Maybe it’s the spring like weather this weekend that’s jolted me out of my winter doldrums, but I’ve noticed a subtle shift…a desire creeping in. Upon further investigation, I realized that it’s not so much a desire for anything in particular, but for desire itself, as if I’ve been experiencing a little too much equanimity as of late. A close friend of mine is in the first stages of a new relationship and as she recounts the latest news to me, I find myself missing that feeling. It’s as if she has been shaken awake and is living this bright technicolor version of her daily life and I’ve been stuck in black and white.

I’ve been wondering if desiring desire makes me a particularly bad Buddhist. From what I understand the point is not to eliminate or suppress desire, but to learn how to relate to it more skillfully. I think what I’m craving is the high that desire creates- I’ll stick with the romantic desire example because that’s the most obvious (for me). Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and others have researched the changes in brain chemistry that romantic love produces. The increased dopamine provides a literal high and is in some ways akin to a drug addiction. For me, being in that state serves to spark my creativity. It feels like everything is amplified.
I was thumbing through Mark Epstein’s book Open to Desire earlier and in it he discusses a more tantric view of desire. He writes:

“Rather than treating is as the cause of suffering, desire is embraced as a valuable and precious resource, an emotion that, if harnessed correctly, can awaken and liberate the mind. In this way of thinking, desire is the human response to the the discontent described in the Buddha’s First Noble Truth. It is the energy that strives for transcendence but, if it is to truly accomplish its goals, the seeker must learn to relate to it differently. He or she must learn how to use desire instead of being used by it. In this sense, desire is the foundation for all spiritual pursuits. As a well known contemporary Indian teacher, Sri Nisargadatta, famous for sitting on a crowded street corner selling inexpensive bidis, or Indian cigarettes, once commented, ‘The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.’ The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.”

So this brings me to the question of whether it’s possible to experience the type of desire Epstein describes without attaching it to a particular object. Do we have to have something or someone to desire in order to tap into the transcendent energy of desire? Is craving the high desire can provide necessarily a bad thing if you’re able to harness it to realize creative or spiritual potential? (And I’m thinking more of the extremes of desire, not the desire required to say get out of bed in the morning.)