In it, Kant attempts to solve the problem of living in a world where our desires and aversions are different, by the rule that we should ‘treat others as we expect to be treated” *

(*More specifically, to act as if our actions would become universal law).

Wherein, Shaw finds the obvious loophole in this idea in a comical way; suggesting that this doesn’t works because our likes and dislikes are so obviously different.

Which brings us to our issue in this essay; that as much as we’re all found trying to be more “conscious’ of our desires and aversions these days, more ‘aware’, how much should we actively try to change them?

And equally how should we cope with difficult aversions these days- as well as desires?

Further still, and as I mentioned before, are there certain sufferings that can never be worked with, that as much as we try, we can never be reconciled with (find any meaning in) whatsoever?

Let’s briefly look at a few past ethical templates, before I suggest my own.

First, the ancient Greeks; they believed that there were objective truths ‘ideals’ and that it was in everyone’s capacity to tune into living by these. Through the cultivation of ‘reason’. they became self evident.

But the problem with this is that, even ‘reasonable’ arguments lead to different conclusions; take the argument for vegetarianism for example; it’s not as simpleas understanding the reasoning for with the same reasoning people arrive at different conclusions.

Aristotle went further, positing a kind of ‘goldilocks principle’; that a life of balance and moderation was a happy one. (For example, the quality of ‘honour’, very important to the ancient Greeks, has cowardice and foolhardiness at the extremes and bravery is the ‘happy’ balance).

But is there any ‘mean’ in hatred or jealousy for example? Equally, it “begs the question”, for one man’s bravery would be another’s cowardice.

Possibly the most famous solution, for this is the one upon which our modern democracy is founded, is ‘utilitarianism’; ‘the greatest good is what is good for the greatest number..’.

Yet, does this mean we can inflict the greatest suffering on an individual if it’s for the good of the masses? It doesn’t take individual rights into account at all.

Then, more recently, ‘existentialism’ attempts to side step the whole issue of ethics in suggesting that in simply being fully aware of our choices and then taking full responsibility for their implications, we will act in the ‘right’ way for our lives.

Which I have time for, but it suggests a very high bar of integrity to really own all our actions. Also, it takes for granted that we’re not living among the psychopaths or mall-adjusted!

In today’s society, it might be fair to say we find a mixture of utiliarianism with moral ‘relativism’; the philosophy that you can only judge good and bad against the particular framework of that particular culture (good and bad actions are simply whatever our society says they are).

Which is also a product of our switch from the idea of ‘intelligent design” to Darwinism (“evolutionary theory’). Because if we’re just evolved apes, then the universe has no meaning outside random evolution - the idea of ‘objectives’ such as ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ are immediately thrown into pretty serious question.

No wonder then that we haven’t generally got much idea of how to work with our desires and make sense of our suffering, and that we’ve turned to Eastern philosophy and various ideas of ‘Spirituality’ to understand our existence.

The trouble is, when we do this we often get stuck in ideals. That is,often what we come away with is not that practically applicable for working with desire and suffering in daily life.

Instead, when we talk of desire , it’s ’non attachment’ and when we talk about suffering, it’s not really ‘real’, as this world is ultimately an illusion. Which, it hardly needs to be said is equally unhelpful as the tautology of ‘being unattached to one’s desires’ (outside denial).

However, the one teaching that does tend to make a lot of sense to me is the ‘tantric’ one; where the very root of the word comes from the idea of a ‘thread’ or to ‘weave’. For it brings us back to the idea that what we’re looking for is ‘meaning’ throughout all our experiences- the highs and the laws being part of one, meaningful whole (as opposed to desperately trying to grab the highs while pushing away the imagined lows).

In tantra then, it takes the highs AND the lows to make a, whole, that is, meaningful puzzle. The point is not trying to find the ‘right’ but that we’re able to unite all our life authentically together by being honest towards our intent at seeing it clearly.

So, how does this bring us back to the question as to whether we can say some desired are ‘good’ and others ‘bad’? Because; straightaway it forces us to acknowledge our suffering as part of the whole picture of making meaning out of our existence - as I mentioned in the last essay.

And when we do so, when we can fully connect to our own pain (which is rare), then the question of us desiring things that may most obviously be predicted to cause another’s suffering doesn’t arise.

