Desire and Dust

Clouds and Mirrors

fLUX eterna

If every man had exactly what he wanted, he would be no better than he is now.

Heraclitus offers a trenchant observation about desire when he tells us that realizing all our wishes will not change who we are; we will continue to live with and as ourselves no matter how much money, sex, power, or material goods we can accumulate and surround ourselves with.  We must become who we wish to be independent of the fulfillment of our desires. 

Montaigne said it this way:  “man cannot discover his needs by consulting his desires.”

I once wrote about magazine ad I had seen for the Visa credit card.  The ad copy promised:  “it’s not just everywhere you want to be, it’s everything you ever wanted.”  This claim left me speechless. 

Perhaps we have learned from Marx that the creation of desire is the most powerful tool a culture wields, for if society can tell us what we want, it has already begun to tell us how to live.  And so perhaps there is at least one version of what we want, a particular field of our desires, about which the claim in this ad is true.  

If so, our challenge may be to discover what, if anything, we want that Visa cannot provide us with.  How will we discover, beneath the distracting veneer of our transient desires, what we in fact truly need, and how will we discover whether there is a way to become “better than we are now” that consists in more than getting “exactly what we want”?

Bhagavad Gita

All is clouded by desire:  as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust, as an unborn babe by its covering.

Wisdom is clouded by desire, the everpresent enemy of the wise, desire in its innumerable forms, which like a fire cannot find satisfaction.

Desire has found a place in man’s senses and mind and reason.  Through these it blinds the soul, after having over-clouded wisdom.

Set thou, therefore, thy senses in harmony, and then slay thou sinful desire, the destroyer of vision and wisdom.

Be a warrior and kill desire, the powerful enemy of the soul.

Herbstnebel

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief