The Beauty of Desire (Part 2)

I would like to continue this exploration of desire that we began last week. Remember, we were saying that maybe desire is one of those aspects of our being, of our existence, that is amenable, open to approach, investigation, exploration from a lot of different angles, and that depending on how we come at it, the whole territory of desire opens up differently, brings perhaps different -- even seemingly contradictory -- conclusions. There's something of a mystery here, part of the mystery of our being.

I said, in these two talks last week and this week, I wanted to just take three of those directions, and just walk a little way in those inroads. And I also wanted to teach in a different way, approaching teaching differently, and very much not disseminate conclusions, but rather open things up, stimulate questioning, inquiry. An opening up of views -- that's really the intention here.

Okay. So I want to touch on two approaches, then. These are not linear; they're just different approaches, two approaches. One very briefly. I'm going to try and limit myself to five minutes on it, and spend most of the time on another one, because this second one that I'm going to talk about now, I've talked about a lot elsewhere, in quite a lot of detail and depth, etc. So if you're interested, you can ask me about it. I'll just touch on it now. And in a way, I'm bringing it up just because it balances the other thing that I'm going to say, to give a bit more of a complete picture.

So this is something that's in the Pali Canon, in the original teachings of the Buddha, implicit. For some reason, not really picked up on much and spoken about much at all, for some reasons -- I'm not sure. What would happen if you or I, as meditators, sat down, walked, sat and walked, and took as our theme desire and letting go of desire (clinging, craving, the movement of the mind towards or away from anything)? So that means wanting something, wanting to keep hold of something, or wanting to get rid of something -- any of that. And we took that as our theme in our meditation, and we became more and more familiar with what it felt like in the being for consciousness to be moving towards or away from something -- in other words, the movement of desire, the presence of desire. We became more and more sensitive to that. And as we became more and more sensitive, we let it go. So there's the awareness, the letting go, the awareness, the letting go, the awareness, the letting go -- awareness of the desire.

What would happen? What would our experience be? It would be the same for everyone. We get more familiar, not just with the gross levels of desire, but also very, very subtle, subtler and subtler movements of consciousness towards or away from anything. The experience would be universal, because we're dealing with laws of consciousness here. The experience would be universal. The first thing one would notice as one did that and did that, over and over again -- let go of desire, let go of desire, feel the desire, let it go, let it go -- is there would be less suffering. The suffering would begin to bleed out, to drain out of the experience, of the consciousness. The more I let go of desire, the less suffering. The more clinging and moving towards, the more suffering. I see that thousands and thousands of times, and eventually the coin drops: the suffering, or 99.9 per cent of the suffering we experience as human beings, is in the relationship with something. It's not the thing itself. It's in the relationship. When the relationship is one of desire, of clinging, of holding on, then there's suffering.

You've probably heard that before. I need to see it a lot of times. And that's great. That's okay. That's very good. I really want to absorb that into the being, into the cells, know it deeply in the body. But as we said last week, I cannot walk around in life, in the realm of objects and relations with objects and people, in a state free of that kind of desire, the mind not moving towards or away from things. It's impossible. Consciousness doesn't even work that way. It's impossible. But still, something is very important to be understood here: the suffering is in the relationship.

However, it doesn't stop there, the insight from that practice. If I kept doing that, if you kept doing that -- this is my thread, this is my avenue in practice, this is what I'm exploring -- kept doing that, what else would happen? Yeah, let go of desire, less suffering, for sure. As I keep doing it, I'll notice other interesting things happen, other interesting ways that perception/experience opens up. The sense of self, the sense of me being something separate, something other than what is not me, than the rest of the universe, than other beings, that would also start to get less, to attenuate. Less desire/clinging, not just less suffering, but less self. The very sense of separate self starts to fade as the desires, the clinging, gets less. And not just that. The sense of substantiality, certainly of this self, but also of experience, so-called inner and outer experience, the sense of it being so solid, so separate, that also begins to diminish. Going deeper even, appearances themselves begin to fade, begin to diminish. The world of appearance begins to disappear, and not just because it's impermanent, but because I'm not feeding it through the clinging.

What is going on here? Everyone would see that. It's a universal law. What on earth is the meaning of this? This is perhaps the deepest core of the Buddha's teaching. It's what he's pointing at. There's something in all that, in that experience unfolding in just that way for everyone. There's something being pointed to in the nature of perception and the nature of reality itself. Something is being implied, and it's radical and profound. If I understand that something, what it is about reality and perception, freedom comes, profound freedom.

