Guest article provided by: wildislelit.com
by MarQuese Liddle | MFA
Author & Editor at Wild Isle Literature
While many can pursue their dreams in solitude, other dreams are like great storms blowing hundreds, even thousands of dreams apart in their wake. Dreams breathe life into men and can cage them in suffering. Men live and die by their dreams. But long after they have been abandoned they still smolder deep in men’s hearts. Some see nothing more than life and death. They are dead, for they have no dreams.
— Griffith, Berserk
written & illustrated by Kentaro Miura
Dreams and Desires as the Divide
“What are you doing?” echoed the voice within my mind by my early twenties. Daily, it repeated this question, varying its phrasing slightly after a time. The full elaboration came to me suddenly, jumping from my lips which transformed the inquiry into an accusation. “What are you doing with your life?”
Like me, you, dear reader, may be suffering—or have already suffered—your mid-life crisis decades earlier than had your parents, or their parents, or any of the generations past. By twenty-two years old, you may be staring down a dark and winding road going nowhere seemingly without end. Call it what you may: a dead-end job, a career you hate, a torturous relationship, a useless degree, crushing debt, bad influences, loneliness, injury, sickness, addiction—it is all the same Hell, a bottomless pit in which the darkness can always dim deeper.
I have great and terrible news: you are not alone. This feeling of listlessness—like a ship adrift and aimless, without a star in the night sky by which to guide it—contaminates our new, night-blinded age following the flash of an excessively bright Enlightenment.
During the 19th century, this spiritual malaise was the subject of many literary masterpieces, such as that of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Through the mouth of Father Zossima, he explains:
The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest and richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them’—this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder, for they have been given rights, but have not yet been shown any way of satisfying their needs. (Dostoevsky 313)
What Dostoevsky is describing is that very aforementioned Hell—that is to say, he is describing a bottomless pit, an infinity, a space without constraints, limitations, borders, or order. And as it turns out, the chaos of perfect-freedom and potential-anything brings about anxiety, depression, and a will-to-nothingness. That is Nihilism, the desire to reduce the innumerable number of possible values in a last-ditch effort to impose order onto a chaotic universe.
And are we post-modern men not suffering this very affliction? In the free and wealthy first world, are we not in fact drowning in out liberty and rights? Especially in America, there is the cultural presupposition that anyone can do or be anything. Even when this presumption is not consciously believed, it is felt axiomatically as an “ought,” as if a failure of reality to conform to this injunction constitutes an injustice by God or the universe or whatever governing body happens to currently occupy the seat of power.
In our post-modernity, we fail to see that our very desires—whether we name them or not—are the source of our feeling frustrated and lost. It is as the Buddha teaches in The Dhammapada:
Don’t get entangled
With what you long for or dislike.
Not seeing what you long for is suffering;
So also is seeing what you dislike.Therefore, do not turn anything
Into something longed for,
For then it’s dreadful to lose.
Without longing or dislike,
No bonds exist. (Buddha 52)
But if desire is what gives rise to suffering, then only by eliminating desire can we free ourselves from our cages of despair, right?
Wrong.
Not even the Buddhists believed this. Despite the truth of their fundamental premise that all suffering stems from desire, they also understood that we are human beings, and that to desire is an intrinsic part of us.
Even though the Way cannot be seen except when you have no desire, people have eyes, so they see; they have ears, so they hear. Because such openings exist, there must always be desire. So the existence of desire in these openings is also a subtle function. Since the presence of desire is the wonder in the openings, to speak of having no desire does not mean abandoning desire. Why? You can’t cut off your ears and eyes and throw them away. As long as there are openings, there must be desires. (Lao-Tzu & Takuan 3)
Therefore, attempts at surrendering all desire are doomed to failure. Worse, they are fated to backfire. If you are reading this essay, likely they are already backfiring, burning you like eternal fires as you descend deeper and deeper into despair.
Has the metaphor sunken in yet? If not perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche said it more clearly in his essay, “What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?” essay three of the On the Genealogy of Morals:
But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to Man, there is expressed the fundamental feature of Man’s will, his horror vacui: he needs a goal—and he will rather desire oblivion than not desire at all.—Am I not understood?—Have I been understood? (Nietzsche 83)
Do you understand now the depth of our predicament?
We are suffering spiritually. We are pained by a gaping wound which will only expand as we attempt to fill it, but which cannot be ignored or willed away. We have an unbounded number of unfulfilled desires, myriad dreams which together interweave to cage us in suffering. We have rights and freedoms, and they are enslaving us.
What then?
