Dear reader,
I think it is obvious that the notions of desire-and its creation-and integration are some of the concepts that I often employ and there is a continuity and deepening in their exploration. I wrote in a previous article about our need to satisfy our inner desires through the use of things, people, etc. There is something profoundly contradictory in this proposal that calls for consideration, namely how something that is our own deep interior can be covered by an external medium? Perhaps a certain answer may not be in this contradiction but in a different view of the query. In the physical dimension, in fact, we have absolute need, for example, food and water to survive, the roof and the clothes to protect ourselves. In Western societies this became the motto for all our desires, when we consume something, in psychological terms, we take something within us then we will be happy, calm, not suffer from hunger, emptiness, etc. So to some extent we think that what makes us happy and whole is what fulfils our feeling of 'lacking' and we have to take it from the outside environment like a missing piece of a puzzle. It is true that we come to this world in absolute weakness, a newborn cannot do anything alone and for his survival he needs everything from his environment, food, protection, care so we experience the ultimate dependence on something other than us for which we have no control over. Thus, we attempt to find various ways to communicate to the environment our needs and desires so that they can be fulfilled. When not fulfilled for a long time or abruptly interrupted then we experience deep pain due to the possibility of our death (physical or psychological). As we age from babies to children to teenagers to adults we form patterns and structures for what needs we have, whether they can be met by us and/or our environment having, thus, internalised our environmental responses as our own. For example, if we grew up wanting to take a risk and our parents told us ' don't take big risks because they don't come out good ', then it is very possible that we will not take risks because we 'know' that it will not be for our own good, regardless of how much we want to do the thing that we want to take the risk. At the same time, growing up we form an 'ego' whose purpose is drive us towards independence mainly from the aforementioned structures. This is particularly noticeable in the years of adolescence where a teenager comes to a great apparent conflict between the security but also the limitation he has experienced in his environment and the explosion of autonomy to discover new things, to explore, make decisions on their own, etc. It is one of the many transitional phases of human life that is quite critical for the person's further evolution. For example, if the environment responds to the teenager with additional constraints without acknowledging the healthy need for independence, then the teenager can abandon the adventures she wanted to start by suppressing a vital part of herself or instead doing extreme acts of independence, thus, creating an internal and external rift with what before was a place of love and security. We have many similar transitions in our lives, almost every time we close a chapter and open a new one. So we leave something familiar, a job, a relational situation, a city and we go to something new by following a new desire, a call. To a certain extent this happens much more often as our bodies renew themselves almost in whole every 7 to 15 years, so on a physical level what we take for granted and stable is not so. A logical consequent question is whether this cycle is ever completed or not. That is, if all our desires are ever completed. The view of the East is that wholeness exists every moment, that we are whole every moment and the fact that we consider ourselves or the world not whole waiting to be accomplished is a fallacy precisely because we have believed and experienced ourselves from the viewpoint of 'lacking'. Returning to the concept of desire as an anchor and compass we can ask ourselves what the desire is essentially. Desire shows us the way to a feeling, we rejoice when we achieve something, we do something to feel safe, creative, full, that we belong, that we are not alone etc. In fact these feelings already reside within us, not in something external, and can be activated at our will with external stimulus or without. In a similar way we all have cancer cells and under certain conditions they can be activated. The higher value towards completion (which I have recognised so far at least) is that of service to the other. If we think about everything we do we want it to be about others, we create families, businesses that want to find something useful for others, events, groups that will give something to us and something to the other. In the same way we have organised our societies where one serves the other, i.e. we use knowledge and skills to be of service to each other. In order to create a conscious, whole reality where we relate to our environment both as elliptical-when we need something from someone else-and as a whole, we need to resolve again and again these 'teenage conflicts' of 'ego'-internal and external- giving more space to something bigger than us. With Love, Panos
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Panos GoumalatsosCounsellor/Psychotherapist, Archives
March 2023
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