Freedom through Desire
“The world is bound by passion, and by passion it is released”.
This thought was recorded as part of the Hevajra Tantra in eighth century India. It’s a radical thought: to reject the approach taken by so many spiritual traditions, of trying to control, fix, suppress or fight desire. What would it look like to have the realm of desire be the place in which one finds spiritual freedom? And - given that we are born into animal bodies with endless wild impulses that don't at all match our manufactured ideas of purity...is there any choice other than finding freedom in the realm of desire? Try as we might, there doesn't seem to be a way to levitate ourselves into heaven while still carrying around our body of bones and hormones.
Most spiritual and religious paths seem to offer prescriptions for cultivating the good and weeding out the bad. Perhaps this works for a while. It could be said that the ongoing catastrophe of Catholic priests sexually abusing children shows there's limits to how well repression works.
Metaphors of cultivation reflect the idea of controlling the wild. We can chop down trees to cultivate a field of wheat, but it seems much more difficult to partition our inner landscape this way. As the poet Gary Snyder points out, we carry the wildness of nature with us in every breath and step: "Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting—all universal responses of this mammal body." No stern finger-wagging sermon can correct our wildness. In the Bible, Isaiah 11:6 predicts that "the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them." Whatever ideas we might have about how wolves should be, they'll stay true to their own nature. So too will the human animal. Our hopes for spiritual freedom must respect this reality.
It’s tempting to believe that the only alternative to self-repression is reckless indulgence. When we hear William Blake tell us “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, we might imagine a crack addict pursuing wisdom by getting higher and higher. Interpreted this way, Blake's words doesn’t seem like sage advice. The Sufi poet Rumi tells us to “drink all our passion and be a disgrace”. The Zen poet Ikkyu tells us that “lust can consume all passion, transmuting base metal into pure gold”. So much advice that seems to run against the impulse to be a good, responsible person.
What is the Way that doesn’t split our inner impulses into the realm of saintly Jesus or evil Satan? How can we be present with what we find within it seems frightening and chaotically out of control? Here’s the place where we explore to find out.