Experience and Desire: some thoughts

Experience may be viewed as a sentient, breath-driven, felt, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of historically (karmically) conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses. This movement is synchronously paired with correlative responses that manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances perceived as either fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses or desires. Therefore, intentions and their reciprocally generated circumstances form an experiential union wherein the drama of human life is played out as living. In this sense of the word reality, it may be used to denote experience as the evanescent movement of a karmic vector seeking the fulfillment of intentions. When these intentions meet with obstruction difficulty arises as suffering and new intentions arise seeking to remedy the suffering.


Often, the intentions, desires, are seen to be fulfilling and a kinesthetic movement of pleasure arises, more often not, sedimenting the drive to continue the feeling despite the evanescent or impermanent nature of all experience. This movement gives rise to further pleasure-seeking and difficulty-evading in a self-reinforcing and futile attempt to achieve a homeostasis of pleasure synonymous with the absence of difficulty—in a word, utopia. No such time nor place exists. Experience, in this sense of the term, admits to no such possibility.


This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest too quickly too be grasped by the reflective activity of the consciousness of and thus is all-too-often mistaken for an independent and objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills “my” intention eliciting pleasure or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven thereby reifying conceptual constitutions into worlds seemingly independent and constituted from their own side. The sedimentation process or embodied memory process aids in this movement contextualizing all actions within the frameworks of pleasure-seeking and avoidance. And so it goes, on and on and on and...until.*

If one takes language as in thought, speech, or text--or more accurately languaging—i.e., narratives, stories of, by, or about self if taken as fundamentally referential, one is bound to suffer. This is simply the way things are. Not a great realization, but a significant one.

Self-natured, self-laden, or self-ish narratives, of whatever sort, also are carriers of feelings. These feelings arise from a very subtle level below, a topic too early in our examination to unpack, into full bloom in the esophagus, throat, and head. Narratives dictate the precise configurations of these feelings and, if narratives become habitualized, as they are inclined to do (another important topic to be addressed in due time) their associated feelings also become habitualized and form an isomorphic relationship with the narratives that produced them.

Now, it is very important to note that the beginning of this process has far too many causes and conditions to be analyzed in great detail. In fact, there is no perceivable beginning of this process of habitualized self, narrative, feeling (SNF) as it reaches far back into history where it has caused great suffering--of course, as well as great accomplishments. However, we are concerned, not with accomplishments driven by SNF but with the alleviation of the suffering the movement of SNF often brings in its wake.

The SNF proliferation process, driven by beginningless intentions, i.e., desires, seeking satisfaction, and inevitably encountering obstacles to fulfillment in many instances will give rise to suffering unless--and wait for this--one surrenders to the indicative, the "what is." This surrender we will term acceptance-attention (AA). Acceptance-attention will be discussed at a later date.


*The "until" is discussed in the Dharma-Megha blogpost.