What do I mean by the word 'desire'?

Please keep in mind throughout this post that I'm using the word 'desire' as an umbrella term to mean a lot of different things, for example a simple want or wish, a basic need such as a need for water, for food, for shelter, also an expectation. Desire can also mean greed, it can be a physical manifestation of a feeling and expression of love, and it can also mean a psychological dependency, a compulsion, and of course an addiction.

As you can see, desire can mean a lot of different things.

There are different states of desire. There are different sensations which we associate with desire, such as hunger, thirst, loneliness, and also longing, craving, and expectation. Then of course once a desire has been created in our minds there is the outcome of the desire. If there is fulfillment then there's satisfaction, pleasure, a kind of 'sweet spot' and so on. But not all desires become fulfilled - we don't always get what we want - so the other outcome is of course despair, which gives rise to disappointment, frustration, dismay, and can often lead to anger, heartache, apathy, and so on.

Therefore as you can see desire is something major in our experience of life and is one of the major determining factors in life and how people function and how they behave. But it's not always so obvious and some of our desires - simply because we're so used to having them - often escape our attention and we behave in ways which we don't really understand which is often based on desire, but we often don't see it.

The basis of relationship is space

Forget about those AirBnB advertisements which tell you that if you have space you have an AirBnB. Let's start with one of the most widespread of common illusions, relationships are not defined by physical form nor is space defined by how much money you can make from it. All relationships are defined by space, not by physical form. Space is not nothing, it's what connects everything in existence.

Let's take an obvious example of a window. The whole point of a window is to enable you to see through a wall. Windows are made up usually of a frame and glass. If there is no glass you have a wall, not a window. The whole point of a window is to let light into a room and also enable you to see outside. Therefore the window enables you to have a relationship with the outside world from inside your home. Doors are another example of how space defines relationship. Yes the door has physical form, but see we cannot walk through walls, we can only walk through doors. Doors need to have enough space for people to walk through. Even when we think of a door as a barrier we are thinking about relationship.

There are other common examples of this principle in existence - cups, bowls, vases, pots, pans, drawers, wardrobes, houses, rooms, shoes and clothing. Your shoes and clothes might look nice, but what's really important about what we wear is the space inside our shoes and clothes which enable us to be able to wear them. If there's too much space in your shoes the won't fit you, and also if there's too little space in your clothes for your body they won't fit you.

Then we come to the mind. We often think in terms of my mind, your mind, their minds, but in reality there is just mind, i.e. that space all around you. I'm assuming that when you walk down the street you see what everybody else sees and you hear what everybody else hears. Or do you start seeing things which nobody else can see? Can you hear things which nobody else can hear? When you stop and think about it everything that goes through your mind is 'other' than you, i.e. you think about things which are other than you. What you're doing is either perceiving what's going on around you or projecting concepts from memory into space.

The whole point of a mind, or mind, is to be able to perceive what's going on around us and to see what's arising. Desire is what distracts us from this process of perception through concepts which draw us into imagination and conception, and through various emotions, feelings and thoughts create various energies and forces within us.

The three most basic and fundamental desires

So to understand desire we need first to understand and recognize the three most basic human desires in existence. Any desire you can have, irrespective of whether it's a need, a simple wish or want, a craving, or something which is more intense, will somehow lead back to one or more of these three basic desires.

• A desire for sensory pleasantness and pleasure

  The first of these three desires is an obvious one, the desire for sensory pleasantness and pleasure. Out of this we get so many different things, not just pleasure but also happiness, fulfillment, relief, comfort, emotional security, success, being healthy, a sense of ease and cohesion, just to give you some examples.

  This is the underlying desire behind what I refer to as the 'sweet spot', a term I've pinched from UK marketing guru and expert Rory Sutherland. We will get into the relationship between desire and advertising and marketing, and political propaganda, a little later. But in so many different ways and in so many different desires we are all seeking our little sweet spots, warm fuzzies, and things which make us smile.

• A desire for reincarnation, rebirth and continuity of life

  At first glance this all seems so mystical, meta-physical and philosophical, but it's not. Sometimes this is explained as the survival instinct, or it can be what lies behind 'the grass is greener over there' type of thinking. We express this desire quite often when we're making choices and considering different variables and possibilities. On a deeper level of course this desire is what lies behind a belief in reincarnation, rebirth, the concept of heaven, just to point out how desire ties in with our belief systems and worldview.

