Hunger Games: Desire Decoded
In psychotherapy, we encounter one another, and ideally it is a special moment of human consciousness — a place where philosophy is set aside to engage the practicalities of life. In time, we can get closer to realizing how the true nature of suffering, and contentedness, eludes us. Not why. How.
"Put your anger in my teacup!" my first Zen teacher would holler at me.
"Wha?" I'd mutter.
If you can't do it, your anger is not real!
He was trying to demonstrate that feelings are not where suffering takes root. Feelings are temporary and fleeting. The problem — I'm not fond of that word — is that our emotions often overwhelm our best intentions, and then we do something stupid.
Without awareness, we are likely to get on the wrong bus. We are standing there, trying to mind our thoughts — maybe picking our noses, hoping no one sees. The bus arrives, and without a thought we follow the person in front of us aboard. We have no idea where we are going. We didn't look at the sign. We just got on. We wanted chips from the grocery store and ended up in Tulsa.
I'm certainly not the first to point out this craziness. As a psychotherapist, I have observed it in myself and others for decades. Feelings, in their purest form, are like colors on a canvas — vivid, real, transient. But when we grasp at the desires that come with the feelings, we grow uncomfortable and dissatisfied. It is like a painter who eats paint because he is so enthralled with his creation that he wants to digest the visceral emotions inside his own actions.
Desire is a puzzle, echoing the ancient question of want versus need. Hunger is not an arbitrary desire but a primal call for survival. Thirst is the same. So is sex. Misreading these base signals — treating a need as a desire, or a desire as a need — leads to unnecessary suffering, a theme familiar in Eastern contemplative traditions.
The Buddha, far from a religious moralist, was akin to a psychologist. His goal was not to condemn desire but to illuminate the path to truth and clarity. I was introduced to this framing thirty years ago and still find it enlightening. When we view hunger simply as a need rather than a desire, we align ourselves with the natural order of things. For Buddhists, the body is not an entity distinct from the mind. To deny this for moralistic reasons is not wisdom; it is a misunderstanding of our fundamental nature. We are mind-body beings. The whole of our existence is channeled through the biology of the brain — and the biological brain is the body.
In the therapeutic space, it becomes evident that our main challenge is not decoding desire itself. Desire is straightforward: it wants. The challenge is the attachment that follows desire like a rabid dog — a jumble of thoughts entangling identity with desire, dragging us into "wanting to become" or "needing to eliminate." "I am the paint," thinks our inner Van Gogh — and then tries to eat the canvas.
This is where the hunger games are actually played. Not in the feeling, which passes, and not even in the desire, which is natural — but in the grasping. The grasping is what converts a passing color into a permanent stain. A man feels lonely, which is a feeling. He decides he needs a particular woman to fix it, which is desire calcified into demand. He then organizes his identity around getting or not getting her, which is attachment. Three steps, each one further from the original truth, which was simply: I feel lonely right now.
Observing our whole being — biological, cerebral, sexual — unfolding with a neutral, mindful approach is not complex. People call this "spiritual," another word I am not fond of. I teach zazen, a Zen sitting practice readily applicable to modern psychotherapy: sit, breathe, notice. Do not judge the desire as good or bad. Notice the feeling underneath it. Notice the grasping that follows. Watch the whole sequence the way you would watch weather.
In time, we learn the self experiencing the desire — or the lack of self experiencing it — is itself just another feature of consciousness, no more solid than the desire. When we decode the sequence this way, desire's disruptive power over us lifts. We still feel it. We still want things. But the compulsion loosens, because we can see the machinery.
However — spoiler alert — the desires do not go away entirely. Sorry. Enlightenment is not the end of wanting; it is the end of being owned by wanting. The bus still arrives. The difference is that now you read the sign.
