The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 42: May 2025
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Recently, a small group of us went into the topic of desire. This was prompted by the 12th and final dialogue in the series of Reality, Actuality and Truth. This exchange, dated 11.10.1975, was an attempt by Bohm to distill the core significance of the whole series.[1] While their investigation concerned the nature and relation between those three realms of being and, as a result, tended to the abstract and metaphysical, at the end they returned to one of the most down-to-earth topics imaginable, which is desire. This, of course, is perhaps not so surprising, for it is a hallmark of K’s teachings that he unfolds ever subtler dimensions by probing into the most common and familiar biopsychosocial phenomena. But as the latter is the starting point, he invariably returns to it, as there is no beyond without direct contact with what is. This time we took as our reference the materials listed in the KFT Urgency of Change podcast series,[2] which raised some new questions and intriguing perspectives on the subject.
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Desire is a daily phenomenon that informs and conditions the way we perceive, feel, think and act. In fact, in the above-mentioned dialogue with Bohm, K had substituted Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum with ‘I desire, therefore I am’, thus identifying desire as the bedrock of the ego. According to the dictionary, ‘desire’ derives from the Latin desiderare, meaning ‘to long for, wish for, or feel the want of’. So desire springs from the sense of want in relation to physical and psychological objects, the satisfaction of which is part and parcel of our basic needs as well as of our search for fulfilment. It is not just an individual tendency with its roots in our instinctual animal background but a compelling structuring force of society. It has been and continues to be one of our major drives and a constant source of unrest and frustration in the search for satisfaction, security and fulfilment, which traps us in the duality of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. While its objects may vary according to the stages of life or the circumstances and needs of the moment, the movement of desire remains identical independently of whether its objects are judged to be base or respectable. As K might put it, the desire for enlightenment and for money, sex and power are exactly the same. The important thing is therefore not so much the nature of its objects as the implications of the process itself.
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“What is desire? Desire comes through seeing, contact – touching – and then sensation. First the seeing, of a woman or a man, or seeing a flower and smelling it, then wanting it. That is, seeing, contact, sensation. Then what happens? You see a car, there is the sensation, the contact. Then thought comes in and says, ‘How nice to be in it, driving it, feeling the power of it.’ That is, seeing, contact, sensation, and thought creating the image. And the moment thought creates the image, desire comes into being. You see a woman or a man, and you know all the reactions. Seeing, contact, sensation; then thought creates the image, the symbol, whatever it is. Then from that image which thought has created bursts desire. Please look at it in your own selves. You can see it very clearly, only the movement is so rapid. It is accelerated by thought instantly responding. Now, we are saying, watch it very carefully, and you will see its movement, how it begins.”
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The Seed of a Million Years, pp. 64-65
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This is K’s basic description of the arising and unfolding of desire. Where we sense a single movement, K sees a sequential series of steps which, when the process is slowed down, can be clearly discerned, namely perception, seeing, contact and sensation. Up to this point K sees no problem. It is natural, he says, to experience sensory reactions because we are not paralysed. But for him desire, properly speaking, begins when thought makes a memory of sensation and gives it continuity by projecting its imaginary fulfilment into the future, which gives rise to frustration, pain and fear. When it leads to attachment and dependence, which are attempts to secure that continuity, the whole thing degenerates into possessiveness, domination, jealousy, conflict and violence. So while the process of desire would appear to be perfectly natural – and that would seem to be the case at the biological and instinctual levels –, once it enters the psychological domain it becomes a source of disorder in our lives, leading to internal contradiction, neurosis and the breakdown of relationship. But the seduced promise of fulfilment seems to obscure the havoc we create in the process of pursuing our fantasies. Such cravings are inherently bound with the me and the mine, whose egocentric motives make for unskilful and irresponsible action, with the resulting conflict and suffering.
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Sensing the dangerous potential of desire, traditional morality has generally condemned it as antithetical to the religious life and, not understanding the process itself, prescribed control, suppression and sublimation as the ways to prevent its deleterious effects. Suppression builds a wall of resistance which is always breaking down and sublimation consists in redirecting the libidinal drive to a higher or nobler purpose. Both imply an act of will, which is concentrated desire, in the pursuit of an ideal of what should be. Such projected ideals are themselves images of desire in opposition to the disreputable desires we actually have, so they signify another contradiction and source of neurosis and sorrow. Ideals have not freed us from suffering but only helped us to carry on with the pursuit of pleasure while telling ourselves that we shouldn’t. The controller is the creation of thought, as is the controlled. It is one desire attempting to control another, which is a meaningless exercise in fragmentation. This brings us back into the old pattern of struggle and effort, into the duality of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ desires.
