A Quote by Bernadette Roberts
I went on to discover that in its deepest sense, the will is not primarily the faculty of desire for anything known, but rather, the desire for something unknown, animate desire for something that lies beyond ourselves, a longing for something we know is missing in us.
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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.
If you desire something, you don't have it. It is more interesting than enjoyment, because enjoyment erases the mysteries and the vision of desire. Desire opens up possibilities but never achieves anything, whereas enjoyment is just the brutal achievement of something - and after that, it's done.
Longing is the fullest sense of desire; it's the most deeply felt kind of desire. I think the most interesting artwork comes out of some sense of longing. It could be called dissatisfaction; it could be called distance. There are many kinds of wanting to get closer to something else, whether that is an idea, a body, a place. Longing is also one of the conditions people approach reading, visual art, or music with - it's to satisfy that sense of longing. It's part of my job, on some level, to grapple with that notion.
At the very beginning, it's a desire and that's not the same thing at all, because when you have the desire to do something, all the work you can do is a positive thing. It's not something that you calculate. An idea is something you work on to make it work and a desire is much deeper in a way. The immersion, it's classical, I watched a lot of movies.
The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.
We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for.
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
It's so much better to desire than to have.... The moment of desire, when you know something is going to happen - that's the most exalting.
Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.
Without the power of intelligence there is no capacity for spiritual knowledge; and without spiritual knowledge we cannot have the faith from which springs that hope whereby we grasp things of the future as though they were present. Without the power of desire there is no longing, and so no love, which is the issue of longing; for the property of desire is to love something. And without the incensive power, intensifying the desire for union with what is loved, there can be no peace, for peace is truly the complete and undisturbed possession of what is desired.
I get up every morning with a desire to do some creative work. This desire is made of the same stuff as the sexual desire, the desire to make money, or any other desire.
To emphasize the importance of beauty is to connect art again to emotion and desire. To find something or someone beautiful is not simply to appreciate what you now see or know about them. It also involves the desire to get to know them better, in the hope that what you will discover will, in some way that you can't know at the time, make your life better, just as your relationship with it so far has also made it better.
Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.
If you want to see God, kill desires. Desires are in the mind. When you have a desire for something, don't act on it and it will go away. If you desire to drink this cup of tea, don't, and the desire for it will go away.
THE FIRST STEP in changing the future is Desire, that is, define your objective - know definitely what you want. SECOND: construct an event which you believe you would encounter following the fulfillment of your desire - an event which implies fulfillment of your desire - something which will have the action of Self predominant.
