The Question of Desire and Its Negation
Today’s question is: can desire produce its own negation—or in other words, the desire to be desireless? It is a deep question, a deep topic, and it needs a lot of energy and attention to understand the whole mechanism of desire itself in this light.
Every day we are negotiating with hundreds of desires. Once you wake up, there are material desires, desires related to the body, desires related to the mind, emotional desires, love, recognition. And there are spiritual desires: awakening, enlightenment, God, self-realization, etcetera.
In our head, we have a ranking system. We rank some desires as higher and we rank some as lower. Generally, spiritual desires are rated as high, desires related to material life a little lower, and desires related to security, recognition, and fame the lowest. But the mechanism under all desires is very similar. Someone desires wealth because they imagine it will complete them, and another desires enlightenment because he imagines it will complete him.
The Second Layer: Wanting to Be Desireless
The objects of the desires differ, but the psychological process is similar. As you’re walking the spiritual path and reading so many books, one day you’ll hear a spiritual teaching about giving up all desires or giving up attachment.
So say you love someone, and you say, “Oh, I’ve read—the path says again and again—I should not desire. Desire is the root of all suffering. Desires are not good. You should get rid of desires. You should desire less.” And you’re attached to someone, say your partner or your children, and then you tell yourself, “I must stop wanting this person’s love.”
But when we do this, notice what happens. The original desire has not necessarily ended. It has been joined by a second desire: the desire to have no desire. There are now two movements in the mind instead of one. One says, “I want love.” The other says, “I must not want love.”
These two opposing desires fight each other. There’s a conflict, and the seeker calls this conflict, this fight, a spiritual practice: “I’m shunning all desires, I’m getting rid of them.” And this is the paradox of the mind. The mind can turn anything into an object of desire, including the disappearance of desire. And what happens if the “I” really wants to let go of all desires and become desireless?
How the Mind Multiplies Conflict
You start becoming very vigilant about the desires or emotions that you have. You see someone driving a nice car, and then the thought comes in, “No, I should not have this desire. I’m a spiritual person, so I should not have it.”
Now what has happened is the want for a car is no longer just one thing. Now there is resistance to it. There is judgment—a story about your failure to transcend this egoistic or petty desire of wanting a car. And then maybe fear comes in: “What happens if I can’t give up all desires? Am I an unspiritual person?” So the mind has multiplied the original desire—”I want a car”—with layers of stories and conflict. It has created an even more elaborate and complex system in you.
I struggled with this a lot in my journey because, during one of the phases, I did believe very strongly that desires were the root cause of all suffering. I thought if somehow I could give up desires, have fewer desires, or transcend desires, I would reach the state which I was craving for.
The Pursuit of Becoming and the Sleep Analogy
Let’s go a bit deeper and think about this goal wherein we say we want to become desireless, shun desires, or have fewer desires. The mind says, “I have too many desires. I’m attached to too many things. I must become free of them.” So the mind now creates an image of a future person who is serene, unattached, unaffected, complete. And then it compares the present person with that future idea.
The present person is still wanting; the present person is still attached. So the mind says, “I’m not there yet.” That creates a movement. It creates becoming. You want to become something else. And the more passionately you want to become desireless, the more you are reminded that you’re not desireless—you still have so many desires.
So this very pursuit keeps alive the condition you’re trying to remove. It’s something like when you are in bed and you intensely want to fall asleep. We all have experienced this: say you have to get up early in the morning to catch a flight and you just have a few hours to sleep. You lay in bed and you’re like, “I need to sleep. I have to sleep now. I need to get some sleep. I just have a few hours, why am I not sleeping?” That very demand for sleep makes you realize you’re still awake, because the mind is monitoring itself all the time, making it very difficult to fall asleep in those conditions.
Giving up desires or trying to become desireless has a similar structure. You keep observing yourself constantly: “Am I attached to this? Should I want this? Should I not want this? Why do I still care? Why did losing that upset me? Why am I still angry at this? Why can’t I finally let go?” So the seeker becomes a kind of surveillance system in itself—a surveillance system which keeps checking the mind for signs of desire and ego.
The Ego and Dualistic Desire
The ego needs a position to stand on. It can stand on acquiring things and desires, but it can also stand on rejection. So the ego can say, “I want this,” and it can say, “I’m no longer attracted to this,” or “I do not want this.” So “I want this” is a desire, and “I don’t want this” is also a desire.
For example, someone says, “Do you want to go out for a walk?” I say, “I don’t want to go out for a walk.” So my not wanting to go—a “no”—is also a desire, and a “yes” is also a desire. In both cases, there is an “I,” a “me,” which identifies itself through that desire.
And what happens when a desire arises? Say you’re walking past a bakery and you smell some fresh bread, and there is a thought, a movement in you which says, “I want some bread.” But now let us put another thought to it which says, “Craving anything, desiring, is not good. It’s not what a spiritual seeker should do. It is dangerous.” So you immediately say, “I should not want this bread, I need to control myself.” Then the next thought is, “Why am I still driven by these small, petty desires?”
Now the first desire is wrapped up in the second desire of resistance. So you’re not merely experiencing the desire; you’re trying to manage the fact that you’re experiencing a desire. To repeat this: you’re not only experiencing this desire for bread, but you’re trying to manage the fact that you’re experiencing a particular desire.
The Mathematical Paradox of Desire
That can get very exhausting, because then desires become evidence against yourself: “I still want love, I still want a partner, I still want security, I still want comfort, I still want sex.” Each of these desires becomes evidence that you’re not spiritual, that you have not let go.
Each of these will then create the second layer of desire. What is the second layer? “I want to stop wanting all these things.” So that is the second layer. It is also a desire—both are desires. “I want sex,” and then the second wave comes in which says, “I want to stop wanting to have sex.”
