The Many Faces of Desire
Lately, after the kangse bell on my Insight timer rings, I find myself instinctively reaching for the iPhone to check Apple News. I’ve been obsessed with reading the news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Russian soldiers fleeing across the border in panic from the onrushing Ukraine army northeast of Kharkiv (yea!). A Ukraine dam and apartment buildings (with people living inside) destroyed by Russian cruise missiles that do not pick or choose who to kill (boo). Vladimir Putin mobilizing new recruits in order to continue his insane war (boo!). The Morality Police in Iran (yes, such a thing exists) shooting and killing unarmed men and woman who are protesting the death of Mahsa Amini, a young girl who died (“mysteriously”) after being arrested for wearing “unsuitable attire” (one thousand boo’s). At the same time, and on a more trivial scale, I have enjoyed watching the US open, cheering for the amazing tennis players (yea!) and being disappointed when they lose (boo!)
As an avid fan of football, it fascinates me how I am programmed to cheer for one team and hope for the defeat of the other. I may have no discernible reason to yell for a team from some unfamiliar town in Iowa, or against their opponents from some team in Idaho, but within a few minutes I’m cheering for one team and booing the other. Every Saturday this fall, at least as many as ten of our largest football stadiums in America will be filled with 100,000 fans screaming with delight when the home team scores, all the while looking as if they lost their mother when the home team fumbles. There were one hundred and one thousand screaming fans in Knoxville, Tennessee last Saturday. We sure love to win, don’t we?
These were a few of the conflicting, unruly thoughts running through my mind when I gave a talk on the many faces of desire at Long Beach Meditation a few Sundays ago.
Since the talk was on September 11, I had already been thinking about one face of desire, a face so terrible that we instinctively turn away from it. There are many interpretations for the Buddhist term “vibhava tanha,” but to me, vibhava tanha connotes desire turned in on itself, similar to what Freud called Thanatos: a nihilist wish to contract into extinction. Its opposite face is bhava tanha, a desire to expand, or increase. It’s the face of Eros, driven by the desire to exist; to survive; to grow; to WIN; to increase in knowledge, wealth, or in the case of Vladimir Putin, to expand one’s territory. Perhaps even the Buddha was caught in the desire for spiritual enlightenment until, on the brink of physical extinction, he saw desire’s true face, and let it go entirely.
How can we imagine the mind of those men who spent months carefully planning and executing the horror of 9/11? How can we even imagine the mind of so many young boys and men who murder innocent children in school rooms, or at malls filled with shoppers simply buying groceries? I think we cannot. In the Dharma talk, I read some lines from my favorite poem, "The Still Time, where the poet talks about desire that has been endlessly thwarted and unrequited. He says,
“I remember those summer nights
when I was young and empty,
when I lay through the darkness
wanting, wanting,
knowing
I would have nothing of anything I wanted —
that total craving
that hollows the heart out irreversibly.”
“That total craving that hollow the heart irreversibly.” This is the dark face of desire.
I began the talk on desire with my favorite story about Carl Jung, who, in 1937, left Zurich for an extended tour of India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Arriving in Colombo in1938, he met and talked with Bhikkhu Kassapa Thera (formerly Cassius A Pereira). To my knowledge and in spite of the voluminous literature written about Jung, not to mention the twenty volume set of his own amazing work, I do not believe another written account of this extraordinary meeting and dialogue exists, other than that of the monk’s fascinating description, and other than that of a certain obscure book titled, “The Bare Bones of the Buddha’s Teaching.”
“Professor Charles (sic) G. Jung of Zurich, who was in Colombo lately told me that as a student of comparative religion he believed that Buddhism was the most perfect religion the world has seen. The philosophy of Buddha, the theory of evolution and the law of karma were far superior to any other creed. But even so eminent a psychologist, not knowing our Abhidhamma, stated that, ‘in every religion the powers of the subconscious mind were represented by gods and demons. The actual psyche,’ said Jung, ‘is really unconscious, and greater experience would impress us of the fact that the consciousness of man is like a little island floating in an ocean.’ ”Greater experience with the facts of Buddhist philosophy would shew Prof. Jung that actuality is something very different to what he dreams, and the consciousness of a being is more like an octopus, at the bottom of an ocean, grabbing and grasping now this, now that, its suckerel tentacle ever seeking to feed that greedy mouth.”
“Our Abhidhamma” refers to the enormous body of commentaries on the Buddha’s sermons, written after his death, by Buddhist teachers, scholars and philosophers over the course of many hundreds of years. Perhaps the most famous commentary, the “Visuddhimaggga,” (The Path of Purification) by Buddhagosha, was written almost one thousand years after the Buddha’s death. Most likely, Buddhagosha’s commentary was what the monk alluded to, especially since it was, and still is, so highly valued in Buddhist Sri Lanka. In any case, Bhikkhu Kassapa had no idea whether Jung was familiar with the Abhidhamma or not, and given the prodigious depth and breadth of Jung’s knowledge (his modest self appraisal “as a student of comparative religion” notwithstanding), my bet is that Jung was quite aware of this important work.
