Desire, Aspiration, and Doing What We Can

Each of us desires a life free of suffering. For some, this means accumulating enough money, power, and material things that they might never truly want for safety or comfort. For others, the desire for a life free of suffering entails following a prescribed religious path in order to attain grace and protection in this life and perhaps even paradise in the next.

Desire seems especially prevalent in religion and spirituality these days—whether manifested as an insatiable thirst to be right about that which can never be known or in the need to be favored in the eyes of a creator. A more mainstream example of this is the barely veiled covetousness of the so-called Prosperity Gospel, wherein God purportedly shows approval by blessing the faithful with abundance. Consider also the many New Age sorts of spiritual practices related to wealth manifestation, bringing the energy of the universe in line with what we want, and revealing the “true self”—which is really just me after I get everything I want! Such thinking is wish fulfillment fantasy writ large!

Are we Buddhists so much more high-minded than all of that? Well, at least with respect to our initial motivation, perhaps not. Don’t we all begin practicing because of our desire to bring an end to our suffering, pure and simple. One of my teachers frequently spoke of the of the bewilderment that students often feel when life suddenly deals them a “cruel” blow—as if the depth of their spiritual practice should somehow provide immunity from the vicissitudes of existence. We’ve been good, after all, and being good is worthy of reward, isn’t it? Shouldn’t our goodness recalibrate the karmic payback machine so that it always works in our favor?

Alas, true spiritual practice takes us through layer after layer of meaning as understanding deepens and intention becomes purified. What starts out as a more selfish motivation gradually transitions into a more all-encompassing one. Desire becomes subsumed by aspiration. Thus, the Buddhist with the desperate desire to alleviate his own suffering might one day find himself reciting the bodhisattva vow to save all beings. Recall the difference between translational and transformational practice discussed in an earlier post. Without coming to grips with the nature of our desire, we will remain on the plane of translational practice—rearranging the furniture in the living room of our ego.

But as deepening practice takes us to that place between desire and aspiration, we might find that our suffering has actually intensified! The increased awareness or awakening that we thought would free us from “our” suffering has brought us face to face with just how much suffering is “out there” in the world. We’d like to do something about it, but what? There’s so much to do. And, anyway, our lives are so fleetingly short—like dewdrops on a blade of grass, as Dogen says. My practice was at just such a place some years ago as I said goodbye to the corporate world and headed out on a cross-country bicycle trip, hoping to answer the question: what can I do?

I was well seasoned by the time I made it to Wyoming’s Wind River Canyon, having weathered the Coastal Range, Cascades, and Blue Mountains of Oregon, the Sawtooth Range in Idaho, and, of course, the Rockies. Such trials leave the traveler open to seeing things perhaps otherwise overlooked, just as practice opens us to insights not otherwise revealed. The Wind River Canyon is about fifteen miles long and a half mile deep in spots. Picture, if you will, the many layers of the earth’s crust, deposited over millions of years. Now picture those layers tilted at a relatively steep angle, as one end is lifted up by forces deep inside the earth. Finally, picture a river—a recent arrival on the scene—flowing down this sloping landscape and slicing through its layers. Since the Wind River flows at a shallower angle than the layers of deposition, a journey upriver through the canyon is like a journey back in time. Whereas the mouth of the canyon opens onto the relatively recent red mudstone beds of the Triassic period, some 225 million years ago, it begins by cutting through Pre-Cambrian granite that is nearly a billion years old.

As I made my way up the canyon—past the grayish-beige of the Permian Period, the yellow, peach, and creamy rust of the Pennsylvanian Period, the creamy buff of the Ordovician Period, and the gray-brown of the Cambrian—I became more keenly aware that my very existence is supported by, dependent upon, and the result of all life that came before. Stem reptiles, lunged fish, invertebrates, the first flowering plants, single-celled life forms—if each and every one of those beings had not strived to its fullest, doing its part to fill in the web of life as completely as it could be filled, would we even be here today? This realization was given even greater poignancy by the fact that the Triassic Period marked a brand new blossoming of life after some catastrophic event caused the vast majority of previous life forms to become extinct. On one hand, we might wonder what those now-extinct lives amounted to. On the other hand, we might ask how the right genetic codes could have been arrived at, the ones capable of surviving such a catastrophe, if each life form had not done what it could.

Doing what we can—what else can we expect of ourselves? We can hold ourselves back from doing something because it may not measure up to what we think of as enough to make a difference. We can lament the shortness of our lives, the limitations of our bodies and minds, and the vastness of the work to do. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are here right now with work to do. The “lowliest” amongst us have done their part, lived out their karma, and paved the way for new generations of life. Let’s not lament the “meagerness” of what we have to offer. Let’s simply aspire to doing what we can, for the benefit of all beings. Perhaps that is where spiritual practice really begins.

 

Parts of this post were originally published in June, 2010 as Doing What We Can.

Copyright 2010, 2011, 2021, 2022 by Mark Robert Frank