Compassionate View of Desires

Desire is often thought to be something we are entitled to. We live in a society that values permissiveness, but we need to ask ourselves: is it compassionate or even beneficial for parents to allow their children to do whatever they want? Compassion can be firm and unyielding as much as it can be gentle and allowing; it doesn’t necessarily entail allowing people to do whatever they want, whenever they want. But there is more to it than this. Actually refraining from doing what one desires the most or wants can, in itself, be a very joyful experience. Through a process of talking gently and compassionately back to our desires, we can create safe spaces where frustration can be endured and even enjoyed, if we so choose to do so. Even the act of doing something unpleasant can be reframed in a compassionate way so that we can fully embrace the act of doing the unpleasant. It takes practice to be able to do so, but I believe it’s achievable.

Why is it enjoyable to do what we don’t like to do? In order to understand this, we need to know how the mind works. The mind is not bound by categories. Even if I react to a situation by saying “I like this, I don’t like that”, we are really only imposing our previous learned categories. We can be in a situation and not be bound by those old categories, simply because our mind is both the categories and more than these categories. When I relax body and let my mind be completely relaxed as well, I can acknowledge that thoughts are only thoughts. I can then choose to disregard thoughts that are either not appropriate to a situation or are not healthy or conducive to the well being of sentient beings. Anger doesn’t need to be acted upon: it can be seen compassionately as the result of prior conditioning or assumptions, especially around a very limited or narrow sense of self.

To use an example of the latter: many times, a person might be in the habit of thinking that they have things or abilities which belong uniquely to themselves. Hence, we speak of “my habits, my things, my talents”, and so on. What we often might not realize is that everyone around us has the same thoughts about the self or “what belongs to me”, and we are not so unique as we believe in this regard. When I drop the sense that I am this single isolated person with their own “unique” thoughts and ways of being, I can realize that I am not as different from the others as I think. Many of “my” thoughts are actually the result of conditioning that happens from the moment I am born into the world, so I can’t necessarily claim that these thoughts are “my own”, and define “me” as a person. So I start to loosen the idea that I am fixed by my previous ideas or am defined by them.

Just as we consider ourselves unique by our thoughts, so we also identify ourselves with our likes or our wants. I define myself as “a coffee drinker” because I happen to like the taste of coffee, for example. What’s more is that the more I identify with what I like or what I prefer to do, the less tolerant I might be of other ways of being which might threaten that sense of self. In the book Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift satirizes this point by describing two warring factions who are fighting over what side to peel an egg from (the smaller top part or the broader bottom). What happens when we choose to refrain from doing what we desire is that often we become afraid of losing that sense of self which we identify with the desires we have habitually indulged in. It’s no longer a matter of giving up a feeling, but now there is a heavy sense of self invested in that feeling.

To really be able to give up desires, we often need to reflect that there is no concrete enduring self that is “desiring”. Even if I vehemently hate or am irritated with what’s in front of me, or strongly wish for that circumstance to go away, is there really a “self” that is permanently in a state of hatred? Often, what we think is permanent about us is really just a set of conditions; once the conditions are removed, the feeling is no longer there. How and why did we think there was an enduring self to defend there? This is the illusion of the self, which has sometimes been compared to a circle that is created when we twirl a torch of light rapidly. The “circle” is an illusion based on the tendency to connect previous thoughts with present thoughts in time. It’s not a substantially real and enduring circle after all.

It’s therefore not necessary to defend the self that desires something so much. Conversely, it’s not necessary to “train” the self either. Where, after all, is this self? No matter how hard I might try to replace my “bad” thoughts with “good” ones, is there ever an enduring self that permanently embodies good thoughts? Actually, even this good self is illusory, because it’s only an object or a concept that exists in mind. The idea is to know that there is no resting point for the self and to practice questioning whether there really is a self there at all.