Desire (emotion) - Contemporary Spiritual Perspective

Contemporary Spiritual Perspective

Barry Long defined desire as stress or strain. It is a tension between you and the thing or state you desire. As the thing does not feel this stress, the desiring is a one-way tension within you, an apparent reaching out towards the object or person.

When the person responds in the way desired, or the object is attained, the desire settles down into a relationship. A relationship is identifiable by the presence of an attitude in yourself which reacts in terms of 'mine'.

The strength of a relationship cannot be known until after it is broken. Then the original desire reappears, modified by experience. It continues to be modified by repetition of experience until eventually it vanishes. Unsuspected by the long-suffering desirer, its final stage is usually a shadow-existence of thinking and going back over the past, powered by nothing more than habit. Every habit is a track left by desire.

Desire itself can only be eliminated by desiring, and that always results one way or another in pain for the desirer. Living is just that: ceaseless desire eliminating and reforming itself by the pain and frustration of its own wanting.

When a desire has been reduced to the level of a habit or idea it can be dealt with and eliminated fairly quickly by observation - seeing it for what it is. In that moment you suddenly realise you are free of the relationship as a need or dependence 'of mine'.