The path of desire

Open to Desire
by Mark Epstein, M.D.

(Page 4 of 7)

The Buddha's path did not focus on desire as an enemy to be conquered but rather as an energy to be perceived correctly. The Buddha was interested in teaching us not only how to find our own freedom, but in how to stay in affectionate relationship to other people. While he counseled his followers to be lights unto themselves, he also recognized how much we need each other to make freedom possible. There is as much emphasis on compassion in the Buddha's teachings as there is on wisdom, and it is clear that one route to the development of such compassion is through the investigation, not elimination, of one's own desire.

In this approach is a very sophisticated psychological path, one that is mirrored and supported by our own tradition of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, also devoted to the intensive study of desire. These are the two traditions that have most influenced my own work as a therapist, and it is their accumulated wisdom with regard to desire that I wish to explore in this book. It is a task that I could never have undertaken, however, if I had not been exposed, early in my career, to the psychological wisdom contained in the ancient traditions of India.

The Indian subcontinent, while as ambivalent about desire as everywhere else in the world, is nevertheless filled with a reverence for the enlightening potential of eros and the tenderness of the human heart. It is a land profoundly influenced by an ancient appreciation of desire, one where this openness has shaped the culture. From its sacred cows, symbol of the Mother, whose milk and dung provide nourishment, fuel and shelter, to its sacred temples adorned with symbols and scenes of divine eroticism, India is suffused with the colors, smells, fabrics, flavors and faces of devotion. Its monuments, even those dating back two thousand years to the first flourishing of the Buddha's teachings, are architectural representations of the transformation of desire; and its myths, Hindu epics like the endlessly repeated love and adventure story the Ramayana, which figures so prominently in this book, teach its listeners how to turn their own love relationships into aspects of the divine. India is rich in the natural resources of human emotion and it holds a model for desire that is much more integrated than our own.

In my introduction to India, I was offered a peek into a culture steeped in the path of desire, one in which pleasure is the image of the divine state: where it is the ladder, not just a rung reaching toward the heavens. In a certain way, the Indian approach is a reflection of the Freudian one. For Freud, everything was sexual, even desire for God. In his famous comments about religious experience, which he called the oceanic feeling, he reduced the oneness that is knowable through mystical insight to the erotic experience of the infant at the mother's breast. In much of Indian thought, however, everything is spiritual, even the desire for sex. The most sacred temples are built on a model of deified eroticism.

My own view is that both are true. Each dimension mirrors the other. Freud understood that our erotic lives contain a distilled, essential, stripped-down version of the enormity of our psyches, while the Indian traditions recognized that attention to the erotic landscape opens up transcendent understanding. As Freud once admitted in a conversation with a prominent existential psychiatrist: Everything is instinct, but everything is also spirit.

In this work, I have focused on Hindu myths, Buddhist teachings and psychoanalytic theory. In my discussions of worldly desire, I have concentrated primarily on intimate life and sexual yearnings. In keeping with Freud's discoveries and with my own training as a psychotherapist, I have found that an unabashed observation of intimate life permits a clear perception of otherwise hidden dynamics of the psyche. This is not to suggest that desire is only sexual, but that within sexuality we can find a model for much of human experience. Within the psychotherapy world, this reduction of things to their sexual bedrock has, in fact, moved somewhat out of fashion. As the schools of what have become known as object relations and relational psychotherapy have grown in popularity, there has been a profound recognition that individuals are seeking relationships and affirmation as much as sexual discharge or erotic release. Yet I have chosen to remember the erotic underpinnings of human psychological experience and to focus on them whenever possible; not to exclude the relational and spiritual but to show how all three: the sexual, the interpersonal and the spiritual, exist on one continuum and are part and parcel of one another. As we open to desire, things do not become less sexual, they become more erotic. Desire seeks wholeness and desire seeks bliss - and it can find them in unusual places. My endeavor in this work is to keep intimate life in focus, using it as a template for an exploration of what is essential, and spiritual, about desire. I want to try to keep the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater.

I have divided this book into four sections, based on the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, charting the path that desire can take us on if we are able to use it for spiritual growth. Each section begins with a quotation from a famous Hindu epic called the Ramayana, a story of thwarted love between a man and a woman who, unbeknownst to them, are also incarnations of God. The Ramayana charts the same course that my four sections describe: a progression, driven by desire, from incompleteness to wholeness, a metaphorical depiction of the path of desire.

The first section, For Want of Desire, is based on the way things usually are. We think that we exist apart from the rest of the world. Our desires are urgent and conditioned by duality. We feel incomplete and are aware of our own flaws and imperfections. Love relations, and desire in general, are driven by objectification, not by openness. We feel "in need" and the "object" of our affection has to gratify us. It never quite does the trick and we have to deal with the gap between self and other, the gap that desire cannot bridge. We think we know all about desire, but, in fact, we are not open to it at all.

The second section, Clinging, describes what happens when we start to realize that there is no such thing as an ultimately satisfying object. This is where the first confrontations with clinging take place, since the obstacles to our growth, called fixations in Buddhism, originate in the effort to find an ultimately satisfying object. In this phase of spiritual development, a certain kind of renunciation is necessary, in order to differentiate craving or "thirst" from desire.

In the third section, The End of Clinging, comes the flowering of subjective life. When desire is not denied or suppressed, but instead allowed to grow in the light of there being no ultimately satisfying self or object, a tremendous development of inner life is possible. The finding of a third way with desire, not denying and not grasping, is what the Buddha's psychology makes possible. Out of this new approach comes the ability to empathize with another's personal experience. No longer relating to others as "objects" that exist solely to gratify or deny us, a person in this phase is able to transform his or her intimate experiences into spiritual nourishment.

The fourth and final section, A Path for Desire, describes the essential principles that allow us to get the most out of desire, to use it rather than being used by it. When desire is no longer used to attack a world that is perceived as separate but instead immerses us fully in the pleasures that surround us, a new kind of satisfaction is possible. At that point, even the bathwater has potential.

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.