What was Jung’s reaction to the monk’s startling metaphor? Undoubtedly he nodded politely, and made the appropriate comment, but did the monk’s assertion that consciousness can be imagined as a greedy octopus sitting at the bottom of the ocean really move the great psychologist? And what was the monks reaction behind an appropriate and perhaps enigmatic Buddhist smile? Also, one wonders if the monk’s “forgetting” the famous psychologist’s first name may have had a trace of that very unconscious he seemed to dismiss so readily. Sadly, this was not a wonderful Zen story of two arrows meeting in midair! If anything, both arrows flew past Korea.
My first reaction to the monk’s metaphor was decidedly negative. Reading his account of their dialogue in a small, worn book in the library at Insight Meditation Society while on a long retreat, felt jarring, even alien to me. But I was so struck by it that I hastily scribbled the monk’s words on a scrap of paper, and eventually carried it home with me to New York. Ten years later, I still had that scrap of paper and was able to use the story of the monk and the psychologist in a paper for Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. To this day, I consider their dialogue a seminal confrontation between two very different views of consciousness, East and West, and I continue to ponder the Buddhist metaphor of desire as an octopus.
To most of us children of our European culture, the word “desire” has a rather neutral or benign connotation; in fact, it probably elicits a slightly positive feeling.
While pondering how we imagine desire, I remembered a verse from the Psalms, which, along with many other musicians through the ages, I once set to music:
“Like as a hart desireth the water brook, so longeth my soul after thee, oh God.”
That verse has been chanted or sung by thousands of choirs and congregations since the early days of Christianity, and the wordless sense of the soul’s longing, is profoundly embedded in our psyche. Indeed, the amazing story of Jung’s inner search and journey, as recounted in The Red Book, is the story of his attempt to reconnect to his soul. And what is more engrained in our culture than the words and melody of Bach’s beautiful, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring?”
But I wonder if we in the West have simply deleted the negative connotation of desire from our collective unconscious? Is it possible to yell and scream for the home team to win without craving?
The Buddhist (Pali) word for desire is “tanha,” and its most common translation in English is “thirst.” If the Psalm read “like as a hart thirsts for the water brook,” I don’t think this would disturb our sensibility. Do you? But what if the words were “like as a hart craves the water brook?” Perhaps we would have a slightly negative reaction. In the Buddhist tradition, tanha connotes craving and thirst. They are synonymous terms. When one is in a desert, craving is intrinsic to thirst, if one cannot find water.
“Inevitability” is precisely what the Buddha saw when his mind opened to the Real. In the Buddhist tradition. It is said that he sat through the three watches of the night: from dusk to 10 pm; from 10 pm to 2 am; and from 2 am to dawn. With the appearance of the morning star, his mind completely awakened to the Real. As simple as it may seem, “inevitability” describes how thirst, unnoticed by mindfulness, can become a craving octopus. What the Buddha saw is called “dependent origination,“ by some teachers or “conditioned co-arising” by others. They mean precisely the same thing.
Permit me to moan for just a moment: The Pali word for conditioned co-arising is paticcasamuppada. My eyelids might start to feel heavy at reading the word “conditioned co-arising,” but, by the time my eyes see “paticcasumppada,” they might be entirely closed! These terms, not to mention the concepts they represent, are very alien to our culture, which is why our conditioned Western minds tend to doze off when encountering them. However, for those of us who are still slightly awake, there can be no detour around what the Buddha saw in the dawn of his awakening, and if the realization of dependent origination, (conditioned co-arising) is what opened his mind to Reality, the least we can do is be mindful of an innate resistance to alien ideas and concepts.
In describing dependent origination, the Buddha saw that everything that arises in experience depends on something else. Hence his famous statement: “There being this, that exists; with the arising of this, that arises.” His first question was, “why do we die?” The answer came immediately. “Because we are born.” Inevitability. He saw dependent origination as a chain of 12 links (nidanas) that define our existence from birth to death, and from one lifetime to the next one. Dependent origination is also called the Twelve Nidanas.
Leaving no doubt about the pivotal centrality of dependent origination, the Buddha said, “One who see dependent arising sees the Dharma and one who sees the Dharma sees dependent arising.” I think that would be called a tautology in philosophy, and could a statement be more definitive than that? He also said another remarkable thing: dependent origination is sanditthika and akalika, meaning that it is immediately visible (sanditthika), and it is not bound by time (akalika). When I imagine the twelve links I always see them as a bolt of lightening flashing across the dark sky, immediately visible and seeming to occur at once. We will leave an attempt to unpack his meaning for another day, but I cannot resist adding Nisargadatta’s pointer that “what takes time is false.”
Let us return to tanha as seen through the monk’s eyes. It is the eighth link in the chain of dependent origination, and if we follow the Buddha’s teaching of interdependence, we know that tanha must depend on something else in order to arise in our consciousness. What is that “something else?” Desire depends on vedana, which is the Pali word for feeling. Vedana is nidana number seven. It is the loom from which the threads of desire emerge.