Especially in as much as self-connection inevitably also includes that self in a world connected to others.

In a certain sense then, perhaps we do arrive back somewhat to the idea of ‘reason’ with the ancient Greeks, or, equally; that of ‘Purifying the senses’ so the mind perceives clearly, an idea we find so often find in Eastern philosophy (which is why doing a practice becomes necessary).

To conclude then - before we expand further on methods of meaning-making in the next mini essay, when desire is connected back to a persistent awareness of the nature of reality, the constant suffering of so much sentient life naturally.moderates our desires - that is, deepens or expands them beyond the individuals most instinctive wishes for comfort and pleasure.

Finally, as to whether there is any suffering that cannot be made meaningful, let me briefly clarify this very important point. For it is not that we are trying to see the “positive side” of our suffering in making meaning. Although, this may sometimes be possible. I find this somewhat offensive to how much people do suffer.

Rather, in the simple and honest cry; ‘why did this happen to ME?’, If this is truly felt, almost spontaneously a shift of perception may occur (which is why Jesus said that both the wise and those who suffer greatly are dear to him).

So, it’s not that we see the positive side, instead, the meaning comes from a deepening of perspective on the very nature of what it means to suffer.

But we’ll have to come back to this question in more detail in the next essay I fear…

What I’m saying is; what are are we outside our desires and aversions and Is there anyone of anything left - in the normal sense of being an ‘individual’- that we can experience as meaningful?

In my subject of specialisation, yoga philosophy, a retreat or merging into the ‘pure consciousness’, brahman’; or the oneness that pervades everything, is usually understood as the aim.

Which, put simply, is to get rid of our sense of individuality as we know it. For example, in the Bhagavad Gita, the individual encouraged to relinquish all preferences, treat a lump of gold and a pile of excrement the same.

And then, wait until death in this peaceful passivity where the whole problem of being an individual will be concluded. Which worries me as most unsuitable, even as an idea for the modern yoga student.

Yet, we hear that this dis-identifying with that pernicious ‘ego’ all too often is the stated aim in modern yoga.

Which is where I break from the historical tradition. Instead, I’d go as far to say that the attempt to get rid of our ego in the modern context, one where we very much need to live as an individual in the world, is a mental health crisis waiting to happen.

Even so, in yoga philosophy - as in Christianity equally - desire is assumed to be the problem, the singular reason we suffer. So the obvious answer is to get rid of desire, in turn, getting rid of that individual defined by their preferences.

Which, admittedly, does have a certain attraction in the crispness of its logic.

Yet, it still doesn’t bear out in practice in a modern world - unless we really are living in a monastic setting - being an individual is the essential motivating tool for daily action.

For as much our situation in life; of not getting what we do want, and getting what we don’t want, causes us pain, if we’re still here, living life in the material world, these’s clearly still something about this ‘game’ that we must admit we still want to play.

And the yoga method being, of course, qualified by the wish for a more direct, meaning honest, experience of our reality, surely this fact of our ultimate ambivalence to desire in the modern context needs to be taken into account?

Otherwise, why not simply exist on drugs or have a lobotomy, if our plan really is to exist in a peace without preferences and the feelings they give way to?

Or, indeed, to put it most simply, what is the point of trying to do anything then?

I would answer, because there’s something about going through one’s own process; struggling with making a meaning out of our various desires and coping with adversity, that’s ultimately found worthwhile, that is. meaningful.

But, to play devils advocate, we all come to any attempt at spiritual practice, understanding the pain of desire and the wish to live our lives in another way.

Which brings us back again to our original question again: is there another way? A way then we don’t have to outright reject desire but might somehow work with them differently?

For, currently, we ourselves like a cat on a hot tin roof (of frustrated desire in the world), wanting to get off the roof, while, at the same time, not being ready to leave it either.

What we can be clear about then at this point, is that this battle with desire is where the struggle for meaning in life resides.

So, if it’s not as simple - nowadays at least - as opting out of desire. But, not, in the end, about escaping the lows to live only in the highs either, as we tend try to do with desire.

For we need the lows to be able to perceive the highs as such), and, of course, we’re more like the passenger than the driver in life anyway - we don’t get to control what’s thrown at us.

