Chapter 5

 

DESIRE

 

The mind is burning with craving.

—The Buddha

 

One of the biggest obstacles for meditation is sensual craving. Any kind of sense craving can be an obstacle, as was cited in depth in the Chapter on celibacy. One way of overcoming sensual craving is to live a very simple, pragmatic and frugal life, not accumulating material possessions, and giving or throwing away anything that is unnecessary or will bog you down, such as objects that require maintenance, time, effort, energy, and care. Also, it means living a life of service, being generous, being a giver instead of a taker, giving without expectations of any kind; doing this skillfully and wisely.

Then there is the problem of clutching, expectation, and attachment to outcome. In some ways we are like the Rhesus monkey, who was shown the jar of peanuts with an opening the size of the monkey’s out-stretched hand. As the monkey inserted his hand into the jar to grab a handful of nuts, he had to make a fist, which then could not fit the size of the hole to get his hand out from the jar. The monkey was unable to let go of the peanuts and would cling, and as a result would starve.

One has to discern between healthy desires and unhealthy desires, such as a desire for a wholesome goal vs. cravings and attachments. This is what is needed for seeking enlightenment.

One time a man approached the Buddha and asked, isn’t the desire to end desire a paradox? The Buddha said, no its not, it’s just like you had a splinter, you would use a needle to remove it, and then throw away both the splinter and the needle. But without the needle you can’t remove the splinter.

For a layperson, there is nothing wrong with desire or sensual pleasure, as long as the intention behind it does not hurt others or oneself, or create more binding and craving.

There is an important distinction between sense pleasure and desire. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the senses as long as there is no attachment or craving or dependency on sensual pleasure for one’s happiness. The ego can exist without desires, but it won’t be happy.

The ego, the false sense of self, is created and sustained by desires and by multiplying and accumulating new desires. These desires, cravings, and emotional yearnings are like gasoline; they are the energy the ego thrives on. If you carefully watch yourself you will find that you are constantly setting up projects—things to accomplish, to know, and to have. The ego thrives on getting these cravings satisfied, like a kind of emotional reward. Each reward gives the brain a little rush of satisfaction; a high from what it considers as achieving something. Evolutionary psychologists say that our brains are hardwired for desire as the mechanism for overcoming any obstacle that stands in the way of survival.

In this way man has barely evolved beyond the orangutan and grabbing at food, going to war, competing with other apes over bananas and sexual companions, constantly reacting out of impulses and deep instincts for survival. Physiologists say that our biological systems are programmed to desire, and that every cell in our bodies is hardwired by this instinct. Our strongest biological drive is to live—to satisfy our hunger for food and sex, followed by the desire for power over others, and the greater the hunger, the stronger the drive to satisfy that desire.

So the problem with sex is that no matter how many times you have it, the odds are you will never exhaust wanting more of it. Have it 50,000 times, and you will want it 50,000 and one more times. This has also been proven with neuro-scientists implanting electrodes in rats, monkeys, and other sentient species, into their hypothalamus. They could never get satisfied and would exhaust themselves.

So even if you are 105 years old or a Zen master, this craving doesn’t necessarily go away when you get older. This was proven with older rats as well.

For example, one old Zen master would touch his female students’ private body parts as a form of teaching them ‘non-attachment,’ or have them massage his own privates as a Zen koan (a paradoxical riddle of some kind).

I was once told of a Western contemporary non-dual teacher who visited child prostitutes in India in the mornings and gave satsang in the evening. I also know of another who would expose himself to his students as he recited the Bhagavad Gita. That he would tell them to take their clothes off as soon as they became enlightened, since it’s all non-dual awareness, Brahman, or sat-chit-ananda. I was told as well of another who taught ‘sacred tantra,’ having sex with his students, but only if they were pretty, not fat or ugly. The fat and the ugly ones would only get satsang.

The problem is as the Buddha pointed out: having sex will lead to more craving for sex because sex is very powerful drug. It’s like drinking seawater; the more you drink the thirstier you become.

