object draws our attention in the mind, it is so seductive, so magnetic, that the awareness, the spaciousness of the natural mind, closes around it. Then the whole of our experience is of that desire, a thirst for that object only.
Attempting to satisfy the directives of the mind, we notice that even the objects of desire exist within change. Satisfaction is short-lived. The object of desire decays, grows old, evaporates, and disappears. Sometimes in years, sometimes in a split second. And we are left with an unfulfilled emptiness. A life guided by desire, a life contracted to the mind’s thirst, seldom has the spaciousness of being. That pure awareness which wants nothing, which yearns for nothing, which simply takes on the shape of whatever form comes within its natural spaciousness.
Awareness could be said to be like water. It takes on the shape of any vessel that contains it. If one mistakes this awareness for its various temporary forms, life becomes a ponderous plodding from one moment of desire, from one object of the mind, to the next Life becomes filled with urgency and the strategies of fear, instead of lightly experiencing all these forms, recognizing that water is water no matter what its form.
What we usually call happiness is the ability to re-create previous pleasures. The pursuit of happiness is the attempt to satisfy old desires. The very nature of desire is a feeling of unwholeness, of being incomplete. We see that this thirst creates what could be called the “if only” mind. The yearning that says, “If only I could get my sports car, I’d be happy.” “If only I could get that job, or that date, or that money I need, then everything would be O.K.” But to the degree the mind wants that object yet unmaterialized in its world, the less it can be present for what is happening. It is drifting off in future pleasures or musing on satisfactions past. The whole world narrows to just that desire, just that sports car, that prize, that pretty face. The whole world disappears into expectation and life is missed once again, traded off for a mirage floating in the mind. We seldom make direct contact with reality, but instead live only in the flat silhouettes that it casts in the mind.
Desire can be quite painful because it is a feeling of not having, a wish for something more. The present is unsatisfactory because it does not contain the desired object. The greater the desire, the more dissatisfaction is experienced.
It doesn’t matter what the object of desire is, it is the closing of awareness around that object which causes us to lose our spaciousness, the loss of ease in our life. It is not the object of desire that matters, it is desire itself that closes the mind, that creates pain.
Desire is a product of latent tendencies in the mind. Old imprints left from previous experience. A memory of the pleasant which the mind attempts to re-create. A pulling away from remembrances of dissatisfaction. Memory creates desire as well as fear, a yearning for things to be other than they are. Every thought or feeling or perception that arises in the mind passes through this filter of unconscious preferences and tendencies. The mind is in a constant roller-coaster state of reaching out for and pushing away its contents. In restless agitation, mind seeks the peace that it knows only in the momentary satisfaction of the absence of desire.
Our work is not to acquire new goodies or even to “be a better person,” but simply to let go of the seeming solidity of the mind. Desire has been so deeply cultivated by our constant attention and mistaken identity with it that as we awaken we see how deeply entrenched this thirstiness is and how fearfully the mind reacts to a life without desire to guide it. Our desires give us something to do in an arbitrary world where only our doing seems of any value. Letting go of what blocks our being means to begin to play lightly with desire. Not to make it such a serious business.
And the question arises, “Why keep playing with the fulfillment of every desire? Why not cut out the middleman and go directly to the source of satisfaction within?”
As we begin to let go of identification with the mind, we discover that there are other means of uncovering the natural satisfactoriness of the mind’s essential spaciousness. Occasionally, in deep introspection, in meditation, or in a moment of quiet, we open beyond our clinging and the mind becomes so unclouded that nothing blocks its inherent joy. Its expanse is so great that waves of energy wash through the body making any satisfaction we’ve ever had, even our profoundest sexual gratification, pale by comparison. The natural energy of the mind is released. Grasping has stilled long enough so that we experience the immensity and intensity of our deepest nature. We experience the joy of what in Zen is called the One Mind, shining through.
Quietly observing desire, we notice how the mind imagines that if only it could get something more, somehow it would be enough. We see the mirage of the “if only” mind, fantasizing “a beautiful life.” But we notice when we meet people who are actually happy that they are not happy because of what they have, but rather because of what they are. They are lighthearted because they have touched within themselves the great source of satisfaction.
There is a song that has a line, “I’ve not seen one rich man in a thousand with a satisfied mind.” Happi
ness is not bought. Happiness is our very nature. It comes from the constant letting go of what causes suffering. It seems to come to those who dive deeply into life, into the investigation of being itself. As we grow, we become like a man crossing a frozen lake in spring, learning to walk lightly. As the ice begins to thaw, the going becomes more precarious. And we learn to distribute our weight in a more balanced manner so that our density is well dispersed, rather than concentrated on a single thin area through which we will fall if we are not mindful.
Examining the possibility of walking lightly in this world is the recognition that life need not be suffering, need not be grasping. We begin to make an art of life, to walk, as the American Indian said, in “a sacred manner,” to develop a reverence for life which does not seek self-satisfaction, but simply is as it is, edgeless and unending, containing everything, lacking nothing. It is in recognition of the pain caused by our thirst for the little satisfactions of little desires that we are led to the great satisfaction of the great desire: freedom from the mind’s incessant wandering and thirst.
The search for happiness is the seeking of our original nature. It is the search for fulfillment that goes beyond a limited sense of self, an identification with the bubbles of the mind. A life led by satisfaction of little desires is a life of suffering. We might even say that satisfaction cannot be found in the world of desires, but is only to be found in the uncovering of our true nature.
We come to see the difference between the desire for self-satisfaction, the identification with the mind, and another quality of mind which is a motivation toward freedom. For lack of a better term, we can call this motivation desire as well. But it is not the little desire of old preferences, it is the great desire of liberation. The desire which reminds itself to let go of desires. It is a sense of presence that does not look elsewhere for satisfaction. It investigates the mind without judgment or force. Desires are seen within this patient openness, without the least identification, arising and passing away all by themselves.
Nonattachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.
brilliantly written/spoken- true words
terrific :
"Use of events (dynamics) of this era...to justify recommendations that ...contemporaries should discard its uniquely evolved institutions and doctrines and instead simply imitate... Not only is such abuse of history invalid from an academic standpoint, it is also dangerous from a political and philosophical perspective. "
"inaccurately represent the facts".. "superpose analytical parameters on situations..that occurred before these parameters were formulated"