Reconciling with Desire

In the past year I have read an exhaustive collection of books, articles and texts, from western psychologists like Freud, Jung, Mark Epstein, DW Winnicot, and Jessica Benjamin, to the Pali Cannon's version of the life and teachings of Buddha. Of great interest and insight were Miranda Shaw's book on women in tantric buddhism, as well as John Steven's book Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex. Otto Kernberg's book on love relationships contained an analysis of a Hindu text known as the Ramayana, which struck me and resonated within me for days: "...the beloved presents himself or herself simultaneously as a body which can be penetrated and a consciousness which is impenetrable. Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom. The contradictory nature of love is that desire aspires to be fulfilled by the destruction of the desired object, and love discovers that this object is indestructable and cannot be substituted." He implied that a healthy anger at this seemingly irreconsilable duality is required to keep loving relationships alive, and partners seeking each other out, even after years together. All of my reading has progressively re-oriented my relationship to desire, particularly as I examined my dissociation of emotion and sex as members of the erotic subset of desire. The synthesis of all that I have read is written below, an essay-poem. While incomplete, it is what I have grokked, the distilled essence of my slow (and ongoing) reconciliation with Desire.

[audio entry]


We each think that we exist apart from the rest of the world.
Our desires press upon us, their urgency conditioned by duality.
Self and universe. Male and female. Mind object and body object.
We feel incomplete, hyper-aware of our flaws and imperfections.
Love and desire are driven, not by openness, but objectification.
We feel 'need' and the object of our desire has to gratify this in us.
Yet, feeling this need, we are ever unfulfilled.
Within us lies the chasm between self and other, that rift which desire alone cannot bridge.
We cling to our desire while seeking obsessively for that ultimately satisfying object.
It is not the desiring which does us harm, but the clinging and the craving.
To know the end of clinging is to feel the flowering of transcendant awareness.
To know the end of craving is to understand that desire need not be denied.
When no longer compelling, no longer reviled, desire becomes ally instead of foe.
We and others become, not objects of desire, not subjects which desire, but beings capable of mutuality, of empathy, and of exchange.
Through erotic desire we may bring the self to a state of non-clinging, of enlightenment:
When first we cease to identify it with self, as separate from other, and understand that it is not the desire within us that matters, only how we relate to it.
When second we know that desire is divine, a direct link to our souls, to the energy of the numen and the universe, to wonder and awe.
When at last we accept that anger is as natural a consequence of desire as is empathy, which erotic desire demonstrates as we physically attempt to unite with another, only to find that other's consciousness impenetrable, forever out of reach.
When we find the balance of desire, the middle way between compulsion and renunciation, the 'other' is no longer an object which gratifies or denies, but an ineffable, uncontainable, indestructable other with whom we can experience mutual nourishment of the spirit.