• A desire for non-existence and annihilation

  Then you have the other desire which is a desire for non-existence and annihilation. You might believe for example that when you die, that's it and you cease to exist. You only live once and once you die that's it, game over. But this is also a basic underlying desire which permeates so many other different desires, needs and wishes, on so many different levels of our living existence.

  Have you ever been standing in line somewhere and up front you have that annoying person who is giving staff lots of grief and being tedious about something which to you doesn't matter? Have you ever wished for a lightning bot to come out of the sky or the member of staff to just wave their hands and make them vanish into thin air? This is an example of such a desire.

The fundamentals of desire

So moving on from the three most basic and fundamentals of desire... We now come to the two most essential aspects of desire which we need to think about and take into consideration. Please keep in mind that all desires are physical, based on energy and karma, so they manifest as energies and forces within us filling in the space of our minds.

The first of the two fundamental aspects of desire we need to think about is the intensity of the desire. This relates to the energy frequency. The more intense the desire, the higher the frequency of the energy and generally energy tends to escalate in frequency. This is something you will notice if you have a need to pee, or you're hungry or thirsty. Your hunger or thirst doesn't remain constant, but increases in intensity the more ou go without food or water. I'm sure you will have noticed how distracting the need to pee is. Desire can go through a whole spectrum of different intensity from a simple want or a wish, to a definite need, to a desperate need, a psychological dependency, a compulsion, and finally an addiction.

The second thing we need to think about when it comes to desire is the outcome of the desire itself. Can the desire be fulfilled or not? What will happen if the desire is fulfilled? What will happen if the desire isn't fulfilled? As we're dealing with physicality and energy usually this gives us a basic duality or polarity. Usually this duality is centred around satiation of the desire, satisfaction and so on, or despair, disappointment, a lack of fulfillment, poverty, and so on. What you need to think about here is how the outcome of the desire changes the way you think, the way you behave, and how you relate to other people.

Indeed desire is arguably the biggest single factor when it comes to determining how people think, what they believe, how they behave and how they interact with others. The different energies from desire manifest across different dimensions of living existence. We cannot think of desire as just a simple desire, because as one desire can manifest another desire can manifest out of the same energies or a belief that has been created out of a desire. When we get different desires all merging into a complex pattern we can even talk about desire systems, just as we talk about belief systems. Sure we can identify a single desire if it has enough intensity to stand out, but we have many desires that we often don't see as desires but often mistake for beliefs or even karma (which is another complex issue).

So when it comes to the battles and struggles between light and darkness, between good and evil, and also in some ways between heaven and hell, desire is the central and most important issue. I personally don't like to get involved in such conversations about the batte between good and evil, good and bad because this is moral reasoning and you cannot employ moral reasoning without engaging in moral relativism. Much of the evil that's being perpetrated in the world today arises precisely out of moral reasoning and people believing that they are right, they are doing good, and they are acting in alignment with God's will. I offer the Holocaust as an obvious example of this point I'm making here.

You see there are also many social and external factors involved in desire which cannot be overlooked. We all have the potential to perpetrate acts and promote beliefs that are cruel, inhumane and depraved and no amount of othering or pointing fingers takes anything away from that potential. You might be sat there thinking "Oh I could never do something like that." But see if someone can make you afraid of something, they can make you believe anything. If they can influence your mind so much that they can get you to believe anything, then they can not only control your mind but they can also inspire various desires and expectations to manifest within you.

This is why developing a meta-physic, an existential dimension to life, mental clarity and an understanding of how desire works are all necessities in life. To twist the context of a popular saying, "You snooze, you lose." Belief in external authority can be a dangerous thing, and if you constantly go by what people in authority are telling you, rest assured that there are many politicians, media figures and businesses that will have you dancing like a puppet on a string to their tune, not your tune. You will go through life like a social mark, constantly working, constantly having to pay, and dedicating your life energies to serve purposes of those who are far wealthier than you. And those in political power will laugh at you and take you for a fool.

The duality between fear and freedom

In order to understand desire properly we need to understand the environment or the context of the desire. This brings us to another polarity and that is the polarity between fear and freedom. I know that people say that love and fear are polar opposites. Not true - love and death are polar opposites which is also why love and hate are also not polar opposites, as hate is a twisted physical imitation of love. Understand that desire is a physical phenomenon, fear is also a physical phenomenon, and freedom if it means anything it means space.

