Reduce your wants and supply your needs. Our needs make us vulnerable enough. Why increase our vulnerability? – M. K. Gandhi
Welcome to the season where the machinery of human avarice walks and talks: Christmas. Unchecked desires stalk us, weakening our moral immune system and enabling all kinds of embarrassing acts, such as unchecked acquisition.
My thesis for this post is that we are the products of our desires, and often this means the unwitting slaves of our unexamined desires. Using street language with my students, I say, “We’re all prostitutes – every last one of us; some of us command higher prices, and some of us walk the streets.”
Desires are good only when understood how they work on us, how they get submerged into our inner souls, and then merge with thoughts and emerge as behavior. Unexamined desires are always bad. Always. There is no "Ignorance is bliss" place to stand. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” according to Socrates.
Let’s say that a particular desire influences you. It could be anything, but the Big Three are power, money and sex. However, in this case, you are blissfully unaware of this desire. For example, one could be unconsciously desirous of acceptance. Needy acceptance. And so, one goes through life stumbling in relationships because one’s unexamined neediness takes up all the oxygen. Nothing healthy can thrive. All the resources go to feeding one’s unexamined neurosis. And one wonders why one is so alone.
Buddhism is the world’s foremost faith for directly confronting desire. Its first teaching is that our #1 problem is unchastened desires. Until we solve this we will be revolving around our own self-ignorance, and such ignorance is always – at some level – freely chosen. Oh, we can rationalize it a hundred ways, but there’s always a moment when we caved, and “settled” for enslavement over freedom.
I mention Buddhism because it is perhaps our world’s most sophisticated technology to uncover desire. Becoming desireless is so important that the faith cites one’s destiny is staked upon it. Its program for becoming desireless is relentless self-examination to see how desire taints even what we think is our best. Even the desire to be a self-actualized individual can be rendered suspect because of the motives involved.
Here’s what’s at stake for us all. Proceeding through life without adequate self examination of desire renders us – as individuals, as societies, and even as nations – vulnerable. The places of our unrebuked desire map out our vulnerabilities, opening us up to exploitation. Repeat that sentence until it makes sense; it cannot be emphasized enough.
Unknown and unresolved desires are our addictions; there’s no difference. And so we go pell-mell into our world, in denial, wreaking havoc in far-flung places we understand even less than our desires, and we lose wars because we know not why we go to war. We are rendered not just vulnerable but impoverished by our desires. Plato warned: Poverty is not the absence of goods, but rather the overabundance of desire.
The person or nation driven by undisputed desires is a puppet, a non-living human-like figure. The puppet knows not what wires or strings have been inserted into its body, and so it hasn’t an inkling of who controls the business ends of those tethers. Ignorant puppets we are, denying what makes us behave as we do.
The addicted are sad because of their enslavement to desire. My desires are perhaps obvious to all (save myself). Understood desires, however, are no longer controlling addictions, but rather, tools. Desires reveal who we are, and that often must be very sad news before it becomes good.
Please feel invited to comment on the relationship between ignorance, desire and vulnerability in your own life.
