But do we feel peace because we have what we want, or because for a while we no longer want.
Put another way is the goal of action to fulfil desire or make desire go away?
Summary:
The answer is to do with ecstasy and being outside "yourself." Selfless people are actually ecstatic because they are bigger than their desires, which means they can adopt a position outside their desires which places them between their desires and others. So being small minded and satisfying a big desire, clears the self and makes you ecstatic for a while. But desires soon fill you up and you become stuck inside again. So really the ascetic is just trying to make the desires smaller then themselves, and the consumerist is trying to keep keep emptying the self. But the real solution I realise is neither. Its trying to become bigger and more magnanimous and more generous.
As discussed a lot in this blog what we desire is conditional. We can't desire things we don't know about. It is the job of marketers to inform us of the existence of things and then make us desire them. But until the marketer has done their job we are blissfully unaware. Indeed the job of the marketer is to make us unhappy, and then we are motivated into action to try and resolve this desire that has been created.
In this cynical view desire is like a disease and a drug addiction, it is an illness to solve.
The traditional material view is like John Locke based on practical things like food and housing. One imagines the argument goes exactly like his argument that property is a fundamental thing because we take possession of things in order to consume them. Desire is a fundamental thing because we must desire things before we are motivated to take possession of them, and then consume them. We enter a state of unrest in order to achieve the goal of desire. Without this all animals would die, they would simply remain at rest until they died. And so because motivation toward a need like food is a natural thing then desire is a natural thing and the rest of economics develops.
In Buddhism they call motivation toward a desire selfishness. The desire is limited to the body, it is the smallest wish and the action that arises from it is the smallest and most trivial action. In Adam Smith's world the economy is the sum of this population of small wishes.
Yet Adam Smith is himself a contradiction. How did he benefit from slaving for 10 years to write Wealth of Nations? Was this just a small wish? Or did he have larger things in mind like the "Wealth of Nations". He was not thinking about himself, his desire was for all of humanity. His work did not enter the market place as a tradeable commodity along side candles and matches, he meant it to be part of the Enlightenment and illuminate people in a way far more widely than just a candle. Magnanimity,Generosity, Sacrifice, Wisdom are not accounted for anywhere in his book and yet he must have exhibited these to write his book. 10 years of his life were lost sitting in a room studying and composing it, 10 years he will never have again, and he gave them to the world in this book. A book which has no room anywhere in it for that act itself. Wealth of Nation is incomplete; Modern Economics is incomplete.
Darwin
In Buddhism the wise who begin to step beyond the daily turmoil of personal desires, begin to develop deeper motivations like compassion, love, generosity, patience, tolerance, acceptance. In the case of these "big minded" persons while they have their small desires they also begin to operate in a way that may not necessarily benefit them but will benefit someone. There is a naturalistic John Locke type argument that says that we must look after our own survival because no-one else is going to and after that there is nothing to do because everyone is looking after them self. There is a great Chinese story of Hell illustrating the problem with this:
Buddha shows the person Heaven and there is a circular table with 10 bowls around it and 10 pairs of 2 meter long chopsticks. The Buddha shows the person Hell and it is exactly the same. Then as they watch the people sit at the table. In Hell they are emaciated, and while the food in the bowl is good they cannot reach it with the long chop sticks. In Heaven they are healthy and instead of trying to feed themselves they feed the person across the table from them.
The point is that not everything (indeed nothing) can be achieved alone. We live and work in a community. Economics serves to study and guide our material interactions but it cannot escape that we work together by one means or another. Adam Smith, like the proponents of Democracy, seems to forget that even in a free-market or given a vote we can chose whether to do what suits us, or we can chose to have a wider perspective. Adam Smith advises us to work in our own interests as this will make the market more "efficient". That is it will lead to money flowing to the "best" producers and lead to right products flowing to the "neediest" of consumers.
Yet as has been the debate through logic to evolution to society to science what is the "unit" of the world. It was "the word" is logic for a while, it was the "species" then the "individual" and now the "gene" in evolution, it was the "nation" for Adam Smith but is now the individual in economics, it was the "atom" and now the "string "in physics. As argued recently in this blog there is no fundamental unit. The universe is not built from "things". Well it is in one sense, but unlike an Ikea flat pack there never was a time when it was flat packed, so we don't know what the "original" units that God built it from were. We keep taking it apart into smaller bits and this is endless (even with quantum limitations I believe we'll find a way to intellectually subdivide units of energy). Limits in general live in a relationship with Regions, and they are constantly changing.
So we don't say that the absolute unit of "action" is the selfish individual. You can look at it like this. You can say that everything someone does is preceded by a desire. I only gave you my last biscuit because I got a nice feeling of friendship from it, or because I thought it would strengthen our relationship, or because in some way "I" benefited. Or perhaps I just looked at the situation and thought well one of us is going to go without the biscuit, why not make it myself for a change. What cares, just take that on the chin and feel the loss and just accept that. The alternative is the other person feeling the same.