In order to understand this polarity between fear and freedom we need to understand attachment. Now to many people there is no difference between attachment and connection, and you might be one of these people. For me there's a major difference between attachment and connection and that difference lies in either synergy - connection through space, or synchronicity - connection through consciousness. Attachment has neither synergy nor synchronicity, because attachment has a physical basis. Attachment is psychological, emotional and is based entirely on energy.

Now the question here arises if you are attached to anything, anything at all, can you really be free? Or is this just like truth, in that what you say is only relative truth, but not any sort of absolute truth? You see whatever you say is only relative truth, because the truth you speak in say a court of law is always relative to the law. So how can you be really free if you're attached to a physical body? Can you see where I'm coming from here? Unless you are able to vanish, make yourself invisible, or can have an out of the body experience at will, any freedom you speak of is only relative freedom. Freedom never negates relationship, because you can only be free from something else. You can never be totally and completely, absolutely free, because there's no such thing as separateness.

So to understand desire we need to also understand attachments and how we form attachments. This is important because it helps us to understand not just desire, but also to some degree how we develop our Ego structure, sense of identity and self, and also how we develop our worldview and the models of reality that we use to explain the reality that we experience from our individual perspective.

Understanding the nature of attachments

So now we come to the nature of attachments, i.e. psychological attachments and emotional attachments. We all have them. Once we form these attachments it's extremely difficult to let go of them and sometimes it is impossible, and this is what lies at the very root of desire, of the way we identify ourselves, of the way we perceive reality and what's going on around us. In the past I've written about the chain of interdependent origin when writing about karma, the basis of all physical existence. It is precisely these attachments which bind us to this chain of (mutual) interdependent origin.

This is where we have the real issue. To go back to those three basic desires, for sensory pleasantness, for reincarnation and rebirth and for non-existence and annihilation, we all make fundamental assumptions and get caught up in illusions. Take for example of the way we perceive death. We know that other people die because this is something we witness and know because it's something which happens to other people. We all understand that one day we will also die. But see we don't know either when or how we will die - unless you are a prisoner on Death Row in the US and you hae an execution date, but even then your lawyers can file an appeal and you can receive a stay of execution. But my point here is that none of us know when and how we will die. We cannot even conceive our own death from the physicality of Ego, because death means the complete destruction of Ego. So all we have to deal with the mystery of death is an assumption and a concept, and death is not a concept. Death is real. In fact death is really real.

Similarly we have the same conundrum when it comes to love, which is the polar opposite of death. Love is just as mysterious as death is. We all have this basic underlying assumption of what love is, but none of us really know what love is about. All we know is love is something we need and something we desire to experience in our lives and this is despite the fact that we cannot define it without making assumptions or forming beliefs. This is problematic because love manifests in so many different ways, love is kindness, it is compassion, it's empathy, it's respect, it's devotion, it's sympathy, it's acceptance, it's so many different things. See when you get to know someone new in a relationship invariably you come across the question "Is this love?" How many times have you looked at another person and wondered what it feels like to be loved by that person? How many times have you got yourself into a relationship with someone believing that it's love only to discover later that it wasn't love at all?

But to understand what attachments really are we need to understand what it is exactly we form attachments to. Below I give you some examples of what we become attached to.

• Our physical bodies

  The first example of attachments we form is an obvious one - our physical bodies. The reality of our physical body is that it is an organism which grew out of an egg and is constantly changing, growing until when we die it becomes a corpse and becomes part of this planet. Our bodies are the vessel for spirit (Akasha) and consciousness through which we experience this common experience of living existence and an environment.

  Only we don't see it like that. We identify very strongly with our bodies to which we are very strongly attached and out of this attachment to our physical bodies we experience desire in the form of constant physiological needs, such as the need to constantly breathe air, have access to clean water, a need for food, a need for shelter, a need for an ambient temperature in our environment and so on. Additionally we also hope that other people find our bodies pleasant enough to be around and do various things with and that they find us attractive and enjoyable to be with.

  Through our physical bodies we can satisfy desires for sensory pleasantness and pleasure. This is not just in sexual ways, but I'm getting that out of the way first because some of you will immediately think of that, but we also experience pleasure in other forms, such as through food, through drink, through comfort, through being accepted, admired, respected, through hot showers and warm baths, through sleeping on a good mattress in a good bed, and so many different ways.

