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:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)