Now of course as is often the way deep down we feel cheated by life, we feel damaged, we harbour some hatred at having been abused at some level. Even if it just a stranger stepping in front of us in a queue without due consideration. We feel aggrieved at life. Such bitterness stored up through life means it is hard to be "big", and hard to be generous. When we "give" we feel we are losing out even more in a world where we already lost. And it is even worse when the people we give to don't seem to appreciate our sacrifice. It just goes further to deepen our sadness and bitterness. Well it's a fact that we do need to think about ourselves. And we do need to take for ourselves. If we keep punishing our self by giving then we are doing to our self what we wouldn't do to someone else. If I always give my biscuits away because I don't like seeing people without a biscuit then I am ensuring there is one person without a biscuit which is myself! The key to generosity is equanimity. If we feel we are losing every time we give, we have no developed equanimity. We still have a small mind that is based upon personal desire. This is not a bad thing, there is truth to the view that each person must look after themselves first. If you are miserable you can be of little help to others. You may wish others to help you in your misery, but they are probably miserable too, and so cannot help you. In a world of small people it is like Hell in the Chinese story above, no one is free to feed another, so we must try and feed our self. It takes a Jesus or Bodhisattva in Buddhism to take the first step of sacrifice. They must forgo feeding them self and risk feeding another. Now that other may not reciprocate and get fact while the Bodhisattva gets thin, and this is the problem of co-operation studied by Axelrod and others (and which I did a final year BSc project on) and which I'll need to return to in my economic models. But the Bodhisattva has one big gain if they do it right, and turn the pain in growth, and that is they begin to develop a larger mind. But warning! care is needed. A small mind, being sacrificed makes a smaller mind. Developing gentle kindness to oneself is the first and most important step to developing it towards others. But this is not selfish desire! This is learning to view your self from the same perspective you will in future view others. It is beginning the step outside oneself, what in Greek is called Ecstasy.
Sadly we understand ecstasy today in terms of selfish desire, when we are indulged and fully fulfilled on sex or drugs, happiness brought on by pleasurable feelings. But in the ecstatic orgy we should be letting go of self control not so much as to indulge our fleeting whims and repressed fantasies but rather to let go of our self as we might in a masked ball, to experience being someone else, to experience being free from the restrictions of our identity. Presumably after Christian repression of pre-Christian ecstatic cults such stuff is now associated with the devil, with human sacrifice and general victimisation and sadism of unfortunate individuals. But utterly ironically the best way to ecstasy is not through superiority and putting up barriers between victim and self, but by the complete opposite of dropping barriers between victim and self. The devil is a deceiver who gets what he wants through trickery. We are in Lent at the moment a good time to discuss this. The devil will offer you the world, and you think your every desire is fulfilled, you believe you have gained. But the Devil never loses and never gives, it is you that is giving. After you have taken the Devil will enslave you like a fish on a hook, like a drug addict seeking their next fix. How ironic that those who seek ecstasy the quick way end up giving far more than those who seek it the slow way. If we reject the devil, and instead seek to gradually remove barriers between ourselves and others, with no obvious gain, taking the pain of loss and generosity very gradually and developing kindness to our self eventually when we are a big person we will benefit from seeing the world from a perspective outside our self. We will be in ecstasy. When we have pain or have desires they will not be centre of the world. We will see them in proper perspective alongside other people from a position of equanimity. "Equanimity" is not some intellectual idea. Through meditation we can experience it directly as a core feature of our minds. Ecstasy is the true nature of our minds. Being magnanimous and generous is the natural state. It is there all the time, but we become small minded and lose sight of it.
So in conclusion. It is not that the traditional view of desire is wrong exactly. As far as I can see now it is not quite like John Locke making the mistake of not distinguishing possession and property. It is that "desire" becomes a problem when we are small minded and we cannot see beyond it. When we are small minded having a desire is an unpleasant experience and it can consume us and take us over. When we have a mind bigger than the desire we have freedom. We can chose. Right now I have a few desires one is to sleep as I am tired, one is to finish some work, one is to go for a walk, I'm not actually hungry which is a rarity, and a desire to finish this! But none are huge, and I can pick them up and put them down and am actually very free. The problem happens with desires bigger than us. They fill us up and we lose perspective. We have no room to move and they take over. The smaller our mind the smaller a desire can do this.
Only when we have a mind bigger than a desire can we experience freedom. And what does this mean? It means that our self is bigger than desire. It means that we are not identical with desire. A human being with a big mind has a relationship with desire very similar in fact to their relationship with things. We can pick things up when we need them, and we can put them down. Likewise we can attend to that desire to go sky diving, or we can focus on the work we have to do. Nothing is so desired that we can't think of anything else. This is equanimity. It also means that when we have a desire and someone else has a desire we can take up a position of freedom between our desire and theirs. Wow think about that! we can occupy a space between our self and another! This is ecstasy. It is the basis of what is cheesily called "goodness." But it is so much deeper and more profound than what is commonly associated with goodness.
