C C C:
Despite repeated readings I don't understand your analogy with the comb, stef. What impulse or force could cause a person to do something without the expectation of feel-good payoff? I have never seen a human act without desire/payoff...ever. Even the most inane, prosaic and miniature actions like brushing lint off my shoulder are motivated by desire. I don't want that bit of lint there. I desire for it not to be there. Unless what you're saying is that you are aligning with a "Higher" desire (as in God, say)...maybe I could accept that. Is that what you;re saying?
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Hi CCC,
Thanks for taking the time to explain your confusion and point of view. I can see that you're grappling with this different model of being in the world and that it is just not computing for you. I'll try to make a few more comments, as clearly as I can, to see if I can elucidate things further. But it may be the case, CCC, that you simply
disagree with the Buddhist model, and the Actualist paradigm, for understanding what it means to be alive.
I'm not saying anything about "god" at all. I don't even think the desire for other people's suffering to end is a "higher" desire if you've actually witnessed other people suffering. Most people have enough empathy, in their unexamined state, to feel a need to prevent other people from suffering. Haven't you ever done anything you didn't
want to do but had to? Like say, for example, remove a leech from a person who'd been wading through a river? Sure, one "wants" the person not have to a leech on their body but there is no feel good payoff for the person, there is only the service they can provide to another who is unable to help themselves, there is the necessity of helping another individual. Once, when I was a teenager I was at the beach and a child I was with was about to get stung by a jellyfish. She was about 5 or so at the time...so I ran over and picked her up and was subsequently stung by the jellyfish myself. There was no feel good pay off there. I didn't get any reward for it and I had a rather uncomfortable sensation around my ankles for awhile.
You must attempt to uncouple actions from their affective charge in order to understand this. You might say that most people experience the world through a relationship between an object and its shadow. That object would be your flesh and blood body and the shadow would be your feelings (including unconditional love, which I'll say more about below). Most of us spend our time talking and interacting shadow to shadow, then don't understand why we can't connect. So, for example, there is driving (the mechanical act) and then there is what I think about driving (the affective charge, the shadow): what kind of car do I drive, memories of when I learned to drive, anger at the other people who drive so horribly, unlike myself, who is a perfect driver, and so on, as the affective charge which parallels the act of driving. There is sitting and what I think about sitting; there is walking and what I think about walking; there is eating and what I think about eating (not to mention the other things I am thinking and feeling not related to sitting, eating, walking, etc.). But what if there was simply driving, sitting, walking, eating, for what they are themselves with all that other stuff added on?
You know here is the fact: you are alive. Here's another fact: because you are alive, you must eat, you must interact with other people, you must move your body through the world. You could do that with perfect harmony and without desire, with no need to throw things out of balance by grubbing for more. It's possible! Your relation to "what you do" could be dictated by "what needs to be done," rather than "What I want." Whether you want to eat or not, your body requires that you do so. Ask anyone who has ever been anorexic about uncoupling action from desire...
I'm sure you might argue that the feel good pay off, to the acts of necessity as it regards helping other people, is that I get to "feel" like a good person. But being unable to imagine the possibility of a self-less act is sort of sad in and of itself. Let's take your gold standard from which all harmony flows, unconditional love, and examine it in relation to the notion of desire. How can you argue for "unconditional love," which requires selflessness to actually operate to its own claim of not being conditioned, but not understand an essentially self-less act? How can one love another, without condition, if one only acts for a "feel good" payoff? Unconditional love is by definition, if it is going to exist true to its name, performed without desire. Unconditional love is called "unconditional" precisely because it is supposed to indicate the act of love without the pay off; that it is freely given regardless of what the giver gets.
What you're calling for, without realizing it, is the practice of a desire-less interaction, which is what unconditional love is supposed to be. If someone loves you so that they can feel good themselves, or so they can feel like a good person, then it is not unconditional love because as soon as they no longer "get" those things they will stop loving you. So if you think you love someone "unconditionally" ask yourself if you'd still "feel" the same way if you discovered they were secretly a serial killer? If there is desire in love, it is not unconditional. And there is always desire in love, which is why love doesn't work.
Acting without desire, yet performing actions nonetheless, is to perform the benign functions of being a human being without a self, without the delusion of an ego operating. The inability to imagine action without self-based desire is an inability to imagine living without the ego, without the self. And though there might be broad disagreement about how to do this, around these parts most people are trying to realize the illusion of selfness, of ego, precisely in order that the actions they take as necessary measures as living beings in this world are beneficial to all sentient beings (in Buddhist speak) or completely harmless (in Actualist speak).
