Two Flavors of Desire

The Buddha taught that in life there is suffering, and craving is the cause of our suffering. Many of us conclude, on account of this teaching, that desire is of the devil, not out of obligation to a Judeo-Christian morality, but because of a flawed assumption that desire and craving are the same.

Craving places a demand on the world to meet one’s preferences. It arises from the perception of self and other, from a sense of separation and therefore lack. Whatever is craved is sought after to fill the lack and inflate the sense of self. From this perspective, not getting what one wants produces suffering. So to avoid it, some people disconnect from desire entirely.

But another flavor of desire exists. Unlike craving, eros (in the way Rob Burbea defines it) is not rooted in one’s personal preferences. Eros flows through and uses the uniqueness of the body-mind to express something beyond our current understanding of self, other, and world. Eros desires the Beloved object while remaining in touch with qualities of Being such as openness, trust, abundance, and selflessness. Whether or not our preferred outcome is attained, we’re fundamentally okay because we’re not identified with the personality and its preferences.

In a sense, we’ve forgotten or lost ourselves in something much bigger, and such immersion in the erotic flow leads us to ecstasy, which Jack London describes In The Call of the Wild:

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.”