Facing Desire

Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life. Insights from Buddhism & Psychotherapy by Mark Epstein.  Gotham Books.  227 pp.  ***1/2

The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80. Edited by Ian S. MacNiven.  New Directions.  528 pp.  $21.89

In Open to Desire, psychiatrist and longtime Buddhist practitioner Mark Epstein takes on the central paradox of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.  They state that life is characterized by suffering (dukkha), that the cause of suffering is craving, that there is an end to craving, and that the means to that end is the eightfold noble path.  The primary problem in life is desire, they seem to say, and if we can just cut off desire we’ll end our suffering.  Hey!  No problem.  Thanks for sharing.

No problem until we try to cut off desire.  It’s not all that damn easy to follow the eightfold noble path.  There’s also a paradox at the heart of this whole endeavor.  If you want to become enlightened, like the Buddha, isn’t that in itself a form of desire?  If you’ve ever met a newcomer to Buddhism who is bent on enlightenment, you can see that his desire is as strong as any other.  And just about as pernicious.

The other thing is that desire is a part of life.  We get hungry and want food.  We get thirsty and want something to drink.  If these things didn’t happen we’d die.  That was what the Buddha realized in his ascetic phase, when he was trying to eliminate desire by eating and drinking almost nothing.  That final end of that logic is to starve to death.  That does eliminate the human problem, but not in a helpful way.

I tend to think of the modern era’s most enlightened being as Ramana Maharshi, who had a spontaneous experience of enlightenment early on and spent months or perhaps years in a cave in deep samadhi, so deep that he didn’t even want food or drink.  He was in bliss, apparently, at one with the source, but if the people around him hadn’t force him to eat and drink he would have joined the source in another way.  He was a modern saint, I have no doubt, but is that how we’re supposed to live?

Usually when people speak of desire, they mean sexual desire.  That’s the pernicious craving that all religions are trying to deal with.  Be celibate! is the answer that many proclaim.  The true saint has nothing to do with sex![1]  In the meantime, the rest of us are utterly flummoxed by it.  Why can’t I be a saint? we wonder.

When I first began doing meditation retreats, in my mid-forties, I was tormented by sexual fantasies.  They had always been my way of dealing with anxiety, ever since I was a little kid, and retreats were a major occasion of anxiety for me, though I was never sure why (What are you afraid of? Larry Rosenberg once asked me.  An excellent question[2]).  At first I was embarrassed by these fantasies, didn’t want to mention them, but eventually, with every teacher I studied with, I finally broke down and mentioned that my retreat had basically turned into a porn fest.  Nobody seemed the least bit surprised or alarmed.  Larry, every time I said this to him after the first, would say to me, “Yes.  That’s your specialty.”

Finally, after about the tenth time, I said, “Come on, Larry.  These fantasies are driving me nuts.  How can I stop this?”

He replied quite directly.  “No.  You’ve got to see the nature of desire.”

So I sat there and saw the nature of desire.

Mark Epstein, as a psychiatrist, was not typically seeing people who were searching for enlightenment.  He was often seeing people who were tangled up in sexual relationships, or compulsive sexual patterns, trying to deal with their cravings.  They didn’t care about the eightfold noble path.  They just wanted to get laid.  Or figure out why they wanted to get laid so much.

Ultimately, I think, we discover that desire is a fact of life.  We can’t eliminate it because it’s the life force.  We need to learn to deal with it, however, because any desire—for food, drink, sex, possessions—can take us over and ruin our lives, as Mark Epstein’s patients will attest.  The eightfold noble path’s prescriptions—right this, right that—advocate moderation and control.  They’re perfectly right.  But they’re not much help to someone with a compulsive craving.

What I discovered about desire I mostly learned on retreat, over a period of years.  I found, as Larry suggested, that I could sit there for seven days, or ten days, burning with desire, but could simultaneously not give in to it and not die of it.  I could just sit there and face it.  I also found—and this is the key to the left-hand path that Epstein talks about—that desire is a form of energy, and energy, as that great Tantric William Blake said, is eternal delight.  Having a desire implies a wish for fulfillment, but if you get in touch with the desire itself, and don’t try to fulfill it, that energy is not necessarily painful.  It can be expansive and exhilarating.  That’s what Tantrics realize when they defer orgasm and stay with the energy.  It goes on and on.

I honestly was a little disappointed with this book, though I enjoyed Thoughts Without a Thinker, and am interested in this subject.  I felt that what Epstein really had here was a long article, and he expanded it into a book by padding it in various ways.  He gives experiences of his patients, but it might have been more instructive if he’d talked more about his own struggles with desire.

In his last story, however, about a woman he met in Maine who gave him some wisdom about entering a pool of frigid water, he met with one of the old women from the Buddhist koans.  She wasn’t a Buddhist.  She wasn’t even a shrink.  She was just a woman who had learned something through years of living.  And what she taught him is applicable to any desire, sex, food, or anything else.  It’s the way to live.  That story makes the book worth reading.

And if a reader wants to embrace a lust for life, as the subtitle suggests, he could do a lot worse than reading the Durrell-Miller letters, which I won’t review here but was reading at the same time as this book.  These men did not lead exemplary lives by any means, though they were fascinated by the wisdom of the East.  But if you’re looking for lust for life, they stand as better examples than Mark Epstein.  He seems to be trying to figure it out.  They just lived it.

[1] I don’t actually agree.  Shouldn’t a saint be able to deal with sex in a healthy way?

[2] I eventually decided, strangely enough, that what I was afraid of was the present moment.  But that’s another story.