• Inanimate objects

  We also form attachments to inanimate objects and to some degree identify ourselves with various objects, which gives us the concept of possession and ownership. Obvious examples include the clothes we wear, our shoes, the objects that we carry round with us such as our smartphones, our wallets, our purses, various accessories and jewellery, and many of the other things we use to make up our identity. If you have a car or some other vehicle, think about how that make and model of your car ties into your identity and your Ego.

• Concepts, beliefs and ideologies

  We also form attachments to concepts - various beliefs and belief systems, philosophies, religions, and ideologies such as political ideologies. It's our attachment to such concepts which make up our worldview, philosophy on life, and whatever model of reality or basic assumption we make to explain reality and such things as truth both to other people and ourselves.

  This is why there is no such thing as absolute truth and why we cannot perceive reality as it actually is. We are all attached to various concepts to some degree or form because this is the only way we can make sense of the world and our experience of life. Keep in mind that the universe is coming at us constantly in a vast multi-dimensional continuum of sensation and experiences. In other words everything is happening everywhere all the time. By contrast our focus of conscious attention, which equates to Ego, is extremely limited and narrow. We think in linear terms, for example when we think of time as past, present and future, and we can only focus on one two, maybe three things at the same time without needing to write stuff down and make notes.

  Yet pay attention to the fact that we all to some degree automatically assume that we understand reality, despite clear evidence that we don't. We all have our own explanations, theories and hypotheses for explaining ourselves, other people, the world, society, politics, religion and so on.

• Environments, spaces and places

  We also form attachments to spaces, places and environments. Think of the place you call home as an obvious example. You may be thinking of the place where you live now, but this isn't the only place which you call home. Think about the place where you were born, where you grew up, and where you believe you come from. Is that not also home to you?

  This attachment to places which we call home not only feeds directly into our sense of identity and Ego, but it also satiates our desires and needs for security, for safety, for comfort, and an environment where we can relax and be ourselves.

  But we don't just form attachments to places we call home. We form attachments to places, regions, countries and continents and identify with relatively large areas of this planet. Take for example the way we identify as a nationality, a region within a nation or country, or even a continent, e.g. African, Australian, Asian, American, Caribbean. When you stop and think about it we rarely if ever identify ourselves as nothing more than being a member of a whole species of human beings.

• Other people

  We also form attachments to other people through our relationships with them. We are attached to our friends, through karmic bonds we are attached to our parents and also if we have them to our children, to our families, to our partners in intimate loving relationships, and to other people in our lives.

  We also identify ourselves with other people and other social groups of people. One such example is how some of us identify as being part of a generation, Generation X, Generation Z, Millenials and Boomers. This is a relatively new way of dividing and classifying people which has arisen out of the internet and social media.

  Not all of our attachments to other people are pleasant attachments either. Many of us are still attached to people who have hurt us, who have abused us and who have wronged us in some way. In my most recent book 'The Loving Space' one of the things I've pointed out that often the ideal or objective to love everybody is unrealistic and that we're all still along way off from gathering around a campfire and singing 'Kumbaya' with arms entwined. I'm making this point to illustrate just how closely our attachment to other people, as an example, feeds back into those three basic underlying desires for pleasantness, rebirth and annihilation.

Therefore when we look at desire within the context of the various attachments we make, we not only understand the polarity between fear and freedom or liberation, but we also begin to understand the tremendous potential we all have within us to either create or destroy - life, individual lives, other people and ourselves.

When we stop and think about just how intense and powerful desires can be when they're combined with the attachments we make, further fuelled by either fear or a desire for freedom and liberation, and also ignorance, energies can very easily become forces and those forces can turn out to be destructive - addictions, abuse, shocking acts of inhumanity, cruelty, depravity. We like to think that we could never become like someone such as Ted Bundy, Peter Sutcliffe, Aileen Wuornos, or Hitler, Pol Pot, but this is separateness and only your assumption. The reality is that there is nothing that separates us from those convicted murderers and rapists and the capacity to commit heinous acts of evil.

We all carry such potential within us and learning how to negate such a potential is arguably the most important thing we have to do in our lives. This is why we all need to work against our own ignorance and be especially mindful of the attachments we form in life.

What is the price of your soul?

