8/29/2019
kMoe
Desire and Conflict
One of the biggest
challenges of any mind is to separate concept from truth within its
waking world of experience. Our minds have grown and developed from
an early age in a technological society will have had to deal with a
great deal of concepts. This ability to deal with concept has been
described conceptually and we have even devised tests to determine
our ability to deal with concept. The IQ test is a modern day test
which is rather believed to test the intelligence of an individual. I
could bring into question its ability to test or determine the true
nature of intelligence of a human being, and with the belief in the
infinite nature of intelligence of the human mind, one can only ask
which mind has come up with the IQ test. It will be very clear from
this onset that an IQ test is really a test of adaptability to modern life, because it rarely takes into account the intelligence
required to navigate and survive in a natural environment, where the
amount of data any living brain is able to gather is nearly infinite
within such a setting.
Having said this,
one can only ask, what is desire and what relationship does it have
to conflict? The old Sanskrit teachings have stated that, in the mind
all division breeds conflict, this can be a rather difficult
statement to fathom because the very nature of survival in the modern
world requires that one divides and categorises elements of one’s
experience. The very nature of modern life implies that all action,
tasks and objects be divided from each other through some form of
categorisation which is what we have come to term as the order of the
way things work, but this only describes a certain kind of order, an
external and rather crude order where everything has a discrete
place or position relative to another. This order is used to describe the
relationship between objects or elements of this reality, such as
human relationships in a family as brother, sister etc. The nature of
thought would have it that categories can only be formed from a set
of attributes around the subject or object and can never encompass
the whole thing and by that nature that intelligence will always be
incomplete and hence breed conflict in one aspect or another.
Desire on the other
hand is a relatively similar sort of observation, because when one
looks at the nature of thought and observation we will see that
desire is not something to be described nor can it be objectified.
The only way we can deal with desire is to see how it comes about,
and that can tell us a lot about its nature.
In order to learn
about desire we have to observe ourselves, and the way in which
desire comes about, and within this observation we have to be very
careful about how it is we observe, because as soon as we become
idealistic or conceptual about what we are observing, then we may
fall into the trap which may prevent us from seeing the desire
actually. In this sense we have to look at the operation of thought
in observation, which means that we have to see how thought reacts at
all times, and that is something which can be difficult to do.
Suppose one is walking in a shop and see’s a shoe upon that
observation
of the shoe thought
takes place, to categorise, name and even possibly proceed to image
one-self wearing that shoe, all these images produce a pleasure in
the thought, and from those pleasurable images there is desire, which
is what the mind pursues -the pleasure of the image. The nature of
thought would have it that it is limited, and any image it produces
is not complete, or whole, therefore it will always create conflict,
which may manifest itself during the pursuit of that image. Many of
us have very many images in our heads, these have come from the many
desires we have picked up during the course of our lives, and from
consuming various types of media and entertainment. It is perhaps
that the many images which we have formed of ourselves and our need
to become has created so many desires that we pursue them
irrespective of the limitation which may be produced by our thoughts
in pursuit of that desire. Could desire perhaps be the root of
conflict in the world, and is it possible to be free from desire..?
