A personal blog post about the meaning of giving up desires.
In Buddhist circles, enlightenment is the giving up of desires that cause suffering. Satori is the sudden experience of awakening to a different understanding of life that is without the human emotional baggage that keeps us in a zombie state.
As you can see from my avatar name, I’m not quite there yet.
The idea of giving up desires feels like just that. Giving up. If desires were not important then how could one motivate themselves to keep achieving? Desire is a hard-wired program in the human genome. If we had not desired to manage fire how could we be here now? The same can be said for any great advancement in the human race. If necessity is the mother of invention, then desire is her sister.
But where does desire fit in our world today? The answer, in my opinion, is that desire is our world today. We are drenched in it from morning till dusk and even then we are not safe in our dreams because of the subtle conditioning we see from our everyday reality. In the 60′s there was a push back against the advertising men, a point that Mad Men covers in their series and I always admired them for taking on the challenge. Today, it is evident that we have lost the battle. Everything on the internet that wants your participation will use tactics available to them to get your attention. To me, this scares the shit out of me but maybe I’m a little sensitive. However, I think that this marks an interesting cultural dilemma where we as people have the opportunity to obtain satori.
Because of my observation, I feel that I generally desire less than most people, HOWEVER, it does not mean that on an individual level that my desires do not run so deep that they become a psychological need and obsession. Yeah, how is that for some truth? This is what desire will do, make you a slave to it in varying capacities. I am able to address my own desires because of my willingness to engage with it on a level that is removed. I have practices for doing this which I may write about in a separate blog, but I am willing to talk about my own struggle with satori so publicly because I know that no matter what the object is that desire affects everyone in the same way and therefore there is no reason for shame or stigmatization which only furthers attachment and creates resentment to letting it go.
Boy, have I learned that last bit on my own and the hard way too. Desire has a couple different ways it can trick you but the biggest for me has always been the expectation. Pretty much every single time. When I expect something and it does not happen for whatever reason I bump up against my own reality and am forced to reconcile with it. If you are still a slave to desire this is what will be the death of you because you will create a new way to obtain that object but without fixing the underlying pins of the reality of it. If you repeat the same cycle compounds and creates a worse situation.
So what to do about it, eh? I don’t know. I’m only a novice myself. I think that desire is useful but dangerous like any drug. A part of me wants to wait until later in life to work on desire as I cannot imagine a life where one person does not desire things. What would that life look like and would it be a happy one? I know that the ending of life is not something one can plan ahead of time, nor should one do so (within moderation of course, being legally prepared for death and your survivors is a worthwhile cause and I want to inspire everyone to do this) and so one should always be making efforts to be able to end their own time on this earth as peacefully as possible at any time. Settling emotional baggage now will help you at your end of lifetime immensely. Trust me on this one.
Which brings me to what Satori means. A sudden enlightenment or a sudden loss of desire which affects everyone as their time of passing comes. During this time we realize that the things we have held on to or have been chasing suddenly seem very small, not insignificant, but suddenly there is a much larger canvas to consider. I’ve witnessed many people go through this state and I’ll tell you that they’ve told me that the realization of the end is the most real period of a person’s life. I’ve witnessed the insane amount of work these individuals then had to begin in order to pass with a feeling of accomplishment and peace.
What might scare some people, is when an individual is unable to do this, and that has taught me an invaluable lesson early in my life that I want to avoid and which has set me on this long path of attaining satori before this time comes. I believe that it can be reached in a happy medium and that it is achievable to every person who has a willingness to engage and get messy with it. While I possess no answers and only thoughts on it, I’m excited to see where it goes and am hopeful that with individual work on self that we as a people can work together to take on the bigger threat on our societal level.
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