I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Zen Asceticism and The Education of Desire

“When I'm driving in my car
And a man comes on the radio
And he's telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination”

The Rolling Stones, written long before the internet, social media and AI.

A few years ago, we were in the market for a new mattress. Note that my wife grew up in a family that owned and ran a hotel in a small tourist town. She spent much of her youth changing sheets, making beds, and vacuuming. As a result, quality mattresses and vacuums are a bit of an obsession for us now. Anway, we talked about mattresses even more than usual during this time. I was shocked when advertisements for mattresses showed up shortly afterwards in our Facebook feeds. Mark Zuckerberg was listening.

At this point I am more aware of how these algorithms are used to sneak into our lives. Zuckerberg, whether you know it or not, is, if you use social media, living rent free in the portion of your brain that craves. You also have podcasts and their advertisements in your car. You have Spotify curating algorithmically your playlists. As you go down most of our roads you can’t help but see the Target and McDonald’s iconic symbols for consumers (that is, all of us) is subtly, constantly working on you. AI isn’t around because it makes our lives better, as much as the tech bros try to convince you otherwise. It is around because it efficiently grows capital for some at the expense of the rest of us and the earth. Each of these specific manifestations of the ecosystem we are trained into isn’t interested in the answer to what it means to be human. Instead, they are all attempts to train us into an environment that has already determined that your core human function is to support the needs of capitalism, and your human value is measured by your ability to do so. As Douglas Atkins points out, “Cult brand marketers know that they must colonize every single moment of everyday life.” (Quoted in William Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.)

We are constantly trained in what we are to desire, and this training all too often occurs subtly and unconsciously. It’s not profound or unique to point out that our capitalistic system, premised on growth, is determined to shape us towards two dependently functioning states: 1. Dissatisfaction with our lives as they are and, 2. Consumption as the means of addressing this manufactured dissatisfaction. Everywhere we look, everywhere we listen, we are being trained to experience lack, and a means to address this lack.

And Facebook does it really well, really insidiously. But so does all of the media we engage in.

In the face of this core sense of experiential lack, Buddhism traditionally determined that our task is to extinguish desire. Upon the extinguishment of desire, we would enter nirvana. The traditional image of that is desire as a candle flame, and our practice the means of extinguishing the flame. The candle of life and desire will go out, and we will then enter nirvana, or desire will continue and drive us into our next life. The unmotivating correlative of this is that once our desire is extinguished, we die to this current expression of life. I’m not sure about you, but, although I do accept the inevitability of my own death, I’m not quite ready to extinguish my desire to live this life.

Fortunately, the Buddhist Mahayana tradition which includes Zen, offers a more life-giving version of desire. The problem is not desire itself, it’s what many theologians call “disordered desire.” A desire that has been trained toward the wrong things. Our capitalistic system necessarily depends on growth, the growth of capital- this is what defines it. Without capital growth, capitalism dies. The growth of capital requires consumption. Consumption requires desire for something not yet attained. Therefore, capitalism is a system that requires the creation of disordered desire. Desire for more of everything serves capitalism well. However, it doesn’t necessarily serve us well. Disordered desire leads to warped lives, warped communities and warped systems. In ordering our desires properly, we can recognize that nirvana can be found right here, right now.

So, one function of Zen practice involves the training of our desire. Zen practice is grounded in vow. The iconic figure in the Mahayana tradition is the Bodhisattva. This is a person who has reached the mythical place of nirvana as described in early Buddhism but refuses to leave the wheel of samsara until all beings are liberated. In other words, it is a person who organizes their life around a particular desire- the desire to free all beings. The first line of the four Bodhisattva vows chanted at Zen temples around the world, begins with some variation of, “All beings, one body I vow to liberate.” To quote Shahaku Okumura, “A bodhisattva is a person who lives by vow instead of by karma. As we grow up, we learn a system of preferences and values from the culture around us, which we use to evaluate the world and choose action. This is living by karma. In contrast, a bodhisattva lives by vow. Vow is like a magnet or compass that shows us the direction toward the Buddha.” To live by vow rather than merely by our karma requires the realization and constant reminder of our intention. Intention is the making of our desire conscious. Karma, on the other hand, is unconsciously living by trained habit. Our task is to train our habits towards healthy desire. In order to do this, we engage in ascetic practices- practices that can support us in retraining our desire. We chant, we do prostrations, we say gathas. We organize our lives around the liberation of all beings. And this liberation starts with our own- freeing ourselves from disordered desires. Asceticism gets a bad rap- a reputation for avoiding life and pleasure. This is decidedly not what healthy ascetism does. It is a renunciation of the things that harm life in favor of the things that support life. It is a turning away from the things that reduce our lives and humanity, and a turning towards the things that grow these. It is an intentional process of continual discernment into what gives life, and what are the obstacles to living fully. For me, the measure of our spirituality is the quality of our aliveness.

The core question is, do we intentionally shape our routines and habits in such a way that they bring us life, or do we unconsciously allow ourselves to be shaped by a system intent on meeting its own needs?

May you live by vow.