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'.
Read more about this topic: Desire (emotion)
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, spiritual and/or perspective:
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15:42-45.
“No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)