[8:40] End of part two. [laughs] So if that piques your interest, you can ask me about it. Part three, quite different. Let's enter into a fantasy together, okay? The fantasy is I'm a research scientist, okay? And so are you. We are research scientists. Our subject is consciousness, our subject is meditation, is existence, and also is desire. So here I am, a research scientist, and in my recent research I have come across some puzzling results. I want to share these puzzling results with you. I want to do it also in a slightly different way, in the sense of kind of presenting sort of 'case studies' -- it will make sense as I go through -- that point to the revelation of something that I think is very interesting.

Just about that: it's an interesting and maybe very helpful fantasy to have of oneself as a researcher into consciousness. If I put that out, it's like, would that be okay to see yourself that way? And how would that be different from sitting down to meditation and trying to do it 'right,' or just doing whatever it is? Why can we not see ourselves that way? Not as any kind of ultimate reality or only view, but it might be something lovely to play with that opens things up.

Anyway. So in this fantasy, I can't remember when it was, somewhere between a year and two years ago, I was meditating in the evening in my room. There had been quite a lot of -- what should I call it -- difficult Gaia House politics going on behind the scenes, and a lot of people were involved, and a lot of people were not very happy. It doesn't matter what it was; I can't actually quite remember, to be honest. This was very much in my consciousness, and I was feeling troubled by all this. Sitting to meditate, I started working with it in a different way, and something happened, and the whole thing opened up in a different way. It was like, "That was really interesting. That was very different than other ways that I might know to work with things." I felt I stumbled across something, and it freed it up in a very different way. I felt I stumbled across a principle.

So then I began to explore it, working with students and with yogis in interviews. I can't actually remember the details of the first instance with myself, so I'm going to share and hopefully explain what all this is through 'case studies,' so to speak. I was speaking in a phone interview with a woman who had done quite a bit of practice, and experimenting with this. I mean, she didn't know it was coming, but experimenting with this. She had been, the day before, in a bank, and some kind of interaction in the bank. She had felt like she was really mistreated in this interaction in the bank, and there was a lot of hassle, a lot of frustration, and it was quite difficult. She was in a lot of turmoil, and I think quite hurt by the whole thing. She said, "No one said 'sorry.' This went on, and they said this, and this happened, and no one said 'sorry' to me." It was really quite painful for her still the next day.

Now, something like that, of course, as meditators -- and she an experienced meditator -- could be approached in a lot of different ways. A very obvious one: can we bring mettā, can we bring loving-kindness to bear? And maybe the loving-kindness towards oneself, and towards those in the bank and the bank manager, etc. That can really soften and heal, open the heart, and the perspective changes, the sense of the situation changes. Would be one option.

Another option, especially for her -- she was an experienced practitioner -- is to re-view the whole situation from the perspective not of self, but of the emptiness of self -- not-self, no-self. Where is the self here that got so hurt? Where is the self of the manager, of the people who were not so kind in the bank? That looking in terms of the emptiness of self can also dissolve and open up and heal something. That would have been another possibility.

Another possibility, in the whole range that we have as practitioners, is to explore the feelings that come up. In her case, when she was sharing, we did explore this a little bit. The helplessness, she felt very helpless in that situation. She felt not taken seriously, and disrespected, not respected. This touched something quite deep in her that was painful. Then with those feelings, very possible, very beautiful and skilful to be with the hurt, be with the hurt little girl inside, the one who feels helpless, and be with her, hold her, hold her pain in compassion, in warmth, in love, and in caring. Very beautiful, very skilful way of working -- all of these.

But we didn't. We did something else. I asked her: "In all this frustration and turmoil, is there a desire? Is there something you're wanting? And what is it that you're wanting?" When we get asked that, "What am I wanting?", very quickly the head answers, "I want this," or "I want that," "I want this to happen or that to happen." Or very quickly the desire, the question of the desire, throws us back and into a sense of lack. We feel the lack, what we don't have. I'll come back to that. The desire has got stuck on this or that object or event.

But she was able to get in touch with the desire of what she wanted in this situation. I said, "Okay, can you feel that energy of desire in the body? Really feel it in the body?" Number one. And number two, "Don't assume, do not assume, let go of the assumptions that the desire, that what you're wanting here, is bad, or immature in some way, or wrong, even." She could do this a little bit. She could do this. And what happened as she did that was a sense of empowerment came. Quite the opposite of what she was feeling -- disempowered. Empowerment came, and, she said, "a sense of the ability to stand up and say something back to the bank manager" -- not as a retaliation, but just kind of hold her ground, an empowerment. In her words, "the possibility of a creative response." Those were her words.