What you imagine to be your intentionality is such a small part of who you actually are as an organism in this world. Giving over everything it means to be alive to desire is giving desire too much weight and credit and is precisely why we're in the mess we're in...Right now your body is handling myriad processes over which you have absolutely no control. "Who" is growing your hair? "Who" is handling the conveyance of oxygen through your blood stream? "Who" is processing the food you ate for breakfast through your bowels? "Who" is sending you the message, much later, that it's time to empty one's bowels? And then we get to the fundamental meditative question, "who" is breathing?
Likewise ask yourself "who" is wanting? "Who" is acting? As one kind of old school Zen-esque teacher put it--"What you took to be the thinker was really just one of the thoughts; what you took to be the feeler of feelings is really just one of the feelings."** So "who" is it that gives unconditional love? It quite simply can't be given because there is no one to give it and also no one to receive it, which is why that model fails. By laying the burden of human suffering on the failure of "unconditional love," you are essentially asking a group of shadows to construct a skyscraper. These shadows can't do it because they don't have hands. These shadows can try as much as they want but it will only be theatre, a pantomime, and completely un-actual. I don't say this to castigate love. Human beings have tried so hard to make that model work, we've banged our head against the wall of love for eons now, and we've cracked that nut so many times. But when you crack the nut of unconditional love, what you discover is that there is nothing inside the shell. It is also true that when you crack the shell of the self, you do not find within a fleshy edible thing but only space, emptiness, a nothing-is-there-ness. So from that space what can be given? What can be received? And then you realize that you thought you were cracking a nut, but that there was never any nut to crack to begin with...no nut and also no shell, and also, no cracker (as in, the one who cracks). Do you follow?
How can the desires of something that does not exist as an entity, which is actually just an unfolding process, be fulfilled? And how can desire, which is not an emptiness, which is not lack, is not an empty space that needs to be filled, answer itself when in fact the arising of desire is an independent object which is actually not related to anything? The arising of desire is a process of the ego and as long as there is an ego,
desire will arise regardless of external conditions. This means you can pursue objects and conditions as much as you want, but desire will continue to arise in the same way that hunger will continue arise for the entire life of the organism. So yes, you fed yourself earlier today, but later, hunger will arise because that is the way the organism operates. Suggesting that desire should always be sated and then it will go away, when all the appropriate desires are met, is like suggesting that one will stop experiencing hunger if one simply eats the right things. And the only way to get rid of desire is to get rid of the ego, the affective self. However if you do not agree with the basic argument that desire is the cause of suffering, then there is actually no reason to belabor these points...
There is a scene in one of my favorite movies, "Mississippi Masala" directed by Mira Nair. In the film, Roshan Seth is an exiled Afro-Indian, who had to leave Uganda when the Asians were kicked out by Idi Amin. His long time friend and "brother," an African named Okelo, stays behind. One day, after many years of struggling with the trauma of being brutally uprooted from his homeland, and of harboring tremendous anger and resentment towards Okelo, he notices a picture of Okelo and his daughter, Mina, in the liquor shop his wife runs, pinned to the wall. He asks her, "Where did that come from?" And she answer, "Why, Jay, it's always been there."
We cannot see what we do not want to see; we cannot understand that which we are unwilling to understand. And often, our inability to understand something has very much to do with a resistance to what is being offered. Jay didn't see the picture of Okelo because he didn't want to; his anger, his resentment, and his fear kept it from his view. His mind literally "blacked it out." It may just be the case that you desire your desire, you want to hold on to it, and so it is unimaginable to you that others might operate differently or have even found a way to be free of it. Perhaps there is despair in your argument as you try to convince yourself, and us, that desire cannot be shaken off despite evidence to the contrary...that evidence being 2,500 years of Buddhist practice, and for those of us who are practicing Actualists and the actually free people, the discovery of a state known as actual freedom...
I understand that for some people this desire-based model, the "achieve your dreams" model, is what life is about for them. And I'm sure that there are some folks out there who are, right now, happier than Hugh Hefner at cheerleading camp in the pursuit and fulfillment of their desires... but understand that the critique offered of it here is a valid one even if one cannot, or chooses not to, understand it. And if there is some part of you that is secretly drilling away at the empty nut, please know that it is possible to decrease and extinguish desire, that the arahants and actually free people are not lying to you or pretending, and that
you can realize this desire-less state too, despite the protestations of the self, despite the arguments of the ego.
**Alan Watts.