Desire as a Trap of Mind

There has never been a moment in your life when you have ceased to desire. What it is to desire, most accurately by my own account, is to place value upon either an external object in space or an internal constellation of cognitions and to strive through the action of body or mind to attain it. When we desire, we become singular of mind, and all processes (cognitive and physiological) begin to take their shape around the desire, morphing to accommodate a reality in which it can be met or justified. And here lies the trap that we may never see, because to see it would be to neglect the desire, neglect the process of its attainment, reject its value, and betray the self. To put it more bluntly, it is the wanting of something to be true or valuable that necessarily creates a trap. Since the beginning of time, humans have wanted to survive. If wanting to survive creates the desire to live, then all processes in the mind will begin constructing a way to attain the desire to live, likely as early as is possible in our development. Most often, we are unlucky enough to inherit a method of survival due to this impetus; this conatus; this will-to-power. These methods are epigenetically encoded, forged by salient experiences as old as the first sapiens or before. A byproduct of this inheritance, though, is the story of survival for as long as it is possible to survive, namely forever. Because, unlike any other animal, humans can imagine a possible future in which we do not survive, we have consequently allowed our desire to create a projected future in our minds where we do survive, which we commonly call an "afterlife". Because a further impetus of the mind is to avoid pain and suffering, we have allowed the picture of what we merely *want* to be not only a place where we survive but one where we survive without suffering. This follows my logic: If we desire it, we will project a future where it exists for us. Even further, because we are not only wont to desire a lack of suffering but take this urge to its terminus - the most pleasurable sensations we can experience - we find ourselves imagining an afterlife where even that desire is fulfilled. And so we find ourselves in the trap of desire, allowing it to construct a reality around itself where our minds can imagine the desire met. And what's better than having our desires met indefinitely, especially in lieu of the most terrifying thing we can imagine -- an eternity of unattainable desires?
The lesson here is one I apply to my life as much as I am mindfully able: If the thing that I want and the thing that is real are the same, then I must be critical and certain that the wanting has not merely created the illusion of something that is real. More concisely, one may ask, "Is this the way things are, or do I just want them to be this way so badly that I'm fooling myself?"



April 1 2021