Growing Our Desires

Whatever behaviours, habits, skills, and knowledge we have at any one particular time – these are things we have grown, things we have become “good at.” From riding a bike, and solving crossword puzzles, to being polite or doing impressions, we have grown our capability to do all these things. Of course, HOW good we are at them lies on a seemingly endless scale of mastery – from unconscious incompetence to total expertise or brilliance. The broad spectrum of our capabilities, and where everything is placed on that array, is part of the richness of our lives.

The thing about that spectrum is this – for each and every one of us, it is the garden of our life. The broadness of the spectrum represents not just the size of our garden, but the number of things we are growing in it, and the degree of ripeness and maturity of those things too. Essentially we GROW our behaviours, our habits, our skills, our knowledge and – let’s not forget them – our beliefs!

Now - we can pick the fruits and flowers from these and put them to some use, or we can leave them be. This is our choice. However, over time, we have grown all these things in our garden.

Now of course there are many more things growing in our garden than the few I have mentioned already. And we can grow some things quicker than others with the use of a particular growing agent – a kind of fertiliser if you like – that we characterise as Desire. Desire brings a level of intensity to our growing process whereby our focus – you might almost call it indulgence – is magnified.

 
Guitar

Back in the day I taught myself how to play the guitar.
Well, this isn’t entirely (linguistically) true because “I” didn’t know how to play the guitar either – so how could “I” have taught “myself”?
Semantics aside, however, I had to have a model from somewhere to get “me” started. This came in two forms – someone showed me some very basic chord shapes, and then I got Bert Weedon’s learn-to-play-guitar book and saw visual representations of the shapes that someone had showed me.
The rest, as they say, was down to repetitive playing and Desire!
The lyrics of Brian Adams’ song “The Summer of ‘69” were particularly poignant for me, as my summer of ’64 involved me playing my first real six string until my fingers bled. However, through Desire the bleeding fingers got hardened and I was up and away, playing things well beyond endless repeats of the two-chorded “Bobby Shafto”.

So, desire indulges and magnifies our focus on whatever we might be engaged in – until the very moment it doesn’t. At this moment a number of things can take place.

Although it is (here) one of four possibilities, this is the point when Love can take over. I started with a desire to play the guitar that became a Love. Within that Love was sheer indulgence in the pleasure of playing, plus a new Desire; a Desire to grow my skill, to get better at playing more things and through that - increase the pleasure and grow the Love.

It is an often repeated cycle for many, many things in our lives – but let’s stick for the moment with what we call “playing the guitar”. Playing guitar remains something we do - until the very moment something changes in our lives and some of the impact of that change is felt in the area of playing guitar. It may be caused by circumstances, finances, lack of available time, etc.
Perhaps this moment has come about as an evaluation of that Love. We no longer get the same level or depth of pleasure or we no longer have a desire to grow. We may notice that part of our playing guitar has passed into unconscious habit, and we’ve “woken up to the fact” that we don’t really enjoy it as much.
We may then choose to make some changes – either start just doing it occasionally, or discard it altogether, or re-evaluate our Love or our Unconscious Actions.
 

Model

Now we can carry this model into many areas of our lives, and draw parallels with many actions, habits and objects, and this includes people as well! And I’d invite you to perhaps go and examine one or two instances, in your own lives, where you have grown to like or love things and then there have been changes - perhaps immediate or gradually over the years. For many things and across many moments, the changes are happening often more regularly than we think!

When the patchwork, the tapestry, of our lives is built of a variety of metamorphic subtleties, the shifts are often down to how we have Grown Our Desires, and the changes or renewals can be down to how we dismantle or rekindle our desires.

 

Meat

In January of this year something changed in my life – a change brought about by watching a feature-length film about man’s exploitative relationship with all other living creatures. Now the film contained a montage of some of the most shocking imagery of carnage and cruelty I have ever witnessed. I could have given up watching after around 20 minutes or so as I was, by then deeply appalled yet anaesthetised by the relentless nature of the depictions. However, I felt compelled to watch the entire film – as if there was, for me, a particular purpose to that watching.

The result was that I have not eaten meat since.

I’d eaten meat all my life up until then, so my relationship with eating meat was on both an Unconscious level and a Love level. I really enjoyed the meals where particular meats were involved. And yet – in an instant, literally overnight – I went straight to Discard mode.

I guess the big question here is how did I do this?
Plus – how did I sustain it? How did I not, over the months, slip back into eating the odd bit of meat here and there?

Was the way I had grown my desire for meat something that was easily dismantled?

Well, I think this is probably true, because in the years I was a chef, I had to change the nature of my relationship with food from consumer to provider – and this allowed me to cook and prepare things that I would never myself eat. Also, through this phase of my life, as a consumer another change was that I only ate through building the experience via smell and taste. The “look” of the food was in the domain of me the cooker, not me the eater!

In dismantling the Unconscious level and the Love level, the shocking imagery also became coded up on top of my memories of particularly the taste of meat, and meat dishes. It was less so with smell - again, I’m sure, from my time as a chef. I would never have eaten liver for instance, yet I would happily cook it for others.
The thing about shocks and traumas is that these override all associated experience, plus any other structures that are running in that place, such as Unconscious Habit, Desire and Love. The other thing, for me, is that my personal values and beliefs also changed.

I know If I am to ever eat meat again at some point in the future, then I will (a) have to have a Desire to do so that overrides the awful imagery of that film, plus (b) a change in values back to meat becoming a necessity.

Conclusion

We grow our likes and our habits, behaviours, actions and beliefs by stages - and we can also “ungrow” them all as well.
The growth is fertilised by Desire, and the growth eventually evolves at pivotal moments.
Any “ungrowing” or Discarding, also takes place at pivotal moments.

So if you have something you want to change in your life – a habit (say) you’d rather discard – then finding where it is on the spectrum, in the garden of your life, is useful knowledge. Ungrowing it can then commence.

Similarly if you have something you want more of in your life, then grow your desire - yet be sure to make it a good and useful thing for you in the first place. Desire is a very powerful fertiliser!

Caveat

Of course, we are only human – and to err is human, as we very well know!
One of the aberrations in humanity is our immoderate nature, and the attractions of over-indulgence. This is when growing our Desire gets out of hand – bolts – and becomes Lust.

And perhaps this is why Lust is a truly deadly sin.
Oh - and that film? It was called "Earthlings" and could be characterised as a tale of lust gone mad.