Sunset

Pastels again

   sunset's 

 brushed

   striped 

     light 

Behind the barn

  the old owl

    echoes 

      his

  weatherbeaten

      question

The Brutal Reality of Evolution

....which is, housecats rule....

I'm at the top of the ladder of human evolution -- I can drive a stick shift and....I can write cursive!  I can even tell time from a wall clock....and can tell directions based on where the sun rises and sets.  Neanderthals got nuthin' on me.  Housecats, though...there, I may have met my match.  

Winter Charm of Lasting Life

A folk song from Scotland, the homeland I've never seen.

 

When You Walk On

 Eliza Gilkyson, from twenty years ago.  Lyrics below.

There's a long and winding river
From the darkness to the dawn
It will carry and deliver you
When you walk on

No one here can say for certain
What lies in the great beyond
You'll pass through that parted curtain
When you walk on

You may grasp at the illusion
The confusion of your mind
But soon you will remember
To surrender one more time

You may fade out the doorway
Fly away above the throne
Those who stay carry your story
A little glory lingers on

Though the world you leave behind you
Will become a distant song
Every soul you loved will find you
When you walk on

Desire

  "Desire is the root of pain. Want nothing, have everything. Want everything, have nothing."

Interesting quote, isn't it? It seems to me to encapsulate the basic insight of Buddhism, as well as addressing one of the inner core truths you might find in Hinduism (Vedanta), esoteric or monastic Christianity, and perhaps some of the Sufi mystics of Islam. Desire appears to be at the core of all life. Why then is it so problematic?

Perhaps the basic nature of desire is that it is unquenchable. No matter how many times you may satisfy a particular desire, even to the point of satiation, usually after a lapse of time, the desire thus satisfied raises its head again with renewed vigor.

As Buddha so aptly deconstructed desire, it can cause suffering in three different ways. First, it is a state of apparent lack -- there is something or some state that you crave. You experience the lack thereof. You're restless to have or experience it. This state of fundamental need masks an undeniable truth: we feel incomplete in and of ourselves. We feel a sense of lack and incompleteness and we know not what we lack; perhaps a state of equanimity and wholeness. It is a profound hole in our soul, or our inner psyche, if you will. We pour anything and everything into that hole in the hopes that it will fulfill that need. As experience eventually teaches us: nothing does. Nothing fills that hole.

The second state of desire, then, is impermanence. We live in a condition of being limited by time and duration. Nothing lasts. Our moment of satisfaction doesn't last either. However you may satisfy your particular desire or need, it will be impermanent. Think of the simple experience of taste, how limited it is. That special flavor that lingers but a moment on your tongue. What a perfect metaphor for all of life. You can build an empire and surround yourself with all that you desire. Someday, you will die and have to leave every last prop behind. As we all know but no one seems to know well: you can't take it with you when you go. All desire is like this. It's temporary, impermanent.

So you have the initial state of craving and lack. Provided you're actually able to fulfill your finite form of desire, you will still lose that moment of satisfaction. It may have a short or long duration of fulfillment but sooner or later, you will lose it. You can't keep it, no matter what it is.

And lastly, nothing you use for your temporary state of satisfaction ultimately works. Nothing fills that hole in your soul. Because nothing is meant to. Things or conditions are all passing. If all you ever wanted was at your beck and call 24 hours a days, you would still feel unfulfilled. You may successfully distract yourself for the time being. But time is passing, my friend. Your days are numbered and so is the time duration of your temporary, conditional existence, no matter how thoughtfully you've arranged it.

That sense of impermanence leads to the intrinsic need to hold onto what we desire and to grasp at it so very desperately, because we intuitively know it's going to be taken away. It's just a matter of time.

Thus, desire is the root of our suffering. This brings us to the middle of the quote: "Want nothing, have everything." If you understood the ephemeral nature of desire, whatever its constituent component of fulfillment, what would happen if you stopped trying so desperately to grasp at it? Would it be a state of perpetual want, suffering, and lack?

Not if you understand that everything by nature is temporary, and you're able to enjoy it in the moment and equally able to live without it if its not there; then it no longer has any hold on you. If it's there, fine; if it's not, you're still good. This all depends upon an appreciation of the fleeting nature of all conditional life, all objects of sense or any form of temporary desire. But it only works if you're coming from a place of interior contentment, not a place of lack.

Lack is a form of torture. The contentment of which I speak is not the result of fulfilled desire. That's simply temporary satiation. Contentment, it seems to me, would be a state of resilience and equanimity founded upon a non-grasping, non-desperate state of inner freedom. Freedom from the driving need and blind compulsion of desire.

I think it must take practice to get there. Probably many lives of practice. But we have that time; we have forever, really speaking. Our individual conditional lives fool us into believing this is our one and only chance to grab everything we want. The illusion of individuality, in the sense that we will only be who we are now, once, ever -- that's the set-up of incarnational life. It fools us into thinking we have to take what we can get now, and everyone else be damned. It encourages us in our selfishness and our callous disregard for all other life.

Western culture in particular, and the world at large in general, all seem based upon the unexamined premise that "happiness" is the result of fulfilled desire. This premise is false and inaccurate. It drives the insanity, compulsivity, selfishness, and gnawing desperation that characterizes modern life. If your initial premise is wrong, then every conclusion you draw thereafter will also be wrong. Time for us to re-examine that initial premise, then.

The stance described in the quote above is one of non-grasping. It doesn't say to not enjoy life or the temporary conditions of life. It simply says don't grasp onto them and don't depend upon them. Be free. Be able to live with, or without, any particular state of affairs. It will all pass eventually, as we will ourselves. But even that is an illusion. Physics knows that all things in the universe continue to exist; they just change form. It would go a long way in correcting our mental imbalance to realize that the same is true of ourselves. We should work on that.