This is a very mathematical paradox. I’ve studied it very closely and intently for a long time. The mathematics is: Desire A appears and says, “I want this.” Then Desire B appears which says, “I do not want this.” So the mind builds layer upon layer around the original simple movement of a desire, all the while thinking that it is getting closer to peace—not realizing this movement, this layering, this complexity is creating more conflict and more psychological load.
So until there is an absence of the structure of either wanting or resistance to wanting, it doesn’t matter which part wins. For a seeker, say I had a thought about bread, then I resisted it, didn’t want it, and was ultimately able to suppress the desire. Then the seeker feels, “Yes, I have achieved something.” One part has won against the other. There were two competing desires—Desire A: “I want bread,” and Desire B: “I should not want bread”—and one of them won, so the seeker is happy. But if it turns around and the first desire wins, then you are unhappy. You’re like, “Oh, I was tricked by the mind.”
But both of these are movements of the mind; they’re just thoughts in the mind. The bread does not care if you want it or not; it’s just sitting happily in the bakery. If you observe intently, you will be able to observe that the wanting is happening, and also notice that the wish to stop it is happening in the mind as well. The two are not enemies in some great spiritual battle; they are movements of the same mind. It took me quite a few years to understand this—I’ve written about this in my blog—when I realized that even wanting to be desireless is a desire in itself.
The Five Levels of Desire
I classified desires into five simple levels. These are not complex; they make sense and are simple to understand:
- Physical Impulses: Based on your physical body, you will have impulses of thirst, hunger, comfort, or cold. That’s also a desire—if you’re feeling cold, you want warmth.
- Preferences: Wherein you say, “I want a cup of coffee,” or “I want a cup of tea.” These are light, passing desires. If you don’t have that cup of tea, the world will not end. You will not get upset, you will not cry, and it will not leave a scar or trauma.
- Deeper Desires: Desires where you are emotionally invested and feel disappointed if they don’t happen.
- Identification: When you’re really identified with a thought or desire, it becomes part of your identity—like being successful, being worthy, or being acknowledged. It is so strong that if that desire is not fulfilled, you feel incomplete.
- Compulsion: I doubt many teachers have talked about this, but compulsion is something most of us have struggled with. Compulsion is: “I must have it.” There’s no choice. Even if you know it may be irrational, harmful, or not good for you, you still pursue it. There is a form of compulsion to keep doing it, like an addiction. For some it can be shopping, for some porn, for some eating—where they eat so much and then feel guilty about it. It drives you to indulge again and again. Afterward, you feel horrible and promise yourself, “I will not do it again,” but you do it again and the cycle continues.
I find compulsive desires very interesting because in compulsion there is no choice, or the element of choice is very minimal. You’re driven unconsciously. In a compulsion, there are generally two reactions: one is “I must have it,” and the other is “I must get rid of it, I should not indulge in it.” One part will run towards the desire, and one will run away from it.
The “Neither-Nor” Approach to Desire
This is where I came up with a simple philosophy I call “neither-nor.”
The “neither-nor” philosophy asks: can I allow this desire—say, this deep desire of compulsion—to be there without either feeding it or fighting it? (I’m taking this example of compulsive desires, but it can be applied to others as well. If we can work around compulsive desires which are so strong and unconscious, it becomes very easy to understand, process, and know the mechanism for other desires.)
What it means is you are not justifying the desire, you’re not condemning it, you’re not suppressing it, and you’re also not satisfying it for the moment. You become intensely interested in the movement, the thoughts, the sensations, the fantasies, the fears, and the promises around the desire.
The desire is there, but a desire is not a command. You need to distinguish a desire when it arises in your head. There is always a small possibility of choice. In that possibility of choice, what we can do is “neither-nor”: neither do we suppress the desire, nor do we jump immediately to indulge in it. We take that gap provided between indulgence and going through the desire to see its mechanism.
Can I experience the pull while retaining some capacity or freedom to respond to it? I can respond and indulge at any moment—no one is stopping me. But do I have the capacity to stop this pull for some time and just observe it?
What I realized was that when you give it space, you’re neither suppressing it nor repressing it. You’re letting it arise. But letting a desire arise does not mean you immediately have to take action—the action can wait. It’s not the end of the world.
Once you view a desire from this gap, understanding that you don’t need to take immediate action and that you can observe it, there is a chance of uncovering the entire movement of this desire rather than just saying, “I need to drop this; this is not good.” You cannot command a desire to disappear. Desires don’t work on command, you know that: “Ah, I’m done with you, just delete yourself from my mind.” It will come back again. So the “neither-nor” path is neither “I must have it” nor “I must destroy, delete, or suppress it.”
Resolving Inner Conflict
The path is to see the desire, observe it, and see the stories around it without creating extra layers of suffering and complexity by weighing it: “Is it a spiritual desire? Is it a material desire? Should I have it? Should I not have it? What will happen if I indulge? What will happen if I don’t indulge?”
If these stories come up, you have the space to investigate them: “Why am I thinking like this? Who told me desire is not good?” Some teacher somewhere; you were not born with that thought. It happened to you later on—someone introduced that thought, and you internalized it.
What I’m trying to say through this talk is that desires are not bad. They are not your enemies—don’t make them into your enemies. The moment you do that, you have another conflict to resolve in yourself. Something as simple as smelling a bakery and wanting bread can become a value judgment on where you are spiritually.
Desire is a movement of the mind, and I watch that movement. I witness it, I see it arise, and I give it space to arise. I know I have the choice to indulge or to pull back. Once you resolve this, whether you indulge or don’t indulge finally does not matter. What matters is resolving the conflict that desires create in us.