Desire and Decision-Making

By: Ira Allen

So, I was talking with my neighbor late last night. He knocked on my door around midnight, wondering if I had finished reading his book on desire; he was leaving town, he said, and needed it back. I’ve long since lost any feelings of guilt for not reading books when they’ve been pressed on me—after all, you wouldn’t feel guilty if somebody insisted on lending you a jigsaw puzzle and you didn’t have time to get to it, so why a book?—but I was a little sorry he was taking it back. I would have liked to read the thing.

Instead, I ended up having a conversation with him about his future: kind of an interesting one, actually. He’s here in Paris to study Tantra, working under a traveling Master he can only sort of afford to follow. With no visa or work permit—and worse, no French—he’s having a hard time finding enough work to supplement his small pension, and so he’s thinking to leave Paris.

Back in the U.S. is a girl; she’s not "the one," but she’s a one, and she wants him. There, too, is a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan’s East Village, available to him for the last time in this coming month. Here in Paris there’s the growing frustration of having too little money to sustain the lifestyle to which he’s accustomed, little luck recently in finding lovers, a small and unlovely apartment, and a day or two with the Master each month. Somewhere in the south of France, there’s another Tantric Master; they have a good connection, but she’s newly elevated to Master status, and isn’t certain she’s ready to take on disciples.

Here and now there’s a decision to be made. And there’s a question of how to make it. As we discuss his situation, several understandings about desire and decision-making emerge for me. Perhaps most pertinent is that which follows.

There is no such thing as a "one true" desire, from which all the other desires are "false" distractions; that’s a bogus way of narrating ourselves into a true/false dichotomy that’s not only not already there, but is actually damaging. An example: my neighbor tells me that his true desire is to follow a Tantric path, to study under a legitimate Master. And yet, this statement follows hard on the heels of lusty, longing descriptions of the girl and the apartment back in New York. Those desires, which seemed so real as he narrated them, are relegated now to the status of "false desires," distractions from the true path. And I can’t help but wonder: What is it that suddenly makes these desires, clearly felt, undoubtedly real, suddenly "false"? And what are the consequences of this false-making?

Well, the poor guy not only still has to make a decision about what he’s going to do (Stay in Paris, eking out a living? Press the issue with the Master in the South? Head for India? Settle back down in New York?), but now he feels guilty about having to make that decision. By telling himself that the desire to follow a Tantric path is the only "true" desire he has, he hasn’t made all those other desires go away, but he has criminalized them! There seems to be a simple lesson to take from this: All desires are real desires.

Now, that doesn’t mean that all desires are simple or that some desires don’t conceal other desires, acting as screens in much the way that Freud described screen memories (which figure prominently in our mental march of time, and draw attention away from more significant memories, but do so in a way that is susceptible to analysis and intervention). But it does mean that we owe it to ourselves—as a matter of both honesty and practicality—to stop insisting that some of our desires are real and others are not. For, when we look deeper, we find something still more disturbing.

Those desires we champion as real are, to no one’s surprise, generally the ones we feel we ought to have, the ones we see as "best" in some sense. What’s disturbing about this is the way we extract ourselves from the decision-making process when we designate such desires as "true," as opposed to the "false" desires that we evaluate more negatively, see as themselves less desireable (in the sense that we would rather not have them, really). By saying, "My true desire is to follow a Tantric path of study, as disciple to a Master," I am in effect saying, "I do not really have to make a decision about what to do with my life, a decision between my very real, conflicting desires.

This decision has already been made for me by the nature of my desires themselves. I may not necessarily act on it, but I will always know what the right thing to do is—clearly, it’s to follow my true desire." This is comforting, because it relieves us of the very real burden of choice—a burden that, as I have written elsewhere—is particularly difficult to shoulder precisely because we understand, even if we understand little else in life, that we never really have enough information or capacity to make the "right" or "best" choice about anything. There are simply too many factors.

But hiding in a fantasy of "true" vs. "false" desires is no solution. The only solution, as I see it—for my neighbor, for myself, for anyone else—is to accept the burden of impossible choice, to make decisions in the dark, taking all our desires as real, choosing to weigh some more heavily than others, acting on the desires we choose to privilege, and then hoping it all works out somehow. That’s not exactly the most comforting mantra around ("take responsibility for something you can’t foresee the outcome of, treat all your desires as real, choose between them, and hope for the best"), but it’s an honest one. Well, it’s trying to be an honest one, at least. Who knows, really, if I’ve gotten even that right?