So we move onto the next part of understanding desire and attachments and that is the social, mental and psychological conditioning we are all put through as part of our process of socialization to become members of society. A major part of this socialization process is the development of various desire systems, attachments and belief systems which we are all subject to as part of our education, as part of our upbringing, as part of the development of social and cultural awareness.

This is where we come face to face with the occult and magic. Now you may be thinking here in terms of secret rituals, blood sacrifices, possibly voodoo and other kind of freaky, swirly notions of the occult and magic. Forget that. Occult simply means hidden, obscured, esoteric, only for the chosen few. Magic is simply connection and unity between self and environment or self and other. The most widely used magical prop in existence is money and it is also arguably the major tool when it comes to developing desire systems. The modern day magician is someone who writes code and designs algorithms, but another major form of magic is selling, promotion and advertising.

Can you see the connection now?

From very early childhood we are all subject or even bombarded with various messages coming from all directions all with the intention of selling us something or working to create a desire system within us. Think of the role of fairy tales, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, birthdays in the role of childhood and upbringing. This all serves to build on the basic assumption we made of separateness between self and other out of which we developed an Ego when we were around a year old, and by the time we have a fully developed Ego, around the ages of six, seven or eight, we have formed many different attachments and have somewhere deeply embedded in our psyche some kind of desire system and belief system.

This creates is major problem for parents and a source of potential constant conflicts. We task parents with the social responsibility of raising their children to be socially responsible adults by the time they reach the age of 18. But all too often it is the parents which are on the frontline when it comes to regulating their children's desire systems. It is often a consistent form of conflict and battles. You might want to think about that next time you see a small child having a meltdown or kicking off in a supermarket because they cannot have a chocolate bar or a new toy and the parent says "No." You might also want to think about the very real ethical dilemma of the ways disposable vapes are being sold and just how easy it is for teenagers, some as young as 13, to get hold of them.

So by the time we reach adulthood we have been exposed to a lot of what we can describe as temptations and we have developed vast, complex, and intricate desire systems, attachments and belief systems. There is an awful lot of psychology, psychological manipulation, cultural engineering, with various melodramas, distractions, diversions through various media such as television, the internet, social media, print media, billboards and so on, all coming at you relentlessly. All kinds of different organizations, institutions, the government, government departments and agencies get involved in all this. We get caught up in all this very much like a fly getting caught up in a spider's web.

This analogy checks out because we all get caught up in a vast, intricate matrix, a vast mindnet with so many different dimensions and it operates very much in the same way as a spider's web. You get caught up in the intricacies of language, culture, belief systems, ideologies, some of which are overt and easy to recognize, but many are extremely subtle and hard to recognize or spot. All too often you can try to disengage, try to somehow detach yourself and believe you are free. But then something else happens, you get caught, and you realize that you are not free at all, but you're caught up in a different desire system or expectation.

As you can see this is not as easy or straightforward as many people like to think it is. I'm not going to be able to do much more in this blog post to give you a brief insight and highlight the general principles involved in liberating yourself from desire systems. This blog post, as long as it may seem, is just a brief extract from my recent book 'The Loving Space' and is a small fraction of what is written in the book. But more on this later.

Abuse and addiction

In order to properly understand the relationship between desire and expectation, desire and attachment, we need to look at the extreme ends of desire and expectation through understanding the relationship between abuse and addiction. I know that for many people abuse and addiction are two separate things, but for me they're really not, the differences are extremely subtle and far more nuanced than we perhaps realize. Keep in mind here that desire is physical, karmic and based on energy and force. There is a certain duality and polarity with consciousness, love, truth and so on.

But see consciousness can also be space or emptiness, which is a fundamental aspect of Natural Law - if you're not sure of the relationship I refer you to the FAQ 'What is dependent arising?. All abuse and addiction arises out of a lack of conscious awareness, out of ignorance, and both abuse and addiction can be defined by a relationship which is based on the extremes of desire, attachment, craving, clinging, and fear. Often in the case of abuse and addiction there is some experience of past trauma, relatively heavy past karma, and an experience which someone is unable to properly process or internalize.

Contrary to what many people may think neither abuse nor addiction comes down to a simple matter of choice. Both abuse and addiction are far more complex issues associated with trauma, past karma, and mental health and there are often many different dimensions and layers to the issue. Indeed there is a spectrum between desire and love and the more extreme you go in the direction of desire the further away you go from the opposite pole of love. Love as it is the polar opposite of death is incompatible with energy, karma and force.