So, this said, what if we grab hold of the other end of the stick then? That is, rather paradoxically, look at our relationship with the lows - that is get to know suffering - as opposed to the common polarities of throwing the baby out with the bathwater or simply trying to maximise our highs?

Which might seem like a strange step to take, but, in fact; the only way out of our dilemma is to face suffering head on.

Not least, because much of our desiring is done simply in the attempt to distract ourselves from the inevitability of suffering in our life.

Accordingly, the honest look at the suffering we all go through in life is where any spiritual tradition begins.

Hence, the parable of the Buddha, who lives as a prince within the palace in a life of utter comfort, which, is disturbed when he goes outside the palace walls and sees birth, death, old age and sickness.

So, in the first place, something tells me that he was unhappy with the wall to wall comfort and pleasure of the palace, in as much as he wanted to go out.

But the second and most fundamental point here, is that the nature of suffering and his acknowledgement of it is the start of his own spiritual journey.

For it is the point from which he starts to fully embrace the nature of reality, as opposed to avoiding it in his palace. (And in this case, our palace is modern technology and the way it’s allowed us to shove suffering under the carpet as if it doesn’t exist).

Yet, this abundance of suffering is the very point when life ceases to be meaningful. Again, because we’re not simply looking for pleasure, we’re looking for meaning. And the search for meaning resides in living as fully in reality as possible.

Which means, in turn, accepting the dual face of life - the good AND the bad, the joy AND the suffering.

Otherwise, having pushed suffering away, all we have in life is excitement and titillation as a poor substitute for happiness.

It is not, in fact, a meaningful experience of life, and, hence, not an ultimate resolution to our struggles to meaning -as much as this is what we’re increasingly able to do.

However, there’s something about our need to see things clearly - perhaps, our search for truth? - that is the only meaningful experience and the only one we then find truly satisfactory. Even if this is always framed between the constant interplay between suffering and joy.

Having said all this, it’s also clear that desires still cause us pain; if we desire too much, or. equally, in desiring the wrong things. So something might also be said more pragmatically to that - and we will come back to next time.

Equally. is there some degree of suffering that it would be an abomination to even suggest that we could ever make meaning from? I think so, and we will also need urgently to address this.

For now, I shall conclude with the Buddhist parable of the wild strawberry which illustrates how the very essence of desire and the temporal fragile, beauty of life need each other to work as one whole:

“A man was running away from a tiger.

He reached the edge of a cliff, and scrambled down, only to lose his grip over a precipice. Yet, he manages to hold on to a root of a plant..

As he dangles there with the tiger just above licking his lips, he sees that a rat is gnawing at the very root he’s holding on to, which will soon be severed in two.

Just as he notices this, at the same time he sees a wild strawberry plant beside him, growing out of the cliff face and containing a few perfectly ripe wild strawberries.

He picks one with his free hand, puts it in his mouth.. “Ah so sweet” he says to himself…

And if we don’t find meaning in life, quite possibly we’ll literally die. Like when people are said to “die of a broken heart”. They die because they cannot find meaning in the suffering they’ve incurred.

But certainly we metaphorically die, in as much as we stop living with any spirit. Which ‘unfortunately’ doesn’t do this fact justice - that many of us have arrived at living without meaning these days.

Or, we sometimes end up making meaning that may be incredibly ineffective, even painful if we can’t do it in an effective way. For it still beats the utter nihilism of living in meaninglessness.

But, we should, of course, clarify what we mean by ‘meaning’. And the only thing that will be deemed adequate or meaningful in the end is connection to Self. For when we say ‘meaning’ we refer, ultimately, to the meaning of OUR existence - the meaning then of US.

Which is the driving factor of all our desire’. But, equally, the meaning of our aversions too, being as I said; the basis of all that we expend our energies on.

Indeed, desire and aversion come to dominate our lives, not for the sake of pleasure or pain in the end (for what we like and dislike for the most part being different to one another are quite arbitrary), but in this attempt at ‘Self knowing’.

They are our most common and endemic tool of meaning-making in as much as they most immediately come to hand so to speak.

For they immediately (and easily) differentiate a sense of ‘Self” out of what otherwise appears like chaos.

Thus, knowing ourselves through and by our likes and dislikes, we don’t ultimately desire the pleasure or even fear the discomfort of getting what we don’t like; our sense of comfort or discomfort pertains to our connection or lack of connection to Self in that moment.

