Varieties of Desirous Experience

A note on craving, aversion, detachment, and stray cats

Desire is the closest thing there is to magic. Nothing else changes the world so powerfully, so quickly. Nothing else builds empires or families or great works of art. Nothing else rearranges my perception so fully, making some things salient and others basically invisible. Even in spiritual lineages dedicated to ending desire entirely, the starting point is and can only be the desire to end desire.

Desire is actually magic, as far as I've seen. I can't count how many times I've watched people hone and shape and pour time and energy into their desires, only to have that desire appear in their life through weird, non-linear, frankly baffling ways — ways that include but don’t easily reduce to the work they’ve put in. The stream of creation seems to respond to desire, though not always predictably. Be careful what you wish for, the maxim echoes down the halls of history and culture.

Desires don't actually come from me, or from you. I'm not sure where they come from, but they seem to be a bit like stray cats. I walk around town, I go about my day, and suddenly — there one is, rubbing itself against my shins, asking to be fed or played with.

I wake up some morning, and it's crystal clear: there's a desire, a vision for my life that I have to work towards and embody.

I read a few lines from a book, and suddenly it's there: a desire for more love, or more status, or more connection with the divine.

I didn't choose my desires, and I didn’t entirely mimic them from others — they found me. They sought me out, and they seem to want something from me. You see the strangness here, don't you? My desires desire something of me.

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The Classic Varieties

There are a few ways people react to desires.

One is to cling to them. You desire something, and you start pouring your energy into making it happen. You get attached to the outcomes you want, and you dedicate energy to making sure that outcome happens. This might be as small as desiring a veggie stir fry and chopping vegetables to make it happen. Or it might be desiring a woman, and doing everything you can to be with her. Or it might be desiring a house in the suburbs, and pushing your life into the paths that lead towards home ownership. These paths might take you to your desires, or they might disappoint you, break you, abandon you somewhere awful.

Another way to handle desire is to push it away, to shrink back from it. You've been hurt too many times before, clung to too many desires that went unfulfilled. You've hoped and hoped and hoped and been crushed again and again. The moment a desire brushes against you, a spike of alarm shoots through you — don't hurt me again, don't hurt me again — and you pull back, you tell yourself it would never work, that you don't even want it anyway. You put up the walls and try to keep yourself safe from the hope of something good.

A third path is detachment. You turn yourself into a smooth surface, allowing less and less surface area for desire to grip you, either to pull you or push you or make you jerk away. You meditate, you do breathing exercises, you go to therapy and you learn bit by bit to let desire slide off you, to loosen your grip when you notice yourself holding one. Your desire to do away with desire moves you, changes you.

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My Personal Blend

I’ve been playing with another possibility lately, something that sprung naturally out of a combination of open and loving awareness practices.

When a desire finds me, when it seems to want fulfillment from me, when it wants to be made manifest through me — I've been treating it like a stray cat.

I don't take the stray cat home, cling to it, dote on it, make it a part of my life. I don't push it away, throw rocks at it. I don't detach from it, refuse to look at it, walk away stone-faced while it begs for food.

When a desire finds me, I feed it, pet it, nurture it, and then send it on its way. If it comes back later, I might do the same thing again, but not too often. It's important to set boundaries with strays.

This basic approach has been going well, and seems to have a lot going for it, from where I stand.

On the one hand, there's a reason we cling to desire: desires are yummy, they're cozy, they're electric. We're humans with wants and needs, and getting those wants and needs fulfilled is the source of so much pleasure and aliveness in this world. Think of some of the greatest moments in your life; some of the top ones are almost definitely the moment some big need or desire was met.

On the other hand, the degree to which we cling to desire is the degree to which we suffer when our efforts to fulfill it are frustrated. Not only that, but clinging so myopically to a given desire can actually make us less likely to fulfill it, as we blind ourselves to alternate ways of achieving it, and/or cause ourselves so much stress and suffering that we lose the capacity to do what we need to do to cross the finish line.

Detachment is a little bit divine — which also makes it a little bit inhuman. James Hillman's distinction between spirit and soul applies here — detachment belongs to the airy, abstracted world of spirit, while desire belongs to the earthy, messily interwoven world of soul. Spirit is timeless, but soul is Alive.

In this variety of desirous experience, the stray cat approach, we can bask in aliveness, and then let go into the timeless.

I notice a desire, the shape and smell and direction of it, and I take a moment to pick it up with loving awareness. I notice what I really want, what Vision this desire is opening up in me. I take a little time to feel good with it, to notice how good it would feel to make that desire manifest, to bring it out of the aether and into reality. Maybe I trace through some plans, ideas, ways of bringing it about, steps I could take. I trim down its more ridiculously far-reaching whiskers, clean up its nose and smooth out its tail. I take a few more moments to appreciate the shape of it, how good it looks, how good it feels, how it sits in my conscious mind, and how it nestles warmly against my unconscious archetypes, shadows, and needs.

And then, when the time feels right, I drop into broad, open awareness, and allow myself to detach from the desire. I think of this as releasing it into the Stream (which doesn't really work for the cat metaphor, but oh well). I let go of all the work and craving and yumminess that I was just basking in, and I release it into the Dao with a sense that if it's meant to take root, it will. If it's meant to become a reality, it will.

Sometimes, I release them and don't see them again. Sometimes, they come back a few times, and I repeat the process (unless it feels subtly grasping or bad to do so).

In a few cases, the process has shifted something big. In the days after starting the process, something in my awareness shifts. The steps I'd need to take to fulfill that desire suddenly start seeming more salient to me, I notice a bit more energy to Do The Thing, to take steps that bring me closer to it. This happens not because I'm driving or forcing myself to follow a plan, but simply because I wake up and those actions seem like The Thing To Do. Caring for and then releasing a desire seems to shift something in my unconscious — it knocks energy into a new configuration that naturally tends towards fulfilling that desire, or something close to it.

(In a couple cases, I've had truly weird experiences where I nurture and release the desire, don't do anything else, but it just... shows up, fulfilled in my life? Under really weird and non-linear circumstances? I'm not going to pretend to understand how that works but it's gotten cartoonishly strange with a couple of these.)

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I'm enjoying this approach so far, so I wanted to share it. For me, it avoids the dour and inhuman detachment that can spring up in certain circles, while also tending away from the narrow, throttled craving that so often leads to bad feelings and bad results — and that can lead to a tragic disowning of one's own needs and desires, which is the root of so many other problems.

If you play around with it and find anything interesting, let me know. I'll be here, feeding stray cats.

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