What I'm saying here is something which I want to make very clear and something I want you to take stock of. You cannot have a loving relationship and an abusive relationship at the same time. I know that some people will think of their relationship in terms of good times and bad times, but moral reasoning does not change the fact that a relationship is either based on love or it is based on desire and once you go past one particular extreme, in this case desire, you end up with an abusive relationship, not a loving relationship.

An abusive relationship is always defined by the energy of the relationship, which is the abuse. The two people involved in the relationship are the abuser and the object or the target of the abuse. Keep in mind that you don't always abuse another person. Many cases of abuse happen because someone turns the abuse inwards on themselves. What we are capable of abusing can vary. We can abuse a child, another person, we can abuse a substance, an activity,

Furthermore as we learn about relationships and develop relationship strategies from other people such as parents and other figures of authority abuse is something which cycles between people and from generation to generation through various relationship cycles. This is one of the ways in which karma can be transferred from person to person, and even on a grander scale from authority figures through media and cultural conditioning to entire populations. This is often how people who were once abused end up becoming abusers, through relationship cycles.

Neither abuse nor addiction ever come down to individual or personal choices. Nobody ever wakes up and thinks "I'm going to try being abusive to my partner just to see how it works." Abusers and addicts are caught up in compulsive behaviour patterns and relationship cycles which, while they may be able to suppress for certain periods of time, always get triggered within the context of a normal relationship and the past karma and relationship cycles come into being and are manifest.

Methods and expectations

There's another aspect to all this which I haven't mentioned and this is the relationship between methods and expectations. Part of the social conditioning we are all put through constantly relate to the selling of methods. This happens in so many different ways, but fundamentally the basic underlying message of this - "If you learn X, and do Y you will end up with Z." All expectations are unfulfilled desires and so we can see that expectation is part of desire and also a part of longing, craving, and wishful thinking. So we get it into our heads that if we accept X, believe Y then Z will happen.

Any figure of authority is capable of selling us a method, or a belief system - religious figures, politicians, economists, spiritual leaders, gurus, businesses, and this is also widespread through education. The problem here is that methods generally don't work and often they are mental and emotional traps. This is especially true in the spiritual industry all selling their methods and claiming to be healers, teachers, maharishis and whatnot. While many have some value in the insight they share, many of these people are people who have fallen off the path - the same path I have taken through life. They fell off the path when they realized that the methods don't work and their expectations are futile. But it doesn't stop them turning round and trying to sell other people the same merhods.

You see the same thing in therapy. Not all therapists are qualified psychotherapists with clinical experience and backgrounds. There is no legal standard or definition of what a therapist is. In some cases you can attend a one day workshop, get a paper certificate and BINGO! You're now a therapist. I'm personally not entirely opposed to therapy in some cases but I want to point out that there are people out there fooling around with other people's trauma and mental health issues, selling a method, and making good money off it. Of course the methods don't work, the patients end up with false expectations and often also end up being re-traumatized as a result. This is why you should never seek a therapist off the internet or social media. If you feel the need for therapy you should always start from the top level of healthcare, i.e. a doctor or a psychiatrist, and follow their recommendations. There is no substitute for verification.

But see we get caught up in the same thought processes and habits of thinking. Let's take for example addiction. It doesn't matter what you're taking, whether it be alcohol, whether it be drugs, whether it be something like porn, cigarettes, video gaming, whatever, you are still using whatever is the object of your addiction as a method to satiate an inner desire or craving and because it's a method it's not going to work. Now you can tell yourself lies such as it regulates my behaviour and moods, it helps me with my creativity and whatever but you're still caught up in the cycle of abuse and extreme desire to the degree where you're believing that whatever substance or activities is solving an issue when it isn't.

You get the exact same psychology in many addiction and rehabilitation programs. Let's say you go to somewhere like AA or some other 12 step program to liberate yourself from the addiction for your alcohol abuse. You go through all the steps and stop drinking. Once you stop drinking you start counting. You've been two weeks sober. Then six months sober. Then say 5 years sober. But throughout whatever time you spend counting your sober days, you're still stuck with the attachments, you still have not resolved your past karma, the only thing that's changed is that instead of drinking and abusing alcohol, you're now avoiding alcohol and exerting a lot of energy and willpower in not drinking. You're still attached to alcohol. All you are doing is trying to avoid the 'cold turkey', the inevitable pits of despair and further trauma from developing the addiction in the first place. You might think you're free from alcohol but you're not. You're still caught up in the predicament and trapped.

