I had been thinking about being open to desire, and so I began re-reading Mark Epstein’s book by that same title. He helps me sort out the power and paradox of desire. I appreciate his sharing his multi-year account of how he struggled to sort out the dynamics of desire. The first time I read his book, I was pleased and gratified to find my intuition about desire put into words by Epstein. I resonated with the reflections of someone like him who had been schooled both in eastern thought and western psychiatry.
Both in the east and in the west, there is a strong tendency to suppress desire, push it out of the way, ignore it. To me this seems such a waste of dynamic energy and misses the opportunity for enlightenment. To my buddhist mind, it ignores the invitation to walk the middle path.
I would rather befriend desire and not push it away. I want to invite Mara to tea. The power of desire is in its energy and its relentless pursuit of the beloved, whether the beloved is a person, plant or piece of rock. The paradox of desire is the importance of not grasping the beloved, not clinging to some outcome. The middle path requires giving up any notion of possessing the object of desire. Desire invites free-fall without any grasping for recovery.
Desire has often been associated with the sensory alone, and so it has been held in a prison of mistrust and suspicion. In the east and west, desire has been kept at a distance, typically under the control of a monkish mind that does not want to deal with desire. Fortunately, there have been hidden traits in both eastern and western thought which did not regard desire as the enemy but as the sacred. That is the path I choose to follow.
Desire is part of the natural energy of the universe. It is the attraction between the earth and the sun, it is the dynamic activity contained in an atom, it is the pursuit of an object of love. Resistance to desire is against the nature of things, as is clinging to the object of desire. Desire is a power and a paradox I joyfully embrace.