Yummy Desires

I’m working right now to pay much closer attention to my desires, so sit right on top of them, as though they were the object of Vipassana meditation. 

When most people talk about desires, I think it looks something like how we desire for a specific food. A craving for donuts, or tacos, or curry. And we pursue those things because they are yummy things. Does the same hold true when we are talking about other desires? When I say I desire to be a coach, or to do a handstand, am I expressing “Yum, handstands!”? Sometimes the answer is yes. All I want is to just do the thing and I have a craving to do some behavior or have my body move in a specific way. But what about desires that are longer-term? Say, I want to complete a PhD in Jungian Psychotherapy. What is that desire exactly? How does it work when I actually undertake the task of completing that study?

When I am committed to that course of action, do I hold the end goal in mind throughout? Or do I perform a sort of mental calculus when I’m taking tiny slices of that goal and composing the whole goal? Do I want to complete 1 year of a PhD, then another and another? Do I want to finish one course, then then next? One sentence of study, then the next? 

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Your attention is a microscope. Insert your slide and see the amoeba of desire.It’s whole and moving and entire organism. It wiggles and you feel your heart swell with anticipation for the future. Turn the dial in, and what do you see?  The parts of desire. You see status, lust, weakness, strength. Dial in further. Are those parts made of parts? Does your desire for status rest on feelings of inferiority? Superiority? 

What’s the lowest, most atomic part of desire? Do we only have the practical near-term desire? The moment to moment only? Or does the longer term desire do the motivating? Can it be both? If it’s both, how does that work? What connects the desires to each other? Is it that they are logically linked, A leads to B then C then D then E. Are they emotionally linked? I feel this which is the same type of feeling as that? 

This is a branch of engineering for the mind. This is personal alchemy. 

You can complete a goal based purely on the end goal. I want to create a film because I want the flash and status from having made a film. But I’m unmotivated by the editing and audio correction in itself. 

I can also love the process. I want to write a book and every sentence I scrape through, every phrase I edit is a process that I love. It’s a pleasant salad to eat, but it’s no greasy street taco. (Are process-oriented activities less intense and somehow more soulfully nutritious?)

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A final aside: I have been focused on goal-setting and attainment for a decade now and I’m just now seeing that I do not know how any of this works. I’ve been tromping across the wilderness of my mind, fording rivers, and engaged in mild engineering when I set camp. But not once in the decade prior did I stop to ask “Why does my motivation work this way? Could it be another way?”