And in all that was strength. She felt strong and powerful -- and not over anyone; in herself. That wasn't there before. Rather than helplessness and lack, strength. Great. I said, "Okay, that's wonderful. Can you go back to this feeling of desire, and really get in touch with the movement of energy inside it" -- in other words, this movement of energy that is desire; we feel it as a movement of energy in the body -- "without landing on an image of an event or some kind of action that's coming from the mind?" So the desire is not so much latching onto something so solid, so immediate and obvious it's coming from the mind. What is it that I'm wanting in a more general way, a deeper way? And really open to that, really, really open up the space of the body to really allow it.

So I'm saying something a little bit more than just "be with your desire," "be mindful of your desire," "allow your desire," "open to it." I'm kind of saying really open to it. [laughter] I'm saying really make a big, big space for something that feels like a current. Let it fill and move, and give it lots of space, lots of space, this current, enormous current. She could do this. This was on the phone. She could do this. And she said then this whole sense of energy came with that. She said, "It feels like dancing inside. There's this dancing energy. It feels like I want to dance. Something inside me is dancing." Openness came, huge openness of being. Love came. She was inundated, saturated with love, totally, inside and out. That, incidentally, was one of the original answers to the question when I asked her, "What are you wanting?" That was the deeper level of answer. No lack at all, but abundance. Not lack, but abundance. Going from a strong sense of state of lack to a strong sense of abundance. This is interesting. What is going on here? This doesn't quite fit the classical map.

[19:22] So another example. I was working, not on the phone, face to face with another woman. And she had recently started a new relationship. Her new boyfriend was living in California, unfortunately. So he had been over here for a while, and then he moved back to California, and there was this separation. But she was getting ready to go over to visit. It was all very new. She came in for an interview and said, "I need to talk about craving. I'm craving, and it feels like that's painful. It feels like there's a contraction, and also there's fear of loss -- the beginning of the relationship, not sure how it's going to work out. There's a fear of loss, and a fear that it won't work out." Okay. So we could look at all that from a classical Dharma perspective, and we did a little bit. We talked about it.

Let's kind of look at craving from the classical viewpoint. Craving involves what I would call 'hype.' Do you know what I mean when I say 'hype'? It means building something up, kind of in an illusory way, like a kind of advertisement. Craving involves hype. It involves constructing artificial distinctions between things and times so that they seem more different than they really are. In her words, "The adventure begins then, when I get to California. Now is just waiting. It's like limbo," even though there was a lot of lovely exchange on the phone and texting and whatever else, skyping, even now.

But is it really that different here and now, to then and there? Is it really that different without the mind making it so? Or is the mind the master painter, the master magician, colouring things? In the Dharma, to deconstruct it a little bit -- not that this is an ultimate view -- we deconstruct and say, "Well, you have sights, and sounds, and smells, and tastes, and touch, and thought, and emotions, and body, and feelings, and perceptions, and consciousness, and all that here and now. Some of it will be very nice, some of it will not be very nice, and a lot of it will be kind of neither here nor there. I get to California, and I have sights, and sounds, and smells, and tastes, and touches, and thoughts, and emotions, and body, and feelings, and perceptions, and da-da-da-da, and some of it will be very nice, and some of it will not be very nice, and some of it will be in the middle." It's a way of deconstructing an artificial distinction. Craving involves hype. Craving is dependent on hype. Less hype, less craving. Less craving, less hype. So all things are, in the inner world, mutually dependent.

So we talked about that a little bit. But then I asked her, "What are you wanting? What are you wanting here? We're talking about craving. What are you wanting?" She said, "Him!" [laughter] It's like, "What a dumb question! Him." [laughter] It's hard to see deeper than that. It's hard to see it's more than that. So I was just kind of probing her a little bit. She said, "I love that I can say anything, and that I'm listened to." That was a new thing for her. It was very lovely. "I love that I can say anything, and that I'm listened to." And then pushing that a little bit further, "What are you wanting?" She laid it out, and she said, with some reflection, "I want the opening of the heart." It felt like something was opening, and she wanted that opening of the heart. "I want the expression, I want the connection, the sense of being received, and I want to love." So all those four things, she said, that's what she wanted.

