To desire is to be human. However, desire can compromise our good sense. How? It can suppress the neural processing that supports critical assessment.
Don’t most of us have a story about romantic attraction gone wrong? Enchanted by chemicals, we fell for love’s image and failed to assess the autonomy of our beloved.
The outcome? A withering of intimacy and the seeming loss of a life sufficiently meaningful to us. (And let’s not forget that our former beloved may tell a similar story about romantic attraction gone wrong!)
The desire for anything—an object, a social position, celebrity or wealth—can enhance or suppress our faculty for critical assessment. That is, when we are exclusively or overly influenced by desire, our thinking may become clouded and confound our priorities. There's more: The suppression of our critical faculties is inevitably accompanied by discontent.
So, it’s not easy to put together a life sufficiently meaningful to us if we don’t expand our responsible efforts to all of life’s challenges. We want to be able to exceed the needy immediacy that suppresses pragmatic intelligence and critical judgment.
We want to design a life supported by our critical assessments, themselves based on our skills of comprehension, evaluation and resolution. Risk being unavoidable, of course, we find a degree of comfort in rational mastery and our ability to manage our risks with a more realistic, measured and humane assessment of what constitutes a successful life.
At the same time, the logical processes of reason and rationality as a method for dealing with the world do not account for the full range of our personal authority. Our subjective resourcefulness, creativity and spontaneity are crucial when we address our experience of ourselves.
Successfully addressing the mysteries and rhythms (and chemicals!) of our experience is just as important to securing a meaningful life as is the achievement of our other goals.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.