What is a desire?
Question from the Internet:
“What is an example of desire?”
A “desire” is a need, a deficiency that starts driving us. In fact, our actual matter, the driving force behind existence is a “desire.”
We exist; we sense life because we have constant needs and deficiencies awakening in us that drive our thoughts and calculations and determine what and why we do.
Without a need or deficiency, without a desire, we can’t sense existence.
A state of zero desire or need is the state of death.
Our most fundamental desire is the desire to exist and fulfill our necessities. This is why our most basic desires are related to food, drink, sex, family, and shelter, to safeguard our security and to maintain our health. In this respect, there is no difference between human beings and other animals, except perhaps, that the basic desires of animals remain within the optimal parameters of natural necessities and available resources, while our basic desires receive “social upgrades” and become unnatural and excessive.
But this relates to an even deeper and more fundamental — uniquely Human — desire, which is self-expression, self-realization, and self-justification.
In Human beings, beyond the animalistic basic desires works a much stronger and all-encompassing desire or need that relates to the Human Ego. The Human Ego is an insatiable desire that relates to expressing, justifying, and realizing ourselves at all costs.
This Human Ego burns on the incessant need to prove itself and magnify itself and to justify oneself against and above everything and everybody.
It is this Human ego that separates human beings, disconnects human beings from nature, and drives all our conflicts, excessive overconsumption, and self-destruction.
It is the Human Ego that separates us from other animals and fuels our incredible cultural, social, and technological development while also making us behave like cancer and march toward seemingly inevitable self-destruction.
We received the Human Ego as our most important desire from nature’s evolution. We also received abilities and tools that can help us learn and practice how to use this Human Ego in a way that instead of destroying everything, including ourselves, we become nature’s only fully conscious and seamlessly integrated partners and independent “inner observers.”
If we can learn how to control and restrict our “pity” and meaningless individual egos and combine them into a vast and singular “collective Human Ego” that can match nature’s quantitatively infinite system with its “infinite quality,” then together we can also learn and practice how this collective Human Ego can become a positive and constructive force that supports nature’s life-creating and life-nurturing system.
This is the only way we can truly express and realize ourselves; this is the only way we can reach true and justified pride in ourselves when the “infinitely able” Human Ego is directed to the selfless and unconditional service of the whole natural system.
Then, we will also understand that all of our individual and collective desires, everything and everything we ever wanted and yearned for, lead to the fulfillment of this single desire: to find and fulfill our “truly Human” purpose in life.