Desire is a major factor in the current state of human existence. We are beset by desires of all kinds daily: desire for a bigger house, desire for a romantic partner, desire for a million types of goods and services. Marketers have figured out how to manipulate desire at scale, and they are vilified for their tactics; but it is our own susceptibility to desire that is the real cause of their effectiveness. But while human life is currently unimaginable without desire, spiritual teachers have warned us about desire for centuries. The Buddha taught that desire was the route to suffering. Medieval Christianity taught the vanity of desire for things of this world. More recently, integral spiritual philosopher Sri Aurobindo has also held that desire must be conquered in order to achieve spiritual perfection.
Is it possible that the spiritualists who admonished humans for desiring be wrong? Couldn’t their viewpoint that be symptomatic of an ascetic and world denying attitude towards spirituality that is made obsolete by a world-affirming integral spirituality? It is true that older forms of spirituality which tended to asceticism, the rejection of desire was a consequence of an ascetic viewpoint. What is less obvious is that even in a world-affirming integral spirituality, desire must be renounced as well. However, with a clearer understanding of what desire is, we can see that renouncing desire doesn’t have to mean the end of participation, and even delight, in the world.
A first place to start is in understanding what exactly is meant by “desire” in the spiritual context; confusion over the injunction to renounce desire is often confounded by the issue of semantics. Desire in the spiritual sense is not just a preference for an outcome; it is a craving of the life force in a particular direction. In Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual psychology, man is made up of the mind, the vital or life-force, the body, and the soul. The life-force is the source in us of energy, drive, enthusiasm, and passion, positive qualities which no life, spiritual or mundane, can do without. But along with its positive qualities come its capacity for craving, suffering, aggressiveness, selfishness, and so on. Desire is the craving in the life force for objects or circumstances other than those available in the present moment. Desire can be identified by the presence of attachment or agitation in the vital over the possibility of having or not having the object or circumstance in question. We perhaps need a more refined vocabulary to be able to discuss the difference between this sense of desire as craving of the life force from the other possible meaning of “preference for an outcome”. For the spiritual seeker, desire must be conquered, whereas preference for various outcomes is legitimate—just as God himself does not create out of desire, but does have preferred outcomes.
Even with this distinction, there are those who still hold out for a role of desire in the spiritual life. One argument holds that desire is “natural"—that humans are naturally desire oriented beings, and to go against this is to go against nature. This argument cannot hold because all of Yoga is the attempt to transcend the natural state of human life for something closer to God. Another concern is political. In our society, there are groups or classes of people that have been shamed for their desires previously and insist that they now be allowed to desire freely. This is a valid consideration. Indeed, large classes of people whose desire has been regulated for political reasons should indeed have their right to desire in line with nature be affirmed. But the question under consideration here is not political, but spiritual. The spiritual admonition to renounce desire does not apply to large classes of people, but rather to the small and self-selected group that is made up of integral spiritual seekers. Though they will be conditioned by the same forces that operate in the world, it is imperative that they rise above them.
Indeed, the question of desire is completely different when considering spiritual seekers as opposed to the manifested world in general. In fact, desire is essential in the lower aspect of the manifestation to bring about God’s will: desire is required to get the species to procreate to sustain itself, sustain the economy, and secure the needed results in presidential elections; the ideal outcome is not for desire to simply drop away from the human race. The question is for the role of desire in the lives of spiritual seekers and in the higher manifestation, and the answer is that desire must be renounced.
But if desire is required in the lower manifestation, what will drive the manifestation when desire is no longer a factor? Some have theorized that after desire is gone, there is no need for the manifestation at all anymore, and when everyone conquers desire, all souls will simply depart and the world will pass away. But that is not the theory of integral spirituality, at least in Sri Aurobindo’s conception. Sri Aurobindo holds that the manifestation was created with the purpose of manifesting God. And the paths God takes along the way are meant to best bring about that end. There is in some sense a preference God expresses to manifest the higher spiritual values—Satchidananda, or existence, consciousness, and bliss—over nothing at all. But we cannot say that this preference is desire in the sense of a perverted movement of the life force. This fundamental will of God to manifest carries down to the smaller decisions we face in our lives. Some possibilities in our consciousness are colored by desire; other possibilities allow God to manifest in his purity. The manifestation of God does not even necessarily exclude of things like a nice house (as an expression of beauty) or a romantic partner (an expression of complementary energies). These things are admissible for the integral spiritual seeker only when they are a pure manifestation of spiritual energies, but not when they are held as cravings of the life force. Naturally, it requires great sincerity to be able to determine what is the will of God to manifest and what possibilities are tinged with lower human desire; perhaps this is why the older ascetic spiritual paths found it easier to simply renounce the manifestation of God altogether than trying to isolate desire and renounce it alone.
On the path to renounce desire we must not get caught in the old trap of confusing spiritual necessity with morality; we must get rid of the idea of moral fault in desire. There is nothing "wrong” with desire. Desire is a natural part of the human experience. When we attempt to transcend desire in Yoga, we attempt to fulfill a higher law for a higher purpose. If the aim of a given person is not Yoga—and this is the case for the vast majority of humans—there is nothing wrong with their desire. They must simply learn to manage it using the enlightened mental will—not everything will be possible to attain, but some things will be possible. God works through these various possibilities and desires to attain his larger purpose.
It is only when an individual seeks to do Yoga that the renunciation of desire becomes an issue. But even for the spiritual seeker, what is so bad about desire? There is first of all the fact that desire leads away from peace and towards suffering. But the more substantial reason why desire is a problem for the aspiring Yogi is that it separates the seeker from God. This is often more clear in others than in oneself. If a person has a concerted desire for a car, a house, a romantic partner, that is that much energy that is siphoned away from surrender to God. They desirer becomes lost in the lower world and turned away from the higher world. The energy spent on desire cannot be recovered; it is channeled away into the lower part of the manifestation where it can only recur and recur in new forms. To attain oneness with God, it is necessary to master these turbid motions of the life force through will, surrender, or any other method that works. This is one of the most difficult parts of the spiritual path. But one secret of the spiritual path that once we are on the other side of the desires, rewards of the spirit that are far more preferable, beautiful, and blissful open up.
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