All methods are traps and fallacies which usually serve to further ensnare you in the matrix and the multi-dimensional web of desire, expectations, attachments, cravings and belief systems. This is why when I was developing Qultura I left the methodology as a methodology and steadfastly refused to offer anyone a method to follow. In writing 'The Loving Space' I realized that I needed to flesh out and develop Unmind much more and this is because people are generally so caught up in following methods. 'The Loving Space' contains a fairly lengthy chapter on Unmind and I hope to come out with a new version of Unmind as an e-book sometime around the end of 2023. Which brings me to the next part of understanding desire and attachments.

Desire, attachment and expectation in relationships

So following the exact same principles we move onto another example which is somewhat more subtle and far more widespread. Just to remind ourselves what principles I'm writing about here... First you have the interdependence of desire, attachment, Ego, expectation, fear, anxiety and insecurity which all combines to make up what we understand to be karma. Then you have the equivalence between energy and consciousness, and between karma and love, truth and beauty. Then you have the spectrum in a relationship between desire and between love and trust.

The difficulty in relationships, not just intimate loving relationships but any and all human relationships is trying to strike a balance between the conscious and the physical, in other words the trust, acceptance and synchronicity - unity through consciousness - and a kind of symbiosis of desires, beliefs and karmic process. The big question in all relationships is what goes into the underlying space which defines the relationship. Obviously there needs to be a certain equanimity in the relationship and a certain amount of give and take.

However what often happens in a relationship is that, simply because we weight everything heavily in favour of the physical aspects, placing an emphasis on physical form and disregarding the space, and further placing a heavy emphasis on desire rather than on connection and love, we end up in a relationship which is made up mainly of attachments, desires, needs and expectations. What happens in such a situation? Well all too often the partner in the relationship becomes the method for the fulfillment of desires and you end up with two people in say an intimate relationship who claim to love each other, but who are often just using each other and exploiting each other to meet their needs, desires and expectations.

Once you are in such a situation in a relationship, simply because you crave a certain amount of emotional and psychological security, the relationship can very quickly become about expectations, possession and control and once you reach that stage it doesn't really take all that much for a relationship to turn into an abusive relationship. Additionally if you're using someone as a method for desire fulfillment rather than love, it also becomes quite easy to cheat on your partner because you see, they're not giving you what you want or need, so you have to look elsewhere to get it. Nine times out of ten this is the mindset of someone who cheats on their partner and it is usually someone who is using their original partner as a method to get something, whether it be sex, money, social status, or whatever.

But this is not just loving relationships. The same things can happen in any other human relationship, in famillies, in friendships, in work relationships, in business relationships, and so on. There are many employers out there who use and exploit their staff and once they burn out they get rid of them and replace them with new staff. As a result they often suffer a high turnover of staff. However smarter employers put more effort into developing a relationship with their staff and so there is more trust and much more equanimity. These are the employers who not only keep their workers much longer, but they also tend to do much better in business.

Liberation from attachments through Unmind

I'm going to finish up this blog post by giving you an overview of how it is possible to liberate oneself from an attachment, say for example from an alcohol issue, through the Qultura system and Unmind. As I'm condensing Unmind down to a brief overview I'm going to use bullet points. I'm also going to start out with the yin yang symbol used in Taoism to highlight how Qultura differs from Taoism in its approach. This might work out it might not. But we won't know if we don't try. I'm also throwing in a quote by Armenian mystic, philosopher and teacher George Gurdjieff. This will become relevant later.

• Taoist 'wu wei' v. Qultura Unmind

  Like Qultura Taoism is a method of enquiry developed to enable people to transform their state of consciousness. Unlike Qultura Taoism is very old, originating around the 5th century BC and centres around the study of the Dao or laws of Nature. It arose out of the simplified Yin Yang School of the I-Ching and is based around two books, the Tao Te Ching and the Chang Tzu. Central to the Taoist doctrine is 'we wei', the art of not forcing anything and letting everything unfold naturally.