In other words, as being the person who likes all these things; identities themselves with these as reflective of Self, and doesn’t identify with, dislikes, all these other things - also, as reflective of Self.

Hence, we hold on to our aversions equally as strongly as our desires as our preferences - good and bad- set a framework we have decided upon as ‘us’, collectively or individually, wherein we also, for example, need an enemy or dislikes, to make sense of what we like, and identity Self with.

And after this, we qualify further how we are doing, our experiences deemed as doing better, ‘progressing’ or, to degrees, failing, doing worse, regarding how we measure up to this, somewhat self-selected framework.

An experience, that as we get older, or a culture becomes more decadent, becomes increasingly rigid as our preferences, that is, the way we know our Selves, becomes tighter and tighter.

For the rational mind will never stop in its quest for knowing in an ever more definitive way. It’s just part of the mechanism at play here.

This style of knowing our ‘selves’ is one elicited through the mind; an entity which can only know in relationship, moreover, in comparison. As 0/1 , better/worst; just like a binary mechanism of a computer..

Yet; this is only ONE style of knowing, one I shall call an ‘overly-definitive’ way of knowing Self. We’ve simply got so used to we assume now that it’s the only way we can know.

Indeed, because for the longest time societies have based their understanding of reality on this method of the individual knowing their Self in this way- through separation, differentiation and comparison.

However, because we don’t make our meaning in a vacuum, we make it together; also need to know ourselves as an entity in the world with others, there’s this inherent contradiction between knowing ourselves in separation and contrast TO the other, and also needing to know our selves in connection WITH the other.

One that sets us in consistent conflict with the world and our experience then; as we’re both trying to separate FROM the other while, at the same time, find a connection out of this painful experience of separation TO the world and others in it.

This style of meaning making is also inherently lacking in as much as the sense of meaning we derive from this arbitrary demarcation of certain experiences as representing US, and others as not representing US, is an exponential contraction of the naturally expansive state of our consciousness.

One which all, so-called, ‘spiritual’ traditions tell us is, in fact, unbounded (by the same token. is really just the birth right of our underlying nature).

Equally, this meaning-making through the mind, knowing through separation and particularly then through preferences, is one that must be constantly fought to be preserved in an ever-changing outer (and also inner) landscape.

So, this kind of self-knowing plunges us into the constant anxiety of losing our sense of meaning in Self-knowing.

Wherein we end up with the nature of Self being defined by the painful experiences of anxiety, or for some, anger, at the potential loss of the carefully de marked space of Self we’ve carved out, essentially, against the world.

Hence, this kind of meaning-making I said was easy, in as much as its self-presenting, but not comfortable nor effective for purpose (to put it mildly).

However, there IS another kind of ‘knowing’. One that is not knowing in the normal sense at all (which fences off something to be ‘known’ from everything else), so it can be hardly be called such.

Instead, it is a knowing through INCLUSION OF EVERYTHING TO our state.

Not then through the separation of what is known from what is not known, US from the world. but in the sense thst everything is known in connection TO and WITH US.

Which might be defined by a state of ‘such ness’, or ‘tat tvam asi’ (“this is that”) in yoga philosophy. Or flow’ as in the Tao, or gnosticism in the Western traditions.

And it is an experience that can’t be qualified - as a clearly known US, can’t then be differentiated from the not-known, or everything else.

So, one where everything is included in the fullness of one’s experience, is indisputably whole, adequate, and utterly satisfactory, regarding the meaning it delivers.

The one problem is, that this ‘knowing’ entails a subjective experience that lies outside sharing and being backed up in our common definitions of self given by society (wherein we seek comfort in the underlying knowledge of the unknowability of Self, in numbers).

Therefore, we must develop the courage to stand alone - or, trust our own process of meaning making (as well as actually engaging with it in the first place), rather than accepting someone else’s meaning as a substitute for going inside and finding our own.

Which brings us back to the aim of yoga often termed as ‘kaivalya’ or “alone” . The courage to BE; to be truly alone in the ineffable experience of an unsharable, yet personally experienced Self connection, while, paradoxically, in this at the same time, connected to everything.

If you’ve enjoyed this, I’m happy to expand further on the topic, Just let me know.