In that, the 'what I'm wanting' has gone to a deeper level, less so much landing on a specific, limited object. It's gone to something deeper. I said, "Can you hold that and feel what that wanting feels like, feel what the desire feels like?" She said, "Whoa, it feels like this current inside," when she let herself be with it. I said, "Can you let it really fill, fill the body? Really allow it, feel it," just as we said before. She said, "Actually, this current feels deeper and more powerful than what I'm used to experiencing," and her sense of self was changing with it, also, "than what I usually take or feel myself to be." So it was pushing at her sense of self, expanding something. And actually we stayed with it a little bit. She began to feel, as she was opening to this deep, strong current inside, her self-boundaries, the boundaries of the self -- "I end here, and the rest of the world starts there" -- that was beginning to dissolve. Something was beginning to dissolve and expand in terms of the sense of self. There was an expansion of the sense of being.

That was actually quite scary for her, and there was some resistance, and some kind of counter-contraction. I said, "What are you afraid of here? What's the fear of?", to go slowly. She said, "I'm afraid of losing myself, of disappearing." Actually, what happened is we ran out of time in the interview at that point, but in theory, possible then to bring compassion to the self -- the self that is resistant, the self that's feeling that fear. And it's okay. Gradually, we learn that we can really let go in that expansion of self, whether it's in meditation, whether it's through this. It's a priceless and precious experience, way experience can open for human beings, this sense of the self just expanding beyond what we take it usually to be. So precious. We can play our edges here.

And eventually, whether this is slow or fast, eventually we're able to allow that expansion of the sense of self, and with it, a whole new sense of self -- and in this case, a whole new sense of self and life force comes, if it's through this desire thing. Strength, and openness, and independence -- in other words, a feeling of fullness, fulfilment that's not dependent on the object of desire being there; fulfilled, to a great extent, by the life force opening something, by the deep desire flowing.

So a question: is it possible that the contracted kind of craving -- the kind of craving that we feel as painful; the kind of craving that has those swings to fear, or fear of loss of the object or the person, fear of rejection, that kind of craving; the kind of craving that repeatedly moves away from the present moment, into being lost in the future, into daydreaming, etc. -- is it possible, maybe, sometimes, that that kind of craving, that painful kind of craving, is actually a result, even, of not connecting to, not realizing, not allowing the deeper desire to unfold, to be felt, to flow? Might that be the case sometimes? Might it also be the case that we have a habit of grabbing hold of desire in a way that is painful and contracted?

[28:16] Another example. A man who had done quite a lot of Dharma practice, and a lot of service in his life, and a lot of Dharma service, service to the Dharma in different ways, he came in, and there was quite a lot of deep pain around his direction in life. He was a certain age, and with this history, and he felt like, "I actually want to be in a relationship. I want romance. I want to have children." And that wasn't there in his life in any way. We were talking a little bit. What if you just sweep aside the assumptions that what the self wants is somehow what we call in the Dharma a kilesa, an impurity, an affliction not to be trusted? You take that, and you just brush it aside for now as an experiment, and you really be careful that you don't assume what the self wants is problematic, is somehow impure or something wrong. Wipe these assumptions, actually Dharma assumptions, perhaps, off the table, and assume instead that maybe any movement of my desire, my movement of desire, desire or aversion, maybe that's kind of like a plant moving towards the sun. What's that word? Phototropic. There's something in the desire -- a kind of, you could say, dynamic intelligence. What if I were to trust that rather than assume the opposite, as an experiment? The dynamic intelligence of the life force.

He could do that. He could just brush that aside, and work with it, and get clear. He said, "What I want is love. What I want is love." And he meant giving love and receiving love, the totality of it. The same way, he worked with it again, opening to it, all that stuff. No sense of lack in that desire at all. That desire moved to actually a sense of this fullness of being, fullness of life force, in a quite almost overwhelming way. Actually, at first it was just in the front of his body. With a little working with it, it began to fill the whole body, and then it was bigger than the body. Quite, for him, a striking experience -- for all these people. It actually felt like the body and the thoughts and the whole life were in something else, in -- I don't know what; not even a word for it. Then what if one lets the practical choices of one's life come out of that?

Another example. Another person who had done a lot of practice over a lot of years, and in recent years has been exploring a shamanic tradition, practising in a shamanic tradition. He was encountering in his practices qualities in himself coming up like curiosity, like wonder, like excitement. Beautiful qualities. And he also noticed that these things would come up, and he would kind of squash them. He was suspicious of them. He kept the lid on them. He contracted around them. He noticed that. He said, "Because of past trauma, my past when I was a child, I'm repressing that energy. I'm holding it back and I'm constraining it, and there's fear of it." He felt, he said, "I feel like I was told when I was very young in the family, 'You are too much. You're too much. Your energy is too much and too big and too strong.'" He felt he'd internalized that and bottled it up.