  So coming to Unmind we start from yin yang. From a Qultura perspective neither yin nor yang is important, nor is a balance between yin and yang important either. What matters from an Unmind perspective is the space between yin and yang. This brings us to what is essentially the central premise or concept of Unmind, which is giving space to existence and giving space to life.

• The environment creates, the individual (organism) grows.

  This is one of the three central premises of Qultura. The second central premise is all existence is change, all existence is relationship.. Then you have the third central premise - all trauma and suffering arises out of separateness and division.

• You cannot overcome an attachment with desire or conscious willpower

  This is where Unmind is somewhat more explicit than 'wu wei'. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Furthermore neither the universe, nature or the self can ever be the object of its own experience. Fire cannot burn fire. Light cannot illuminate light. Water cannot make water wet.

  Once any desire, attachment, or belief is manifest it immediately becomes part of your karma and is recorded into memory. You cannot fight a compulsion, a psychological dependency, or an addiction in any way because these things are based on desire and attachment and your desire to fight such desires and attachments is also a desire and attachment.

  You can only overcome attachment by giving space to it and developing your conscious awareness. This requires a process of awakening.

• You can start a process of awakening from any experience in life.

  The foundation of Qultura is the Principle and the Process. Existence is a principle, creativity and interaction is a process. This is the 'how' and 'what of all existence. Asking "What?" gives you a principle. Asking "How?" gives you a process. Everything in existence has a principle and a process, including you, including me, including everyone else.

  Your Principle is consciousness, your Process is physical and karmic, which is why we refer to the process of living existence as a karmic process.

  Qultura methodology is a complete methodology. There is no method to follow, no doctrines, no dogma. You make up your own Qultura methods from your own perspective and experiences of living existence. No two Qultura methods should ever be alike, because in terms of physicality and life experience no two human beings are exactly the same. There is nothing to stop you calling your karmic process a process of awakening.

• You know all the answers to the questions you're asking.

  This is another major difference between Taoism and Qultura. If there is such a thing as the Dao permeating Nature and the universe all around you, then for sure the Dao also exists within you. But often you are not conscious of the answers you need to your questions. This is where we come to the practical aspects of developing a Qultura method, which is dream weaving - seeking connections between self and environment and self and other and developing a loving space. If you are sufficiently connected to both environment and others not only will the answers come to you, but you will know what to do with your life.

I think I will leave it there with the bullet points.Let me try with one final example of what Unmind is really all about. Let's look into the statement 'practice makes perfect'. Have you ever tried to do soemthing but found yourself constantly failing? Did you ever try to learn the piano or musical instrument? Maybe I can come up with a better example from childhood when you were learning to swim or ride a bike.

So you kept trying and trying and not succeeding. No matter how you tried you just couldn't master what you set out to do. Maybe you thought you were the weird kid who would never know how to swim. Or that one kid who would never be able to ride a bicycle. Or that teenager who couldn't learn how to drive. No matter how you try. So you decide to give it one or two more half-hearted attempts, and then suddenly, you're able to swim. You're riding that bike. You've passed your driving test.

But see you cannot explain just how you managed to swim, or ride that bicycle, or drive a car. All you know is that you had reached a point of despair and had almost given up. It was like there was some insight coming from somewhere other than you.

Let me give you another example and let's see if you can figure out how Unmind works. Let's say you've lost something, such as your keys, your wallet, or something else. So you start looking for what it is you've lost and you check all the places where you think you left it, but nothing. You go through drawers. Search your pockets, look in cupboards. You go to the bedroom and check through your bedding and on all the furniture. You even go to the bathroom and check behind the toilet. You even consider checking the fridge. So you give up.

How often has it happened to you that when you've lost something and you've given up looking for it, and you've moved onto something else, that sometime later when you're not thinking about it your conscious attention is somehow drawn to the object that went missing and you find it in an obvious place?

This is an example of Unmind and how Unmind got it's name. You cannot develop conscious awareness or receive insight through your conscious will or own efforts. No amount of meditation, yoga, or so called spiritual practices will ever result in any enlightenment. In order to develop conscious awareness or insight, which will always come from somewhere other than you, not only do you not have to be seeking it, but you also need to have presence of mind and take your eye off the ball.

Therefore as Gurdjieff pointed out, awakening can only happen when you're not seeking it. All you need to be is present, with a clear open mind, and receptive to change. You leave the enlightenment to the cosmos.