Desire has a bad reputation in many spiritual circles. It is associated with craving, with attachment, with the source of all suffering. Yet the traditions, read carefully, almost never ask us to extinguish desire as such. They ask rather that we understand it, purify it and direct it. Desire is an energy: everything depends on where it is directed.
The restless heart
Augustine opens the Confessions with a sentence that has become famous: our heart is restless until it rests in God. This sentence contains a complete theory of desire. The human being is made of desire, of a lack that no finite object can entirely fill.
This restlessness is not a defect to be corrected, but the sign of a vocation. Whoever tries to satisfy it with possessions, successes or pleasures discovers that every satisfaction is short-lived and leaves a new emptiness. Not because those goods are bad, but because they are not proportionate to the depth of desire.
The lesson of the Symposium
In Plato's Symposium, Eros is described as the child of Poverty and Resource: always lacking, always seeking. Desire is born of lack, but it is also ingenious, able to find ways.
Diotima's ladder shows that desire, instead of being repressed, can be educated: from desire for a single beauty one rises towards ever broader forms, up to Beauty itself. Desire is not eliminated; it is transfigured.
Craving in Buddhism
Buddhism identifies tanha, thirst or craving, as the root of suffering. This might seem a wholesale condemnation of desire. In reality the tradition makes a distinction: craving is compulsive desire, which grasps and does not let go. But there is also a healthy desire, called chanda in some texts, which indicates aspiration towards the good and towards liberation.
Without this aspiration no one would set out on the path. Even the desire to be free from desire is, in its way, a desire. The point is not to stop desiring, but to stop being a slave to desire.
Desire and need
A useful distinction, present in various spiritual reflections, is that between need and desire.
| Need | Desire |
|---|---|
| Is satisfied | Deepens |
| Concerns survival | Concerns meaning |
| Is exhausted in the object | Points beyond the object |
| Has a measure | Tends towards the infinite |
Many problems arise when desire is treated as a need, by trying to satisfy it with finite objects. One eats to fill an emptiness that is not hunger, one buys to fill a lack that is not material. Recognising the nature of one's desire is the first step to directing it.
Desires that betray
Not all desires are equal. The traditions teach us to distinguish between desires that open and desires that close. Some signs of a desire that betrays:
- it never leaves you in peace, even when satisfied;
- it always demands more to produce the same effect;
- it isolates you from relationships and other interests;
- it is born of comparison with what others have;
- it feeds on images more than on reality.
By contrast, an authentic desire brings a certain peace even in waiting, makes you more alive, and opens you towards others.
The transfiguration of desire
The word transfiguration indicates a change of form that reveals a deeper reality. To transfigure desire does not mean repressing it, but letting it show itself for what it truly is.
Mysticism has often used the language of amorous desire to describe the search for the divine. The Song of Songs in the Jewish and Christian traditions, the poetry of John of the Cross, the verses of the Sufi mystics speak of longing, of the wound of love, of seeking the Beloved. Human desire is not disowned but recognised as the image of a greater desire.
Working with your own desire
A few questions can help you know and direct your desire:
- What do I really desire, beneath what I think I desire?
- Is this desire mine, or was it suggested to me by others?
- What do I hope to find once I have satisfied it?
- Are there other ways to reach what I am truly seeking?
Studio Esoterico Cornelio considers desire one of the most powerful forces of the soul: not an enemy to be extinguished, but a flame to be tended and directed towards what can truly satisfy it.
In short
- The traditions do not ask us to quench desire, but to understand and direct it.
- Augustine sees in the restless heart the sign of a desire no finite good can fill.
- Buddhism distinguishes compulsive craving from healthy aspiration to the good.
- Distinguishing need from desire avoids trying to fill a lack of meaning with objects.
- To transfigure desire is to let it reveal its deepest direction.