Now, with this shamanic work, similar to a lot of psychotherapies nowadays, they were saying you need to go back, so to speak, go back in time, and identify the causes of these patterns, identify what it was in the history that kind of is at the root of these patterns. The metaphor is "dig out the root." Dig out the root, and then the beautiful plants can grow and flower, and the beautiful qualities. All very good, and can be sometimes very helpful. But there's also the possibility of working in this way that I'm talking about today. Feel into this energy. And in this case, there was a lot of frustration. There was a lot of frustrated feeling, a lot of being bottled, and the frustration at that. Feel into that. And the same thing we were talking [about before]: what's it wanting? What's this frustration wanting? Feel into the body. And the same thing happened: the qualities came. The qualities that were being desired manifested through the desire. They came right there. And interestingly, with it, the sense of self began to change and expand again. He said, "I feel power. I feel power in my being." This was very different for him, very different for him to feel -- and again, not power over, but power in the being. Very different. He said, "My self feels different. I feel myself differently, and I feel freedom in this sense of self," compared to the habitual sense of self. Kind of distorted and inhibited was the habitual sense of self.

So it seems like, with all this ... is it that the seed, the seeds of what we're longing for are actually in the desire? However that is, whether it's desire, frustration, aversion, the seeds of what we long for are somehow there for us in the very desire. If I can find a way of approaching it that helps, maybe those seeds actually manifest the very qualities, in the here and now, of what it is that I'm longing for. And with that, that seems to open up the sense of self in different ways.

Let's touch on this, because desire and the self -- many of you will have heard this in the Dharma -- they go together, or they can go together. Desire and the self are intimately connected. So another example. This is a young -- well, not that young; a young-ish man, with a lot of experience in practice, really a lot of experience, and a very -- I don't know what to say -- bright, very, very bright person. He noticed in relation to this desire and self thing, he noticed in meditation one day that images were coming up -- kind of images of wanting to appear a certain way to others. He was exploring them. It was like, "I want to appear bright." He was bright, actually, but he wanted to appear bright. He wanted to appear insightful and kind of creative. Actually, it was a whole list: creative, virile, all this. He was watching this kind of fantasy in his mind: "I want to appear bright, insightful, creative, virile, noble, dynamic, and fearless in my exploration."

We could hear that and think, "Phew. This guy's got a bit of an ego problem." And at first, as he looked into it, it did feel like, "It's me. It's me that wants to appear this way." The me, the ego, was tied up in it. It wants to appear this way to others. But actually, he stayed with it, and he just kept peering at it and the quality of it, and he saw that wasn't really what was going on. It was something a little bit less obvious and deeper than that. He realized actually it was the qualities themselves that are beautiful. These are beautiful qualities of brightness, of nobility, of whatever-the-hell-else was on his list. These are beautiful qualities, beautiful things. And it was like what he wanted was that the qualities themselves, their beauty, manifest -- that they are seen and appreciated. It was about them, not about him. Subtle, subtly different. It wasn't about the ego. It was from this perspective, and then he entered into that perspective with it, and it unfolded, it opened in a very different way. It's as if the universe wants to unfold these qualities, these beautiful qualities in time. Something quite different from an ego trip. It's the joy of the universe to manifest this beauty. With that, huge sense of vastness opened up. And again, a very different sense of self starts to be broken open with that. Not me, not mine, these qualities. They are the universe's, somehow -- and actually, with him, it went to an even deeper level of emptiness beyond that, too. It could slip back into the ego, for sure. But actually you can open it up again. He could open it up again and look differently.

[38:42] So maybe we also have to be careful with some assumptions, because we assume that desire comes from the self, from the ego. And in the Dharma we also assume that desire leads to the self, builds the self and the ego. Maybe we let some desires as okay, like the desire to be compassionate: "That's an okay desire. Maybe that doesn't lead to self." Maybe it's not so simple. Yes, it's true: desire comes from the self, and desire builds the self. It's true. Maybe there's more to it, too.

