“Just - let - go”.

I must have heard that sentence thousands of times since starting to learn about Buddhism.

Let go of your attachments.

Let go of your thoughts.

Let go of your desires.

Just be here now, in the present moment, this is it. Surrender. Accept, and even love, what is. The Universe is unfolding exactly as it should. Go with the flow.

Don’t resist, that will only make you suffer.

There is incredible wisdom in those ideas. Practicing and contemplating such views allowed me to grow tremendously and live with more ease.

With time, though, I started believing those ideas to be “true”, and became too rigid. I somehow assumed that living according to them was the key to a happy and fulfilled life. 

I was blind to the fact that all truths are partial, including those, and that applying them in every situation might become counterproductive at times.

Stuck in those views, I had never stopped to consider:

“Admitting it was possible to let go of desire and attachment, would I really want to do that?”

“Is it possible that a healthy relationship with desire can make life fuller, more dense with meaning and beauty?”

“Am I stifling something within me by telling myself to let go of desire and attachment?”

“Am I letting go of opportunities for beauty, fulfillment, and joy as I try to let go of desire?”

Coming across Rob Burbea’s work, planted some of these questions in my mind and helped me consider that embracing some of my healthy “soul desires” could actually be….desirable.

But until yesterday (….all my troubles seemed so far away…), I hadn’t realized how my conditioned aspiration to “let go” affected me in undesirable ways.

I hadn’t realized that passively allowing the most significant relationship of my life to end so smoothly, without any resistance, maybe had not been such a skillful move.

At the time, my general thoughts were something like:

“I don’t want it to end, but if that’s what she wants…oh well. I’m not going to fight back, or try to force her, or anything. I can practice letting go of whatever attachment I have to her.

Maybe, hopefully, she’ll change her mind and we’ll come back together, but if she doesn’t, that’s how things were supposed to go. I’ll just accept the facts, and move on”.

Was this the right situation to think about in terms of just “going with the flow”?

I don’t know, perhaps not. 

“Soul Desires”

Listening to Rob Burbea opened my mind up to the possibility that perhaps not all desires are driven by a needy, craving ego.

Perhaps some of our desires come from some (divine?) higher part within us that knows something we don’t (Socrates called this the Daimon), and by suppressing these desires we also neuter some important parts of ourselves.

As I recently saw how foolish it was to “just let go” in my own life situation, I realized the significance of these views on a much more concrete level.

Life is too unpredictable. 

One moment you glimpse that she might want to come back to you soon; and right after circumstances change so dramatically that make it impossible for that to happen.

And that’s why I wanted to write about “The Duty of Desire”.

If we adopt the view that some of our desires come from deep within us (some may like to say from our soul), we can see it almost as a duty towards this higher part of us to act upon them.

Of course, it’s important to remember that this is just another view, that also needs to be taken lightly. It could be extremely dangerous to start seeing our desires as implying a duty, but we can play with this idea and explore what it would mean to us.

If there was such a thing as a “soul desire”, what would it feel like?

May we be able to differentiate it from the kinds of desire we can let go of?

Desire’s Bad Rep

Part of why traditional Dharma circles seem to be against goals and desire is that they concern the future, taking us away from the present moment.

This great talk by Osho discusses exactly this in a compelling way. In it, Osho encourages his students to not aspire to enlightenment, but simply to be present and drop all goals.

This idea that living in the present with no goals is the ultimate point of the Dharma (here meant as the Buddha’s teachings) is very common, and it’s also a view that I embraced for some time.

But is being present really all that we want out of the Dharma? Out of our lives? Don’t we want to live with desire, passion, enchantment, playfulness, a sense of purpose? Wouldn’t those enrich our lives?

Some may argue it may not even be possible to always live in the present moment, without any thought, direction, or aspiration about the future.

Even the Buddha desired to spread his teachings and talked about striving to achieve enlightenment. He even included desire as one of the “Four Bases of Success”.

We often unconsciously allow ourselves to be driven by small attachments and desires; for comfort, good food, technology etc… Yet, sometimes, when it comes to higher aspirations such as meaningfully contributing to a better world, we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t have goals?

Part of the reason for this, which contributes to the negative views we hold about desire, is that we fear the disappointment that comes with not obtaining the “object of desire”.

Some parts of us might be so afraid of disappointment that we automatically inhibit our biggest, more meaningful desires.

I love that in this context, Rob talked about protecting our desires from these fears like we protect a small plant that needs to grow.

desire is energy, is a life-force. pay attention where you’re directing it, are you squandering it over useless, material stuff, or towards what you truly long for?

Can We Love Our Desires?

Maybe, even if we don’t end up satisfying this desire, just the movement towards it, and the connection with this part of our soul will enrich us. Maybe the pain and passivity that we fall into by stifling our highest desires are much worse than the disappointment of not satisfying them.

“Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not that which is desired” Nietzche

In this sense, we can intend desire as different from craving in one important way. Craving implies an inherent sense of lack – “I lack this thing and can’t be happy until I obtain it”. While in the sense intended here, desire may not have a sense of lack at all, but rather a positive energy springing up from it. Rob titled a series of his talks The Beauty of Desire, implying, as Nietzche does, that deep desires may have a kind of beauty imbued in them irrespective of whether they are satisfied.

How would it feel to allow ourselves to inquire into our deepest desires, and take steps towards them? Not the material or egoic stuff that our consumerist culture encourages us to crave, but the deep desires of our soul, things like God (whatever it means to you), Love, Connection, Intimacy, Beauty, Enchantment, Adventure.

Just Another Way of Looking

I’m not saying that the traditional (Modernist?) Dharma views are wrong or not helpful, not at all. Like Rob would say, they are Ways of Looking that can be extremely useful in some particular situations, but less so in others.

The Buddha’s parable of the raft seems to offer a great example. 

The story tells of a traveler building a raft (with great effort) in order to cross a river and get to the other side of the shore, which was safer and more beautiful. Once he managed to get to the other side, no matter how much effort it took him to build the raft, he has to leave it behind. Otherwise, it would become an unnecessary burden.

Similarly, we could think of these different Ways of Looking as different rafts that we can pick up and put down depending on which shore we need to get to. Never forgetting that neither of them is absolutely true or perfect for all situations.

This is a whole new territory for me and I’m currently exploring it by diving into Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma. This is to say that I consider myself a newbie in this area, and that I felt compelled to write this mostly for myself. To help make sense of a personal situation that unfolded recently and to start integrating these alternative ways of looking that I’ve been learning about.

Having said that, I hope this can be useful to someone else, and I welcome all sorts of feedback and criticisms.

And if you’re interested in diving deeper into this stuff, I highly recommend checking out Rob’s talks, The Beauty of Desire, or feel free to reach out to me :)