Is desire bad?
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment
Those who have investigated their sense of self through meditation, including Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Zen Buddhists, students of Advaita-Vedanta, and so on, have read about desire being the cause of suffering. And yet, all of the great teachings from enlightened sages speak of something that seems quite contradictory. These sages teach that desire is needed to find out who you truly are. Confused seekers are left puzzled: Is desire bad or good?
A PBS article on Buddhism notes, “In Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering.” And the Dali Lama said, “All beings are united by the desire to gain happiness and avoid suffering.” He also said, “Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for, and attachment to, things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.” Hindu teachings tell us, “According to the Upanishads, when organs are put to selfish use, a person becomes impure. For this, desires are the root cause.”
Sages have also taught that the mind is responsible for all our problems. What are we to make of these two inescapable factors — the mind and desires—that are part and parcel of our lives? Are they good or bad?
Double-edged swords
Desire and the mind are double-edged swords. Hold onto this thought for a moment…
There is really one mind, despite how psychology has split it into several components — the Id, ego, superego, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. However, much of what we read by sages such as Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta, HWL Poonja, Ramana, and others, discuss the mind as a problematic nonentity, a shadow. But this mind that they are discussing is the mind that has been psychologically conditioned by all sorts of ideas, information, experiences, memories, and so on. This psychological conditioning leads to the belief that you are an individual separate from the whole fabric of life. It also leads to the belief that you are connected, attached, and identified with possessions, ideas, memories, relatives, a race, gender, the body, objects, pets, nature, religion, nationality, and so on.
It is the conditioned mind that is the problem, and not the mind itself. If you were to get rid of all conditioning then the mind would still exist. But if you got rid of your mind somehow then you would no longer be able to navigate this world, know where you live or how to drive a car, recognize friends and relatives, communicate, and all the rest.
It is the conditioned mind that causes suffering, because it desires many things, chief of which are to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Such a mind is lost in this enterprise, unable to escape as long as the conditioned mind is in control. By analogy, we may say that your computer has been manufactured to “think,” to process information, provide answers, communicate with others, and solve problems, to name a few functions. But if the wrong information is programmed into your computer then it will not function optimally and will give you problems. Whether programmed correctly or not, the computer itself does not change; it’s still a computer. So a mind is a mind, whether it is conditioned or not, and all of us have had different conditioning. This conditioning leads to our suffering.
What can you do about this conditioned mind?
If the mind is used to stamp out desire then this is an act of control so that neither the mind nor desire are eliminated. The mind that is able to control desire may believe that it is capable and victorious, yet this pride and sense of accomplishment is just an artifact of the egoic mind, the sense of self. When the mind finds its own source and realizes that it is no more than a belief from an accretion of tightly held thoughts, then it neither seeks to destroy desire or to entertain desire. The mind then gives way to consciousness and there is a realization that the real doer and actor in life has been consciousness all along.
Consciousness is the singular totality of all that is, including creation, destruction, thoughts, actions, the mind, deeds, phenomena, objects, nature, animals, your body and all your ideas, and pretzels, to name a few of its contents. This is the real you as a living being. What you discover when you break the veil of ignorance caused by the conditioned mind is that everything and everyone is an expression of consciousness. That is, we are all versions of one movement called consciousness.
And what about desire?
Desire is a natural process of thinking. It has practical implications. Ironically, it is the very feeling or thought that leads a few people to seek the source of their own beingness. It also leads people to explore, create, and solve problems.
Desire is not bad and it is not good; it just is. The desire of the egoic self is a different matter, however. This kind of desire feeds into the illusion that happiness and the end of suffering can come from entertainment, scientific theories, education, information, knowledge, distractions, sex, conquest, gambling, drugs, alcohol, violence, intense pleasure, eating, acquiring possessions, outdoing others in physical or mental competition, and all other matter of distraction from facing one’s own ignorance borne of psychological conditioning. It is this type of desire that perpetuates the illusion that keeps one focused upon all impermanent matters of the self.
By desire, Buddhists refer to craving pleasure, material goods, and immortality, all of which are wants that can never be satisfied. These desires can only bring suffering.