According to the Buddha, the mind feels! I added an exclamation point because the idea that the mind feels may be news to some of us. This is not to deny that we are also thinking creatures, but that is hardly any news at all. That we think has been a well established fact since Descartes’s famous announcement, not to mention Aristotle. But beyond the purview of poets, our culture did not open to the importance and reality of feeling as a function until the emergence of a new discipline called Psychology at the turn of the last century. We tend to confuse sensation and feeling and use them interchangeably, but, actually, sensation is how the mind processes physical information (sensations) from the body. “I feel bad,” is, most likely, a statement about body aches or an upset stomach, and not really a statement about how the mind feels. To realize that when you say I feel bad” you are probably referring to body sensations, and then to see the corresponding mental feeling (i.e. unpleasant) is a powerful moment of mindfulness.
This is fascinating. I tend to think that we think about ourselves as thinking rather than feeling creatures, and notice that there are three “thinks” in this sentence. Meditators soon learn that one seems to think all the time: big thoughts, bright thoughts, trivial thoughts, ugly thoughts, lustful thoughts, loving thoughts, endless thoughts. But in truth, we are also feeling (vedana) creatures who slowly developed the capacity to reason and think over the span of thousands of years.
I’m inclined to believe that our species becomes human with the arising of the seventh nidana. One cannot “think” empathy. Not really. Empathy is a feeling, not a thought. Compassion is a profound feeling, however much the ego may try to think itself into such a state. Ultimately, it is vedana, the capacity to feel, that connects us person to person, heart to heart, mind to mind.
According to Buddhist teaching, every experience is felt as either positive, negative or neutral. This is difficult for us to grasp, because, over thousands of years, the thinking brain has become lord and master of our awareness. In other words, the thinking function has become so loud it drowns out the softer music of feeling.
We feeling creatures want more of what feels good, and we want it to stay longer. From wanting more comes thirst (nidana number eight). We want less of something that feels bad and, if possible, try to push it away. When we cannot get rid of something that causes psychic pain, we get anxious, angry, act out, or sink into depression. We are drawn to politicians, ideas, religions, movements that feel good, convincing ourselves that our attraction is rational and intelligent. In other words, that we “thought” about it. And we throw rocks at politicians, ideas, religions, movements that feel bad, again, convinced that we are objective, rational beings who “thought’ about it. All of our reactivity comes from the arising of desire which, as dependent origination clearly indicates, depends on feeling.
But wait! There’s more (God help us). Inevitability does not “harden” until craving has morphed into grasping, or upadana, which is nidana number nine on the hit parade. Upadana is most frequently translated as “appropriation.” In fact, Upadana is the greedy octopus sitting at the bottom of the ocean, “grabbing and grasping now this, now that, its suckerel tentacle ever seeking to feed that greedy mouth.” Grasping is what is left when the heart is hollowed out irreversibly. When we have finally succeeded in grasping the desired object, it owns us completely. This is the very essence of addiction.
As mentioned earlier, I suggested that we become truly human with the arising of the seventh link of vedana or feeling, but this is my opinion only. All of the previous six nidanas have a robotic, machine-like quality. In fact, the first six nidanas are much like a product moving along the factory line. This is why the word “inevitability” seemed appropriate to me. But there is one factor arising in the mind that is an antidote to the inevitability of a mechanical process. That factor is mindfulness, which I suspect first arises as a possibility with the faculty of feeling. (Again, my opinion only.) Feelings will only hook us when they occur unnoticed, and, by definition, mindfulness gives us the ability to see, in reflection, our own experience, moment by moment. In other words, with the arising of mindfulness, we are not lost in immediate experience, whatever that may be. The mind can step back just enough to see (reflect) the experience in consciousness. Without one doubt, this is the Buddha’s very good news. More importantly, it is the Buddha’s path (magga) out of the desert.
My favorite teacher of the Buddhadharma is a Buddhist monk named Nanavira Thera, who, until World War II, was part of the Intelligence Corps of the British Army. (Later he called that an oxymoron.) He left England shortly after the war and became a monk in Sri Lanka. Speaking about nidana number one, avijja or delusion, he said that we can never pull it out of the mind like a nail. We can only unscrew it.
I have relied on Nanavira’s teaching of dependent origination for years, and by the way, Jung would have been interested to know that Nanavira had no use for the monk’s Abhidhamma, saying that it was full of contradiction and misunderstanding of what the Buddha actually taught. Unfortunately, neither did Nanavira have a high opinion of Jung’s insistence that the unconscious is a psychic reality. But who’s perfect?
Here is what Nanavira said about a person stuck on a speeding train. “a man in blind revolt is like someone in a railway compartment trying to stop the train by pushing against the opposite seat with his feet.” It is only mindfulness that tells us that we are on the speeding train of twelve nidanas, hurtling toward an inevitable train wreak. It is mindfulness only that tells us that blind revolt is a colossal waste of time.
I close with a poem by Rumi who knew something about blind revolt:
“Break the legs
of what I want to happen, Humiliate
my desire. Eat me like candy.
It’s spring and finally
I have no will.”
