self help reading + music

We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object.

--Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace

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Reason is a fine thing, there's no question about it, but reason is only reason and only satisfies man's rational faculties, whereas desire is a manifestation of the whole of life, that is of the whole of human life, along with reason and all our head-scratching. And even if in this manifestation our life frequently turns out to be rubbishy, it's nevertheless life and not just the extraction of a square root. I, for instance, quite naturally want to live in order to satisfy the whole of my capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has managed to find out (the rest, perhaps, it will never discover; that's no comfort, but why not say it?), whereas human nature acts as a whole, by everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously; and even if it lies, it still lives.

--Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground

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Known as the tantric, or left-handed path, desire, in this view, is a vehicle for personal transformation. --“The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.”

Desire is a longing for completion in the face of the vast unpredictability of our predicament. It is ‘the natural’, and if it is chased away it returns with a vengeance.

In its path of desire, Buddhism has a natural counterpart in psychoanalysis. Both traditions encourage an appreciation of the important links between the spiritual and the sensual: the ways in which erotic experience can be transcendent and spiritual erotic. There is an understanding in both traditions of the multidimensional levels of what we call the self, the ways in which we can be seeking comfort, closeness, pleasure, affirmation, release and oblivion all at the same time, from the same persons, places or things.

Intimacy depends on how lovers understand that gap between them. Desire recognizes the sense of incompleteness that is endemic to the human condition. It seeks a freedom from this incompleteness in any form: physical, sensual, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. . . Desire can be freed from the tendency to cling. As this happens, the sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’ becomes transformed as well. For desire, in its paradoxical nature, in its ability to simultaneously breach and maintain the space between lovers, in the way it both connects and separates, and in the manner in which it forces us to reconcile love and hate, is often as close as we come to liberation in our regular lives.

It is desire, after all, that makes us seek liberation in the first place.

--Mark Epstein
Open to Desire ---Buddhism and Psychotherapy

U2 – Window in the Sky (Jackknife Lee Remix)

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It was community supported organic agriculture distribution today--every Thursday all summer, the hippie farmer (Stew, whose red hair is hard to tell from the rest of him, sun burned into one giant freckle seems like, sober as a judge with his ‘notes from the farm’ newsletter) and his crew drive into the city to give us our re-used Target bags full of fruits and veggies. The black raspberries ripened this week. They come in picked that same day, the temperature that it is in the afternoon, still smelling a bit like dirt and their own berry-ness. I didn’t bother washing them because I like dirtsmell and daytemp—I just popped them into my mouth all the way home, feeling Alive.