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“Control implies a controller and the thing to be controlled. I am angry and I must control my anger; and where there is control, there is conflict, ‘I must’ and ‘I must not’. And conflict obviously distorts the mind. A mind is healthy when it has no conflict at all; then it can function without any friction and such a mind is a sane, clear mind, but control denies that, because in control there is conflict and contradiction, there is the desire to imitate and to conform to a pattern – the thing you think you ought to do. So control is not order. This is very important to understand. One can never have order through control, because order implies functioning clearly, seeing wholly, without any distortion; but where there is conflict, there must be distortion.”
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The Awakening of Intelligence, pg. 308
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So control only perpetuates the conflict of the opposites. Indulgence, which has also been tried, is not a solution either, as it is still caught in the duality of getting and losing, satisfaction and frustration. Control, suppression, sublimation and indulgence are the continuation of the disorder of desire as will. So we are left with the fact of desire and the challenge of understanding its nature, for which we must let it arise and bloom so we can observe it without preconceptions, without the ideal, without judgement or choice, without the projections, fears and expectations of the observer. So what K proposes to break the chain of desire is not to shut out the senses or repress our thoughts and emotions, but to widen the gap between sensation and thought. This gap is attention in which the self is dissolved and the senses are fully alive. But there is still the question as to what gives desire such vital and overwhelming strength.
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“Being nothing, being a desert in oneself, one hopes through another to find water. Being empty, poor, wretched, insufficient, devoid of interest or importance, one hopes through another to be enriched. Through the love of another one hopes to forget oneself. Through the beauty of another one hopes to acquire beauty. Through the family, through the nation, through the lover, through some fantastic belief, one hopes to cover this desert with flowers. And God is the ultimate lover. So one puts hooks into all these things. In this there is pain and uncertainty, and the desert seems more arid than ever before. Of course it is neither more nor less arid. It is what it was, only one has avoided looking at it while escaping through some form of attachment with its pain, and then escaping from that pain into detachment. But one remains arid and empty as before. So instead of trying to escape, either through attachment or through detachment, can we not become aware of this fact, of this deep inward poverty and inadequacy, this dull, hollow isolation? That is the only thing that matters, not attachment or detachment.”
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The Second Krishnamurti Penguin Reader, pg. 260
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The implication is that behind the sound and the fury of desire lies the encounter with the desert in ourselves. Finding it painful, we escape from it, which is the action of fear. So behind the drive of desire lies this fear of emptiness and not being. The aim of desire is thus aptly called ‘fulfilment’, as that is what it attempts to do through the multiple objects of identification and attachment, namely, to fill the emptiness, to become whole through the accumulation of parts. But this inward poverty cannot be enriched this way. Neither acquisitiveness nor renunciation will bring on the rain. The drive of fulfilment is the desperate attempt of the self to escape from its own nothingness. The emptiness we feel is the result of this comparative movement of becoming, but behind that, K suggests, there is another emptiness which, being nothing, is its own plenum and in which desire and self-fulfilment have no place.
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“How we want to possess the coconut, the woman, and the heavens! We want to monopolize, and things seem to acquire greater value through possession. When we say, ‘It is mine’, the picture seems to become more beautiful, more worthwhile; it seems to acquire greater delicacy, greater depth and fullness. There is a strange quality of violence in possession. The moment one says, ‘It is mine’, it becomes a thing to be cared for, defended, and in this very act there is a resistance which breeds violence. Violence is ever seeking success; violence is self-fulfilment. To succeed is always to fail. Arrival is death and traveling is eternal. To gain, to be victorious in this world, is to lose life. How eagerly we pursue an end! But the end is everlasting, and so is the conflict of its pursuit. Conflict is constant overcoming, and what is conquered has to be conquered again and again. The victor is ever in fear, and possession is his darkness. The defeated, craving victory, loses what is gained, and so he is as the victor. To have the bowl empty is to have life that is deathless.”
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Commentaries on Living, 2nd Series, pp. 52-53
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The bowl of consciousness empty of all the things of desire and thought is what K calls meditation, a space in which there is the ending of division and the emergence of a quality of cosmic order in ourselves and, through our relationships, in the world. For K this is the ground of order without which there is no meditation, whose emptiness and silence are the necessary space for the emergence of love, compassion and intelligence, of beauty, truth and the sacred. Then the self-limiting energy of desire finds its freedom and flows into the sea of creation.
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Enjoy the summer, amigos, and let’s pay attention to the nature and implications of desire,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. View of the mountains, Mürren, CH; 2. Sunset, Het Bovenwater, Lelystad, NL.
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