Ending the Pursuit of Happiness by Barry Magid

Author:Barry Magid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

CHAPTER SIX

LOVE, SEX, AND COMPASSION

1. DESIRE AND SUFFERING

In the previous chapter, we looked at the inescapability of suffering and how suffering is grounded in our human response to change and impermanence. One version of where practice is supposed to lead is an acceptance of impermanence. This is true, but it is only a half-truth, one that can give rise to the fantasy of being so open to change that we will no longer suffer. What we also come to accept through practice is the inescapability of desire. As an old master reminded us, “The red thread of desire is never broken.”

Desire is a word with many connotations. In some contexts, it feels more appropriate to translate the Second Noble Truth (“The cause of suffering is desire”) using the words clinging or attachment instead of desire, thereby shifting its emphasis toward a resistance to Buddha’s fundamental insight that all dharmas, including the self, are empty of a fixed, unchanging essential nature. This version of desire focuses on the suffering that arises from the desire that things shouldn’t change. We want to have a rock-solid, unchanging relationship to something and particularly to another person. Desire in this sense is whatever attempts to deny the universal fact of impermanence. Since life won’t cooperate for very long with our attempts at denial, we inevitably will suffer.

We do have to accept the fact of change. We can come to understand that in many aspects of our life, but I think we face the greatest challenge when it comes to our personal relationships. Don’t we have any right to expect constancy from our loved ones?—or is that too unrealistic an expectation? This longing for emotional constancy restores “desire” to its full emotional range, encompassing its everyday meanings of love, sexual attraction, and emotional need. All of these, I maintain, are as inescapably part of the human condition as the fact of change. Realizing that desire is intrinsically part of being human will sharply curtail our transcendent fantasies about ending suffering.

Psychologists (and parents) would, I’m sure, universally agree that an infant requires a basic level of constancy and a sense of secure attachment in order to develop normally. That emotional constancy can take many shapes and there is no one way to be a good parent. The range and styles of adequate care-giving vary enormously. What we mean by developing “normally” has equally many forms, some of which are only now being acknowledged, especially in the areas of gender and sexual identity. Psychoanalytic theory for too long equated normality with heterosexuality and maturity with narrowly defined roles for men and women.

In contemporary Western culture, there also has been an emphasis on the child’s need to develop the ability to separate from the mother and function independently without anxiety. In Eastern societies, such as India and Japan, much longer periods of familial dependence are the norm, and embeddedness in the family and society at large are valued more than autonomy. Social conformity may provide the link to a sense of a secure connection to the group as a whole, as well as to one’s immediate family.

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