As we talk about releasing desires and cravings, it's important to keep in mind that it's attachment to desire that is the problem, more than desire itself. So let's review attachment.
It was explained to me that attachment is something that grows out of the delusion of me-and-other. We think something is separate from ourselves, and we want to possess it (or avoid it) or otherwise do something with it. When we perceive that nothing is separate, we may become intimate with something or someone without attachment.
This is particularly challenging in human relationships. We expect certain things from relationships. We love and care and worry. We rejoice and we grieve. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Isn't this a problem?
I've been sent a review copy of a not-yet-published book by Zen teacher Berry Magid, called Nothing Is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans, and there's a section in it that relates to this. I'll do a proper review later this year closer to the publication date (October?). But for now, I just want to quote from a section called "Desire and Attachment":
"Even though one of the central tenets of Buddha's teaching was interdependence, one rarely hears this interpreted in terms of emotional interdependence. How can we link up, in our own thought and practice, the rather abstract idea that we are inseparably entwined with the world in a nexus of causal, karmic relations, with the more immediate experience of being emotionally tied to our family, our loved ones, our peers, friends, and an ever-expanding social network of relations? When we speak abstractly about causal relations, we realize that not only is this net inescapable but that who we are is the sum of our relations within the net. Yet when we speak of emotional connections, we all too often switch ito a language of entanglements, clinging, attachment, and dependency as if all of these ways of being connected, unlike our more neutral sounding causal relations, were somehow extraneous, superfluous, or obstacles to realizing our true nature."
What Barry Magid describes may be a Zen thing, or it may be an attitude that grew out of monasticism. I do not know.
But we must acknowledge that humans are wired to bond with other humans. Bonding is as important to our physiological and psychological health as food and water. Humans need other humans. I would argue that being "human" is entirely about relating to other humans. Our relationships are us.
The challenge is to bond without attaching, and to love without clinging. Probably no one ever gets that right all the time. But as long as we are human, we cannot escape relationships and the emotions that go with them.
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