I'll give you a personal example, one more. In the last -- I don't know, three or four years, I'm not quite sure -- I've been studying a lot, much more than I ever have before in my years of practice, much more, and all kinds of different things. One of the sort of threads I've been studying is modern physics, and there's a reason for that. It's because a lot of the discoveries in twentieth century physics and beyond, with quantum mechanics and relativity, they point very deeply and profoundly at very similar conclusions to the Buddha's profound teachings of emptiness. For me, it's very, very interesting how that's unfolding. Anyway, I've been studying a lot. And I began to feel, after some time, it's like I began to feel this kind of pressure in the studying. It's like this sense of impatience and antsiness with it. It was beginning to feel quite familiar. It's almost like a pressure to understand. You finish one book, it basically leads to another book. It leaves you with more questions than you had. One book leads to another. I felt like I was unable to read them fast enough. It was like something in me wanted to arrive at the end and say, "Right, that's it. I understand it all now." [laughter] "Finished. There are no more books to read." With all that, there was quite some agitation and pressure, like I said.

I felt into it. What is this thing wanting? What is this pressure wanting? What's being wanted here? Really feeling into that and opening it out. It was beautiful, the way it opened and transformed. It actually brought all this joy. And it opened a joy. Rather than fixing on a conclusion and landing somewhere, actually a joy in ongoing inquiry, ongoing discovery, and kind of ongoing questioning. That very ongoingness brought joy, beautiful manifestation of joy, in different ways. And again, with that, the self moved through different kinds of stages of openness, expansion, dissolution, etc.

Two more short examples. A woman with a sister who she was quite worried about over quite a long period of time. The sister had all kinds of difficulties, financial and otherwise, relational and all kinds of things, and really wasn't meeting them very well, wasn't responding, dealing with them, getting quite depressed, etc. This person that I was working with on the phone, quite worried in an ongoing way about her sister, a lot of torment, a lot of deep pain with it. Similar thing: "Can you feel what you're wanting for her? Really feel into it." And same process. What came was a tenderness came back, a tenderness and trust came back, which wasn't there before. There was a trust in something unfolding. Love and peace came back. Peace came back into the loving. What's the difference between compassion and worry? Compassion has peace in it and has well-being in it. It's different than worry. She felt like she reconnected and reaccessed her strength, her self, her sanity, a spaciousness through the desire: "What are you wanting for her, for your sister?"

Another situation. All these are slightly different, and they shed slightly different light on what's going on. This is quite interesting, too. There was a woman who was saying, again in a phone interview, "I feel this resistance to life. I just feel this ongoing resistance to life." It was quite strong and quite agitating. I said, "What do you mean? Can you fill that out for me?" She said, "I feel resistant to others' suffering, to the suffering in the world." Now, I asked her, "What is that resistance wanting? This resistance to being impinged on by others' suffering, what is it wanting?" She felt into it, and the same thing. What's interesting about this is we might think that kind of resistance wants to be unhassled by it all, all the suffering in the world, others and their problems: "I want to be unhassled. I don't want to have anything impinge on me that might upset me." What was very interesting was when she went into that very resistance, opened to it, asked what it was, what it was wanting, explored it, what it actually wanted was the very opposite, the complete opposite. Actually, it wanted to open, to engage, to meet life. In feeling in again to that desire that was wrapped up there, it was seeded in that aversion and that resistance -- seeded in that was this desire to open. Opening to that brought this huge openness, and the resistance to life, the sense of resistance to life, just dissolved.

So to me, this is very interesting. Something very interesting is happening here. You can try this, and I hope you do. You can try it. What would it be to try it -- I've just got a pain in my body, and try the same thing? Something very mundane, even. With all these people, these case studies, it was quite a remarkable experience. It was quite a 'wow' experience, which is great and wonderful, and it's nice that people have that. But actually, what's maybe more remarkable is a principle to be understood here, because what on earth is going on, and why is this happening? It doesn't quite fit. It does not quite fit. Like I said at the beginning of the talk last week, I'm interested in opening views, and challenging things a little bit, and shaking things up. So something in some of what's been said over these two talks and the three approaches should be shaking something up and questioning.

But with all this, everything from last week and this week, what is the relationship with desire? What is the relationship with desire? What is my relationship with desire? Do you remember that story I told you about the retreatant who had the longing for God, and the teacher said "That's just clinging"? Do you remember this from last time? Well, like I said, I know them both. I know them both pretty well, actually. I know that teacher, in fact, was adopted when she was very young, and a very difficult history there. Maybe -- I'm not saying it is, but maybe -- through all that, if we're looking from that perspective, maybe it wasn't okay. Desire was not okay. It wasn't okay to want deeply, whether that's mum, or breast, or love, or attention, or whatever it is, if we're looking from that perspective. And maybe there came a fear of desiring in the life, fear of inhabiting or allowing desire in life, because one has grown to be afraid of the punishment, or afraid of being humiliated, afraid of the disappointment: "Maybe I won't get it." And then, very easy to co-opt spiritual teachings on letting go of desire. It fits nicely with my kind of defence mechanism.

