Desire creates mental habits!

It is certainly clearer that desire breeds existence.

When we want something all kinds of things start existing. Firstly the thing we want becomes big and solid. Secondly problems surrounding the getting of it start to exist. Thirdly the emotions and physiological responses involved with the action of winning/losing and the struggle start to come into existence.

Without the initial desire none of this exists. It is the fact that without desire nothing exists which is why things are called empty and the world described as having infinite potential. It is not the world that has changed over the centuries but human desire. No one desired mobile phones a century ago but now we do and as our desires expand so the mobile phone industry evolves hand in hand.

Its not quite Schopenhauer or Nietzsche that our desire physically makes the world like a magician. But it is not naive Materialism either where the world makes us like a magician. It is very subtle.

So the conclusion here and which i have been pursuing for a long time now is that we should check our desires and not feed them. But then we have this malaise because what is there to do in life if every desire is seen as the cause of imperfect existence and suffering?

This weekend I could see that socialising was often just the effort to escape that sense of bordeom and ill ease which we have with ourselves and our life. That sparkle of friends, of flirting or feeling wanted and belonging just a cover for the deep dissasatisfaction in life. When even making someone laugh is considered a cheap medication to their deep inner anxieties and needs ... what is the point?

And often people refer to the thought patterns that we learn in religion to make us good and positive as "habit". And I have always argued that this sounds very bad as it makes "goodness" sound like a robot action.

A more positive view I thought I was reminded this morning is that it is negativeness which is the robot habit. We develop fixed behaviour patterns and apply then wholesale to the world - that is badness. Goodness by contrast is flexible, sensitive and free and applies itself directly to each and ever person and situation.

That must be the liberation that they talk of. So there is a problem with the blanket appying of the observation that desire creates existence because it can become a mental habit which replaces the very freedom that it was designed to create!

Desire creates mental habits! So when we find a mental action then we need to see its creation by desire and see that as empty! Like i suppose this blog entry... what desire created this ?