Dreams and Desires as the Way
Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like. (Tsunetomo)
The path leads through—not out of—suffering. That means that suffering cannot be avoided, and any attempt to avert one’s eyes from his deepest desires will only result in him stumbling into ditches or headlong into walls or the skulls of other people. You can pretend that you don’t have higher aspirations, but you cannot hide behind pretense—not for long, anyway, before angst and shame sniff out your hiding place.
Likewise, you cannot indulge in every fleeting whim. Life is too short and opportunities in too short supply. Furthermore, you are constrained by the time and place of your birth and by the bounds of your body. You are you; you are not just anybody, and an attempt to be anyone will result in you becoming no one, a nobody.
Peter Pan, the eternal child, lives in Neverland for a reason. Neverland never was and never can be. It is nowhere, a place where an immature boy can play out his fantasies; and it is a place from whence the maiden flees. She wants a hero, you see, a man willing to sacrifice his useless, boyish self in order to grow up into a man capable of saving her.
This sacrifice and self-resurrection is a form of Jungian individuation—the transmutation of lead into gold, of suffering into meaning, and it is accomplished through the cultivation of your character. Ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius describes this process thusly:
If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yes, let there be daily renovation.” (Confucius, The Great Learning, Chap II, para 1)
In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself. (The Doctrine of the Mean, Chap XIV, para 5)
Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone. (Chap I, para 3)
It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven who can give its full development to his nature. Able to give its full development to his own nature, he can do the same to the nature of other men. (Chap XXII)
According to Confucius’ instruction, the Road through suffering is traversed in increments, one day—one step at a time. You must first attend, that is to pay attention to yourself and the consequences of your actions. Then comes the hard part: you must be honest. Only a sincere evaluation of your own conduct and that of those around you will allow you to discern when the fault is with you and not others or the world. And when the fault is yours, you renovate yourself. You make small changes, ceasing things which cause you to feel guilt and shame, pursuing things which make you proud of the duties and responsibilities you become capable of taking on.
To borrow several phrases from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, this is the divine inspiration of interest which we name enthusiasm. Pay attention to it. Notice what behavior of others evokes involuntary feelings of admiration in you, and mirror those actions. That is what those feelings are for. They are an orienting reflex and a source of animation—just like brightest star shining in the darkest, it is a guiding light, singular and far.
That star is your dream, your deepest most desire in its highest, most integrated form.
Confused? Did we not just spend a thousand words discussing dreams and desires as the source of our misery? How, then, are we now wishing on a wishing star, the very distance from it which we stand being a gulf of utterly black despair?
The answer is harmony.
Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou makes it a point in the Zhuangzi distinguish between the Great Course and one’s personal Way of being. There is The Way and there is your way. Like Yang and Yin, these two separate streams can flow in confluence, or they can contend with one another.
Takuan Soho has already told us that to be human is to be in the possession of desires, therefore, not having desires is not a method by which people can accord with the Great Course. Zhuang Zhou explains this predicament in narrative form:
Prince Mou of Middle Mountain said to Zhanzi, “My body is here taking in the sights of the rivers and seas, but my mind remains back at the court of Wei. What can I do?”
Zhanzi said, “Value the life in you. If you value the life in you, profit ceases to seem so important.”
Prince Mou said, “I understand that, but I can’t help myself.”
Zhanzi said, “Well, if you can’t help it, then just go with it; do not hate the imponderable spirit in you! If you cannot control your longings, but then you force yourself not to obey them, this is called a double injury. Those who are thus doubly injured are never among the long-lived.” (Zhuangzi 234)
So you see, it is not a matter of not desiring, of not dreaming. It is instead a matter of deciding on one dream and then bringing that dream into reality by transforming it and yourself to fit into the Path laid before you. This is how meaning is made, by accepting and then embracing the pain necessary to pursue a singular goal to its culmination.
You see, this whole time, the means have been within you! This whole time, it has been up to you to decide!
But you must decide, and you must commit. For once you identify your star in the sky, there is no leaving your dream behind. Already, it is too late to go back. You know now that the escape from Hell is the long, arduous climb which you have hitherto denied. But you can see the light now, yes? It is that faintest glimmer most high. Watch yourself. Abandon your lies. Shoulder yourself, and let that which is holding you back die—for innumerable small ego-deaths must pave the Way, or else all of you will die instead and pave the way to somebody else’s dream.
Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.
Confucius and Mencius. The Four Books; The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, Confucian Analects, and The Works of Mencius, translated by James Legge, Andesite Press, an imprint of Creative Media Partners.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, originally published in 1979-1880, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Lao-tzu and Takuan Soho. Tao Te Ching; Zen Teachings on the Taoist Classic, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Publications Inc., 2010
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, originally published in 1887, translated by Michael A. Scarpitti, Penguin Books, 2013.
Tsunetomo, Yamamoto. Hagakure.
Zhuang Zhou. Zhuangzi; The Complete Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2020
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