Of course, later in life with Dharma practice, with psychotherapy, and meditation, etc., one can actually -- if this is the case -- one can actually re-experience that kind of frustration, etc., and re-experience, perhaps, this very primal level of desire, and see that it's okay. I know from personal experience, I know from plenty of yogis, that that's possible. That's totally possible. And it may be we need to grieve -- we need to grieve what wasn't there early in life. It may be that that's the case.

In this angle, what I was calling the third angle that we were going into today in the bulk of the talk, maybe I also need to grieve the sense of lack in the present. Maybe. To grieve that -- what would that be? How would I do that? But ... but, but, but. To be careful here. It's very easy, in regards to desire, to get stuck in this sense of lack. Desire and lack go together. But if I get stuck in the lack, then desire, my experience of desire, ends up always being a painful experience of lack; it's got stuck in that. So maybe I need to grieve, but be careful, be open.

[50:04] If I am accustomed to noticing and feeling lack, as I think most people are, if I'm accustomed to noticing and feeling the lack, then discerning and tuning into and allowing the desire in the way that I've talked about in part three, that may feel unnatural. It may feel like, "Nah, I'm making something happen here." The lack feeling will seem, it will seem to be that that's what's actually present. It will seem that that's what's unforced. It will seem that that's natural. But maybe that's an illusion of habit. Maybe it's an illusion of habit. Maybe it's a habit of attention, of what I give attention to between the desire and the lack. Maybe it's a habit of building this rather than that. Maybe.

So with that, there are also other habits that are important. Body posture, for example, is quite important. I'm still talking about this part three. After I stumbled on this, I started trying it and trying it and trying it with lots of people, and I went through a period of just trying it with lots of different yogis, one on one. And so much to the point that I must have -- I mean, I don't know how many examples I gave you -- but must have done about thirty-five or forty, and it always brought the same result. I was kind of, as a 'research scientist,' looking for the confirmation of the hypothesis. After a while I felt, "Okay, it's clear. It doesn't need it any more. I don't need to keep experimenting." There were a couple, really just two, where it didn't work.

One of them was quite interesting, because in the interview she was sitting slouched. I didn't say anything about that, but we kept doing this, and it didn't open up that way. Now, it could have been other reasons, too. But I just wondered whether, almost like in slouching, the habitual -- what could we say -- psychophysical circuits, the circuits of energy/mind, the habits, stayed able to configure what they usually configure, which was usually a sense of lack and despair. This desire, and opening to it in the way I'm talking about today, has tremendous energy in it -- tremendous energy in desire, wrapped up there. It's a life force of energy. And maybe I need to have the body be open and upright to allow that to flow. If the body is not, it won't be able to flow, and what will flow instead is, as I said, the usual neurological circuits of lack, etc. -- again, if we're thinking in that way. So somehow I need to open in a way that allows this force to flow.

None of those examples that I gave today in the kind of case studies, none of them were on retreat. Not one of them. Not one of them was a person on retreat. They were all people leading very busy lives, very complex lives with lots of demands, etc., lots of pressures.

Let's go back to this lack and desire thing. Lack and desire are usually intertwined. Usually we get frightened of desire because of the lack, the feeling of lack, because of the pain of the feeling of lack that's mixed in in this intertwining. So would it be possible to differentiate the two, the desire and the lack? Maybe that needs a subtle attention. I don't know. Like I said, the people were not on retreat. It wasn't like they were coming out of a lot of hardcore mindfulness and stillness and silence. That wasn't the case. But maybe a certain subtlety of attention is needed to open it up.

Maybe both the lack and the desire need exploring. It may be, as I said, that I need to feel the lack first, if I'm trying this third approach. Maybe I need to feel the lack first, recognize that that's there, before I can open to the desire and explore it. But I wouldn't even assume that. I wouldn't assume that. We have habits of attention and habits of building. I might even have habits of assumption. I wouldn't even assume that. It may be the case. It may not be the case.

