The Truth About What the Buddha Taught, Part 2

Open to Desire
by Mark Epstein, M.D.

(Page 2 of 7)

Open to desire

When I began to work as a psychotherapist, after completing many years of medical and psychiatric training undertaken after my introduction to Buddhism, I discovered how important it was to be able to admit to, or "own," one's desires. Freud's initial emphasis in psychoanalysis, in fact, was all about helping people plagued with forbidden desires. Psychotherapy, in the hands of Freud and his followers, became a means of allowing people to close the gap between their wishful conception of themselves and who they really were. More often than not, this meant learning to accept and tolerate wishes and urges from which a person had become estranged. As I began to treat my own patients, I was given a special window into the particular struggles of those engaged in a spiritual path. Because of my immersion in Buddhist thought, many of those who sought me out for therapy were themselves drawn to the spiritual. In fact, one of the things I was struck by was how prodigiously people had been using the Eastern spiritual traditions to try to serve a therapeutic function. With my own patients, I was privileged to see how fundamental the issues of desire remained, even after years of spiritual pursuit. What I observed has led me to write this book.

Many sincere people drawn to Eastern spirituality are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In identifying the cause of suffering as desire, they struggle to eliminate it from their being. A number of these people have come to consult me, wondering why their spiritual pursuits have not brought them the peace of mind they were expecting. To sit with them in a room is to feel people not quite at peace with themselves. There can be a closed, anxious or fearful quality underlying the way they express themselves. When they become more honest about their desires, a different feeling emerges. They become more present, alive, open and tender. The brittleness disappears. It becomes easier to breathe. All of the feelings that I associate with meditation, that I want to make accessible to people through the medium of psychotherapy, open up when people become able to treat their desires as their own.This is why the story of Nasruddin has such poignancy for me. As he defiantly indicates, there is more to desire than just suffering. There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. This is one of the major insights to have precipitated out of my study of the psychologies of East and West.

There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires. While there are certainly currents in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions that dismiss or denigrate desire, encouraging us to forsake it through renunciation or sublimation, there is another, more controversial, alternative that Nasruddin points to in his story and that I have found necessary in helping my patients.

Known in the East as the tantric, or "left-handed" path, desire, in this view, is a vehicle for personal transformation. It is a yoga in its own right. Rather than treating it as the cause of suffering, desire is embraced as a valuable and precious resource, an emotion that, if harnessed correctly, can awaken and liberate the mind. In this way of thinking, desire is the human response to the discontent described in the Buddha's First Noble Truth. It is the energy that strives for transcendence but, if it is to truly accomplish its goals, the seeker must learn to relate to it differently. He or she must learn how to use desire instead of being used by it. In this sense, desire is the foundation for all spiritual pursuits. As a well-known contemporary Indian teacher, Sri Nisargadatta, famous for sitting on a crowded street corner selling inexpensive bidis, or Indian cigarettes, once commented, "The problem is not desire. It's that your desires are too small." The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.

The natural

When the Buddha taught his First Noble Truth, he elaborated the gnawing sense of incompleteness that underlies much of our experience. As if he were describing the Second Law of Thermodynamics (that every isolated thing is moving toward a more disorganized state) or Freud's reality principle (that pleasure cannot be maintained indefinitely but must always give way to unpleasure), the Buddha evoked the unrest, instability and uncertainty that color our lives. In the face of these qualities, which he called the three marks of existence, we all feel yearning or longing. In the psychodynamic world, this yearning or longing is sometimes described, in the language of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, as the depressive position. In the curious reverse language of psychoanalysis, the depressive position is considered a developmental achievement because it acknowledges the feelings that come with an acceptance of separateness. The ability to see things the way they are, not to expect constant gratification but to understand that all things are limited, is what allows for personal growth.

Desire is a natural response to the reality of suffering. We feel incomplete and desire completeness; we feel unrest and desire ease; we feel insecurity and desire comfort; we feel alone and desire connection. Our experience of life, our very personalities, are shaped by dukkha, and our response is infused with desire. Desire is the crucible within which the self is formed. This is why it was so important to Freud and why it remains the essential kernel of psychotherapy. If we are out of touch with our desires, we cannot be ourselves. In this way of thinking, desire is our vitality, an essential component of our human experience, that which gives us our individuality and at the same time keeps prodding us out of ourselves. Desire is a longing for completion in the face of the vast unpredictability of our predicament. It is "the natural," and if it is chased away it returns with a vengeance.

In the Sufi tradition that Nasruddin exemplifies, human yearning is understood to be a reflection of God's desire to be known. To the Sufi, God is hidden, but wishes to be found. The clue to God's presence lies in the depth of our longing. Only by dwelling in the insatiable, and infinite, quality of desire can the Sufi begin to appreciate God's nature. While I have been much more drawn to the non-theistic tradition of Buddhism, where the notion of God is deemed irrelevant to a person's spiritual strivings, the Sufi perspective on longing is not far removed from the left-handed path. The infinite can be known through an acceptance of, and opening to, the unending quality of yearning. My interest in writing this book, in fact, is to correct the still-dominant misperception that Buddhism strives to eliminate desire.

The actual word that the Buddha used to describe the cause of dukkha was not desire, it was tanha, which means "thirst," or "craving." It connotes what we might also call clinging: the attempt to hold on to an ungraspable experience, not the desire for happiness or completion. As a therapist who has spent the past thirty years engaged in an integration of Buddhism with psychotherapy, I have seen how crucial this distinction can be. To set desire up as the enemy and then try to eliminate it is to seek to destroy one of our most precious human qualities, our natural response to the truth of suffering. Buddhism was not intended to be a path of destruction, it was a path of self-understanding. It did not seek to divide and conquer, it sought wholeness and integration. Hidden within its vast panoply of teachings, in fact, was a way of working with desire that completely contradicts the usual interpretation of Buddhism as encouraging renunciation and detachment. These teachings about the enlightening potential of desire were traditionally kept secret, because of their tendency to be misunderstood and abused, yet without them, the full value of the Buddhist approach cannot be appreciated.

In its path of desire, Buddhism has a natural counterpart in contemporary psychoanalysis. Both traditions encourage an appreciation of the important links between the spiritual and the sensual: the ways in which erotic experience can be transcendent and spiritual experiences erotic. In a metaphor that Freud would undoubtedly have approved of, the Tibetan Buddhist model for the awakened mind is orgasm, because it is only at the climax of lovemaking (in worldly life) that the veils of ignorance drop away. There is an understanding in both traditions of the multidimensional levels of what we call the self, the ways in which we can be seeking comfort, closeness, pleasure, affirmation, release and oblivion all at the same time, from the same persons, places or things.

Copyright © 2006 Dr. Mark Epstein

About the Author

Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City who lectures frequently about the value of Buddhist meditation for psychotherapy. His previous books include Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, and Going on Being. He is a contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and has written many articles for Yoga Journal and O: The Oprah Magazine.