Test and brain scans reveal a moment between consciousness and unconsciousness while men and woman are looking at images of the opposite sex in bathing suits. There is a moment when the attention is focused solely on the reward and everything else suddenly doesn’t exist in their awareness. This is called the ‘sexual zone,’ where the mind/body complex gets high-jacked by overpowering cravings and feelings. This can also apply to eating food, gambling, playing the stock market, or other forms of addictive behavior.

That is why the only way is to stop the cravings though mindfulness until the craving disappears, or to replace it with something even better like jhana, which is a 1000 times more powerful and more pleasurable than any kind of sex, drugs, fame, power, or anything else.

The problem is, Zen type meditation is not exactly jhana meditation, since the practitioner only sits for short periods of time, with the eyes open, usually not long enough for these ecstatic states to arise. In order to do this the mind has to be perfectly still.

With jhana, if you practice properly, you can become free from craving sex, since it is much better than sex, and also because it seems to alter your biochemistry as well, and the bliss derived from this lasts for very long periods of time. The Catch 22 is you usually have to be temporarily celibate for this to truly arise and to reap its full benefits.

Additionally, there can be the craving or desire to acquire material objects. It has been scientifically proven and tested that many highly ambitious men have higher than average testosterone levels. There are studies that reveal a correlation between high testosterone levels and physical strength and an increase in dopamine levels that result in over-confidence. This is where the need and insatiable desire stems from to buy more unnecessary material objects, more than one needs to survive, such as excessive amounts of clothing, fashion accessories, furniture, jewelry, multiple vacation houses, cars, and so on. The brains of these individuals may have increased testosterone levels and they may be addicted to dopamine spikes. In other words, a brain severely out of balance and attempting to regain itself through external objects that have nothing at all to do with survival.

The Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan once said:

“The desire to live is not only found among human beings, but is also seen through the most insignificant of creatures creeping on the earth and living on the ground. When one sees how even the smallest insect wishes to avoid any pursuit after it, and how it seeks shelter against any attempt made to be touched, for it fears that its life may be taken away from it.”[1]

Some desires stem from the yearning to exist, to live—to survive, to feel secure, to be assured of being protected from the elements. These types of desires are referred to as instinctual desires or ‘needs.’ In the West, people speak of having ‘needs’ as if their lives depended on them. They may say to someone, “You are not meeting my needs,” and then expect others to do things for them.

What one fundamentally needs for survival is subjective and relative. One man may be content and satisfied with his life situation of living in a cardboard box, while another needs not only one mansion but many mansions, since his desires are endless. Desires depend on what you are seeking and not everyone is seeking nirvana or enlightenment. Most are in search of pleasure and what feels good through the six senses. They believe that life’s external pleasures are what bring happiness.

Sigmund Freud’s insightful theories on human motivation have been called psychological hedonism. His supposition on ‘life instinct’ is essentially the observation that people will pursue pleasure to no end. Freud said that the pleasure principle is universal, that it guides us in virtually everything we do whether we are consciously aware of it or not. The pleasure principle states that people are driven to seek pleasure and to avoid pain and any aversions based on memory and previous experiences. One drive is to continually pull pleasure towards us while the other drive is to repel anything painful. This is also what the Buddha taught 2,500 years ago.

Problems and frustrations arise is when eventually we become aware that these pleasures only bring a momentary consolation, a temporary fix that has to be constantly renewed once the novelty wears off. The reality is that this black hole can never be filled. It’s like shoveling snow into a well. Once seen, one becomes aware of the Sisyphus within, pushing a gigantic boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again. A life of endless desires becomes futile.

The key is to be aware of this problem and to let go, to be satisfied and content with our lot. Whatever it is, accept and make the most of it. See it as a gift no matter what it is and know your karma, your own actions, are what brought this lot to you in the first place.

Next, don’t blame others for whatever has been done to you.

Sri Nisargadatta spoke to the fact that most people are miserable because they have what they don’t want and want what they don’t have. He suggested, very simply, “Just invert this. Want what you have and don’t want what you don’t have.” 

Continue to Part 6