So I'm not sure what's needed to be able to do this third approach. What's needed that you could just go, and take it, and play with it for yourself, and discover, and open things? Maybe all that, what I've just said. Maybe -- and I'm guessing, I think also true -- a certain meditative facility with the emotional life, that one's able to work with the emotions in meditation with mindfulness in different ways. Maybe, I don't know, do I need to have previous -- in what I was calling part two -- previous experience being able to let go of desire, maybe? I need to be able to feel desire. I need to be able to know that desire is there. Maybe I need some facility with desire in the heart, and be able to work with it. Maybe I need to feel -- probably true -- I need to feel safe having desire, and also maybe, maybe, safe letting it go.

So I don't know. I'm not sure what's needed as a kind of background. I know for sure it's not true that it always needs to be guided, one on one with a teacher. That's not true, because I did it on my own. And actually, unfortunately, just one person, of all these people I've done it with, has come back to me and said, "I did that on my own. You know that thing we did? I did it again." There are reasons for that, but I don't think it needs a teacher. I'm just wondering what it needs. I don't think it's particularly complex. I don't think it's particularly difficult. I don't think it's particularly advanced. But who knows?

Just a couple more minutes, if it's okay. Perplexing, perplexing. Depending on your [background], for some people that won't be perplexing at all, this part three -- what would be more perplexing is part two, maybe, or what we did last week. But this part three is perplexing if you're from a classical Buddhist background. Like I said, I'm not going to make any conclusions. I'm not doing that this talk or last talk. I can hint in certain directions, or point. We might have to look in Vajrayāna, in tantric Buddhism. There's a deity, a female, a goddess from the Guhyasamāja Tantra. Her mantra is rāgaratī.^[1] Her name is Paṇḍāravāsinī, but her mantra is rāgaratī. That means something like 'she who delights in desire.' Her realm is the realm of inner warmth and inner fire. She's a manifestation of Tārā, if you're familiar with this stuff. We could just slap part three, "Oh yeah, that's just tantra." Maybe there are some connections there. I'm not sure it's quite that easy.

In the Jewish Kabbalah, in the mystical tradition of Judaism, the ancient mystical tradition, it says we need to

dare to extract the sparks of divinity even, and especially, from those states of mind that seem completely removed from God.^[2]

This desire, this aversion, this frustration seems the last place we would find that. It's bottled up in self and all that. We need to dare to extract the sparks of divinity even, and especially, from those states of mind that seem completely removed from God. Different language.

Nietzsche said,

Ultimately one loves one's desires and not that which is desired.^[3]

So where's the treasure? Where's the treasure in all of this? Is it in the object of desire? Is it in the object that I'm desiring? Or is it in the opening that comes from the movement of the desire? It's what the desire opens as it moves through me. We have a very deeply ingrained habit to keep expecting this object or that object to give me fulfilment, even after we've experienced something like the second angle that I was giving today, or the third angle. That habit is probably still going to be there. It's part of delusion.

So there's a method here, actually two methods, in the second angle and the third. There are methods and there are approaches. I really hope it doesn't sound abstract. We're talking about methods that we can implement in our practice. A very brief summary of method three would be -- let's see -- asking what is wanted, deeper than the obvious answer. Asking what is really wanted -- the deeper, the more amorphous, the more general answer to that. Actually, before that, step one: wiping away, just clearing away the assumptions that desire is not to be trusted, and actually trusting desire as having a gift with it, as having something precious, as giving the being something, as having an intelligence with it. Step two: asking "What is being desired most deeply? What's the deep, more general thrust of the desire?" And step three: really, really opening to that. Opening a big, big space to let that current move through, and seeing what happens.

So there are methods and approaches here, but like I said earlier, probably more significant is the investigation, the questioning, the exploration. So I hope just some seeds can be planted -- maybe not for now, and that would be fine; maybe for another time, another period in your practice. There's a lot in these two talks. There's a lot of stuff. We covered a lot. I don't know, depending on your background, where it will land for you. Maybe it's uncomfortable. Maybe it's disconcerting, some of it. Maybe it's puzzling. Maybe it's exciting. I don't know. Something should have been stretched, challenged, surprised. Something should be new in what's said, I would imagine. I would be very surprised if not.

But it's interesting, going right back to the thing that I said right at the beginning of the first of these two talks, when we inquire, and what is our relationship with inquiry, because oftentimes we're holding ourselves back, and holding the inquiry back, and we want to find certain answers. I want to conclude this or that: "This is what I want the truth to be. This is what I want the Buddha to have said." How free, how open can the inquiry be? First step to start with something like that is: what do I want to conclude? What is it that I'm wanting the answer to be? Just to be aware of that.

Okay. So I'm going to stop there. Let's have a couple of quiet moments together.