Lama Surya Das: Craving, Desire and Lust in a Consumer Society

Lama Surya Das
www.surya.org

"Craving, or lust, as it is sometimes called, is one of the primary five hindrances, or challenges, that Buddha warned seekers they would meet on the path to awakening," observes Lama Surya Das. "When Buddha Dharma speaks about craving, it implies psychological hunger and thirst, unhealthy desire, longing, attachment, and psychological fixation."

"Who among us," he asks, "is so completely filled that he or she is above "wanting" of any kind? Is there nothing wanting in your life right now? As we try to purify and refine our actions, we need to be aware of the myriad ways by which our desires create pitfalls on the spiritual path."

"Purifying oneself of craving and desire," Das notes, " is a complex and subtle process. The analogy of a misguided moth being consumed by the candle flame to which it is fatally attracted is a good one. Sometime," he observes, "we want something so badly that we think we can't possibly let go of our goal."

"Judge the moth by the quality of its candle," Rumi advises. For even our spiritual thirsts can prove a fatal distraction from true attainment. Wisdom traditions in all ages are rife with stories of great achievers who have been distracted by the sensual, the occult or other powers they have achieved, only to allow their final liberation to slip by the wayside.

"Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight," Rumi points out. "Be a connoisseur and taste with delight. Any wine will get you high," he cautions. "Judge like a king and choose the purest."

"On the spiritual path," warns Surya Das, "be prepared to confront compulsive desires again and again. Watch what you desire," he advises, "observe what attracts or repels you most. Notice what buttons are pushed in you by external stimuli, and how you respond to each of them. We have all invested emotional intensity and energy in wanting, achieving, accumulating and grasping," he points out.

"How does it happen? What is it for?" he asks. "Just round up the usual suspects and look them over - love, ego gratification, sex, sensual pleasures, money possessions, fame, security, power."

Looking at the proliferation of all these desire objects in our modern consumer society, Surya Das rightly asks: "Are we making Faustian deals with the devil?"

"It is said," Das points out, "that a thief's vision is so distorted that even when he meets a saint, all he can see is the saint's pocketbook. Ask yourself: Is there anything or anyone you crave so much that it clouds your judgment and vision? What do you hunger for? Is there anything that engenders feelings so intense that your pursuit of it becomes a substitute for furthering your inner development?"

"It has often been said," Das notes, "that everyone has a price. What is yours? Don't sell yourself short," he advises, "or you'll pay for it."

[Lama Surya Das, "Awakening the Buddha Within," pp. 219-220.]

Eckhart Tolle: On Ownership and Consumption

"The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, life objects to be used, then discarded."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

Spiritual Practice, Non-Attachment and Enlightenment

"Practice is the repeated effort to follow the disciplines which give permanent control of the thought-waves of the mind."

"Practice becomes firmly grounded when it has been cultivated for a long time, uninterruptedly, with earnest devotion."

"Non-attachment is self-mastery; it is freedom from desire for what is seen or heard."

-- Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: 13-15 --

"The waves of the mind can be made to flow in two opposite directions - either toward the objective world ("the will to desire") or toward true self-knowledge ("the will to liberation"). Therefore both practice and non-attachment are necessary. Indeed, it is useless and potentially even dangerous to attempt one without the other. If we attempt to practice spiritual disciplines without attempting to control the thought-waves of desire, our minds will become violently agitated and perhaps permanently unbalanced."

"If we attempt nothing more than a rigid negative control of the waves of desire, without raising waves of love, compassion and devotion to oppose them then the result may be even more tragic. This is why certain puritans suddenly and mysteriously commit suicide. They make a cold, stern effort to be "good" - that is, not to think "bad thoughts" - and when they fail, as human beings sometimes must, they cannot face this humiliation, which is really nothing but hurt pride, and the emptiness inside themselves. In the Taoist scriptures we read: "Heaven arms with compassion those whom it would not see destroyed."

. . .

"Perseverance is very important in this connection. No temporary failure, however disgraceful or humiliating, should ever be used as an excuse for giving up the struggle. . . . No failure is ever really a failure unless we stop trying altogether - indeed, it may be a blessing in disguise, a much needed lesson."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," pp. 28-29.]

In the attached video, spiritual teacher Paramahamsa Nithyananda discusses the importance of practice in Patanjali's yoga sutras (above), highlighting the dangers that may arise when the spiritual aspirant employs spiritual techniques in practice without a true understanding of how and why such techniques are used.

In terms of practice being "cultivated for a long time, uninterruptedly," Nithyananda stresses that this is not in sole reference to linear time, but is rather a recognition that, like the Buddha, the aspirant must realize and determine that 'practice' is a life-long commitment that must be continuously cultivated. The dedication of the spiritual aspirant must, therefore, be to the practice of 'being enlightened' rather than to that of 'seeking enlightenment.' In the end, even the desire to 'become' enlightened - like all other desires - must be dropped, says Nithyananda.

Thomas Merton: Intellect, Possessions and Grace

How is it possible to find ultimate happiness and meaning in our Western consumer society? Clearly, it is not for sale, or there would be advertisements for it. In fact, all advertisements and media commercials are intended to create demand - or, in spiritual terms, desire - and without generating this 'needing' to have, the model of our Western consumer society collapses, for we are not really consumers but over-consumers, striving to get and have more in the hopes of being secure and satisfied.

Yet the glow of acquiring -  be it new clothes, a new car, a new house, or even a new relationship - fades all too quickly, and as the old saying goes: "the bloom is off the rose." Intellect, trained largely by the media tells us that the acquisition of material things will bring us happiness, but knowing this happiness fades, we suffer in any event; and implicit in this process is the stark if unfaced reality that possessions alone cannot bring ultimate happiness and, in fact, they may be a complete impediment to its attainment.

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

Writing in his autobiography, "The Seven Story Mountain," the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton touched upon the role that our trained intellect has in generating not happiness, but suffering. He writes:

"I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, acutal practice. It is constantly and blindly being perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda."

"We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own infallibility. The desires of the flesh - and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgment, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire."

"And therefore, even when we are acting with the best of intentions, and imagine that we are doing great good, we may be actually doing tremendous material harm and contradicting all our good intentions. There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is the depths of hell."

[Thomas Merton, "The Seven Story Mountain," pp. 205-206

"The only answer to the problem," says Merton, "is grace, grace, (and) docility to grace."

But why this need for grace, this need to foster and develop a gratitude for who we are and what our life circumstances are, without regard to what we "should" have or "could" be in accordance with the standards of others? Perhaps, it is because we know, at a deep level, that all such standards are fallacies, and the opinion of others will not provide us with ultimate happiness any more than material possessions or wealth will.

"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy," Merton observes, "(on) the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions of other men! A weird life it is, indeed," he notes, "to be living in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real."

["The Seven Story Mountain," p. 303]

In these times, as blessed (or cursed) with material possessions as we may be, the ancient Sufi poet Rumi would undoubtedly agree with Merton: "(We) need more grace than (we) had thought."