#inthought - Desire and Conflict

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..?