So in final conclusion. When we have a desire that is near the size of our mind then it is a relief to get rid of it, because it can totally absorb us. Now this can be a pleasurable experience, because while we are absorbed with a desire we can think of nothing else and this can actually distract us from other sufferings and desires. Perhaps I have a deep desire to be famous and I am still a nobody. However if I develop a big desire to climb Mount Everest this will distract me from my pain at being no-one. Unfortunately there is a test for this: once we have climbed Mount Everest and the desire is satisfied we no longer have the distraction and we must return to the pain of not having achieved fame. I believe this has always troubled me. It is far better to be honest about our desires to some degree and seek to address them directly rather than try to distract from them. Some desires like fame are incredibly hard to achieve and we need a conversation with Simon Cowell to tell us to just forget about it. It is painful, but pain like desire is something that is much easier when we have a big mind. If our mind is too small and the pain too big, then like a huge mouthful it will take a lot of chewing before we can swallow it. This is text book suffering, and it is what having a small mind is like. It also underlines the importance of growing our mind, and developing a perspective that is bigger and beyond our self. But suffering is good, because this is the number one way of growing.
It is so sad to see the news about Keith Flint. He did achieve fame, and was front man to one of the defining music phenomenon of our generation. He did climb Everest. A true legend. Very deeply missed. And he gave so much to so many people. In that sense he was a bodhisattva. A blinding light in the darkness for many who wanted to party hard in the 90s and 00s. Yet after all this he was left profoundly wanting himself, and a desire that ultimately was too great for him that it consumed him. He lost control and unable to meet the demands of that devil he killed himself. His mind was too small for this whatever it was. Johnny Rotten puts it down to loneliness and lack of love. But there are many who are heart broken, and unloved who soldier on through the valley of darkness and loneliness taking each miserable day as it comes, and eking out what meagre joy their life affords them. Perhaps they have hope, or perhaps they are just big enough to just accept it. Life isn't always amazing, sometime life is just rubbish, some times a whole lifetime from birth to death can be horrendous. But it's always life, and within that some days are better than others. And from what I've written in this blog underneath the overloaded small mind, there is the big mind that lies in equanimity to the world sufferings. As discussed in the blog before this does not mean the big mind is dull the world's suffering, it means that it is big enough to see the suffering as it is without feeling overwhelmed. A baby may burst our crying if you take away their ice cream. Their whole world just collapsed. When we are older it still hurts exactly the same, but when we are bigger we can contain that sadness and just see it and let if dissipate without becoming too distressed. Something that starts, will end. This is the basic law of the world (Konadattas insight). Not everyone has teh same desires and emotions. A spider may fill one person with huge fear that they cannot bear it is not because they are small minded but because their fear is very great. Perhaps Keith Flint was not small minded, but the desire he had was too great for him. I don't suppose he ever meditated, or did any mental practice to develop that mind of his. As a result when Mayumi Kai refused to come home, whatever part she played in his mental life, it left him with a mouthful too big to chew. My only advise if I had known him would have been to start chewing on that, whatever it was, a long time before it became unbearable. You "Gotta face your fears in the wild frontier." Just gotta face your desires.
Final conclusion: ecstasy is our true nature. Free from the boundaries of self. This is not self annihilation, it is just stepping outside not always being dragged back inside the selfish perspective by desires and fears we can't manage. The way outside is what is generally called "goodness", but which is essentially trying to occupy the space between our self and others. It can hurt to give and not be recognised or receive in return, it hurts to love and not be loved in return. But when we step outside our self, outside that pain, when we are big enough and big hearted enough, big minded enough (same word in some languages) we can see it for what it is we can get freedom from it. It doesn't go away, we just sit outside it. This is ecstasy, this is true mind and heart. So when we get what we want, the desire goes away, and this returns us to freedom, but with a big heart and mind there is room in us to be free and have the desires, pains and loves all at once.
Just celebrate this post with the latest Carly Rae Jepsen offering. So we find what we want, there's "nothing like this feeling". That feeling is ecstasy it is true peace because for a while we are free, there is room in us for two. But when desires start to develop again that "you" don't satisfy then we fill up and there becomes room for only me again. And if you are Keith Flint there stops being room even for you if the desires are too big. When we are in love, and free and have room for two we must work extra hard to grow and make room for more. I think my mistake is I get lazy and actually my mind shrinks when I'm in love and that means I become even less able to weather hardship. Well done Carly some musical love again.
Now this is the real nature of the problem we face in life. This is not just a economics post, its a religious, ethics, spiritual, psychological, existential, ontological post. "New Economics" must have limits. Perhaps the goal is not unify the whole of spirituality, science, ethics and economics. It is just to define the correct boundaries of economics to avoid people justifying the indefensible with economic theory.
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