It's desire stupid

OK i'm convinced... was watching a doco on Merlin last night and was relishing the dreamy moonlit world of the pagan and mystic which I love ... but since a child have been disappointed to know is not real. "My muse" was my closest approach to that "reality" - and after she passed on to greater things I discover amazingly a lot closer than even I was prepared to dream! I find out today yet another coincidence that her birthday fell on the date of the Liberalia the festival of Liber ("the free one" a connection "my muse" would have relished) and an avatar of Dionysus. But for all this dreaming something becomes very obvious, something akin to Sartre's analysis of emotions in general...

It has been said that, we are not material bodies having a spiritual experience, but spirits having a material experience.

Knowing within my own soul the struggles to existence and the romantic dreams which never match their pale realities, I know full well the frustration that the alleged spirit feels within the apparent prison of its weak and mortal form. But isn't this just the dreams that arise in a mind whose desires is greater than their means? As Freud would have argued, it is repression of the sexual instinct which births our whole civilisation - seeded and nurtured within the furnace of frustrations and restraint which typify the civilised individual. Deep down I know that to be a great poet one needs to suffer, one needs the frustrations of unattainable desires to fuel the searching and ecstatic frenzy of creation ... an experience the doco called arwen in Gaelic (or something sounding like that). To be wise also one must suffer, and the two are always intertwined since even before the days when Plato wrote his Symposium. Evan our own Saviour follows this ancient pattern of suffering before he attains the Divine ascendancy. Woden, our Wednesday, who brought us poetry and the runes of writing suffered long hanging on the branches of the World Oak Tree. I'm sure the motif is familar throughout Asia.

But Buddha, teacher to the Asian peoples including the Europeans, teaches a very simple teach. If one has no legs, then only the fool seeks to run. It is in this that our frustrations and sufferings are born. It is in this that our dreams are born.

So it seems plainly simple to me once again until the fogs of desire cloud my eyes again, that really it is having passions beyond our means that is the source of all our unhappiness and suffering. I've known unfailingly since a child that given the choice between getting what you want, and not wanting it in the first place: there is no contest. How can anything go wrong, how can anything be less than perfect if we can forget the desire entirely. In contrast its a journey fraught with danger whenever we seek to satisfy a desire.

And look outward in the search for things, we unwittingly leave ourselves unguarded and inward become slaves to desire. The war, the Desire, is for a ridding of desire. The sweet ability to forget without residue any desire that should arise lest we find it demanding more than can be attained.

It is interesting as someone bound and ensnared hopelessly within the world or desires to watch why it is that attaining mastery over desire is so illusive. One profound complication is social expectation. I always feel the I need to be somebody, that unless I have attained something then I am not what I should be. I feel the need to seek external proof of my attainments like clothes, a house, a car. I am slightly different in that I haven't done any of these things, but the desires are still there like everyone else. I experience huge stress from this disparity between what I seek and the world of expectations outside - but wisdom is born of suffering is it not?

I wish sometimes I were born in India where it (at least once) was socially acceptable to seek spiritual liberation. But am I not just wishing freedom from the social isolation that is inevitable on this road? Another expression of desire and the suffering that comes from its non attainment. The wise begin as social outcastes - always.

I write this blog to furnish my mind with an outer proof that what I do makes sense, a mirror for a self that while educated in them, has ceased to take its cues from the rack of social expectations. There is still this desire for social conformity, if only that people are not frightened or overly challenged by me, and as an a-void-ance of that greatest exile that lies in the void of madness. Is there really such a thing as madness? "My muse" studied all this at university, would she have once answered that question? Is it just a convenient term for those who do not wish to accept that there are worlds beyond the safety of this fragile island state of historically established culture. I watch Bruce Parry engaging with various tribes and one constant between them all is the expression of some unity of custom and culture - people are drawn into syncrony and allignment even in practices that have no material function. We adopt as an automatic harmony rituals like bowing, or hand shaking which have absolutely no function at all except to say "we belong". I heard it said that we shake hands to prove we don't conceal a weapon, so why do the Japanese bow then? Well "belonging" is not a luxury it seems the road to wisdom offers, despite some interpretations of Mahayana teachings. Do the walls really belong to the house? Or does the house belong to the walls?

So I'm im-pressed once again toward this realisation that everything does derive from desires. Those desires we can satisfy bring relief from desire (what is erroneously called happiness) and those we can't bring suffering and from suffering comes dreaming and from dreaming comes false belief in cathartic super-characters who can solve our suffering for us. Really if we can believe it the solution lies in mastery of our desires, something I still find very little "motivation" to do. I mean what motivation can there be to master ones motivation. Maybe what I need is a period of plain hard self-discipline. Ascetic living to challenge and master the desires. Looks like I've no choice anyway. Mum kicks me out tomorrow and I'm back to the simple life I've been nurturing, but winter's coming now and even warmth and light will be rare pleasures! Shall see how I bear up. Certainly the ancestors survived the ice ages so this should be a breeze... but our desires are so much stronger these days and the challenge so much greater than 10,000 years ago.