“When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your Desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, ‘Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.’ Dalai Lama 

“The most common reason we stumble into the delusion of powerlessness is that we’re afraid of what other people would do or say or feel if we were to act as we wanted.”  Martha Beck

I just read two completely different books that would be unlikely companions on a book shelf. They came together for me in a surprising way.  The first one, The Four Noble Truths, by the Dalai Lama, discusses the sources of suffering and how to find the path out of it.  The second one, Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo, discusses the sexual desires of three women from three different generations, geographies and cultural backgrounds who chose paths that led them into suffering.  At their core, however, both yield useful insights into our desires and delusions. 

Here’s my shorthand version of the Four Noble Truths. 

Truth One:  Suffering is an almost guaranteed component of life.  At one point or another in our lives, we are going to suffer from disappointment, loss, fear, anger, confusion, disease, or existential angst.    

Truth Two:  The primary causes of most of our suffering are desires and delusions.

Truth Three:  Letting go of our attachment to our desires and delusions will reduce our suffering.  Awakening to the conditioned responses that lead us to cling fiercely to limitations and to try futilely to control our environment enlightens our way.     

Truth Four:  The eight-fold path to peace and joy is right vision, right feelings and aspirations, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort and energy, right awareness or mindfulness, and right concentration or being.

So, there’s your cliff notes version of Buddhism.  Please inquire more deeply for a better understanding. 

Three Women is a non-fictional account of the lives of a teen-ager from Fargo, North Dakota, a young, married woman from Indianapolis, and a 30-something woman from the East Coast.  All three have desires that cause them suffering and all three have delusions about men.  I found the themes of desires and delusions in both books surprisingly serendipitous. 

Fargo Maggie desires the attention and affection of her high school teacher who is married with kids.  Maggie is a naïve and desperate kid with alcoholic parents who is gobsmacked by a handsome English teacher.  Indianapolis Lina desires the affections of a high school sweetheart who is now married with children.  Lina is stuck in a sexless, affectionless marriage she deplores.  Newport Sloan desires the affections and sexual intimacies of women and men outside her marriage.  Her husband gets off on her extra-marital affairs. 

George Eliot, the famous English author of Middlemarch, one of my favorite books of all times, used a pen name because of the sexism of her time.  She believed that people engage in habitual acts due to the cultural conditioning in which they live.  As a result, we are endlessly impressionable and easily influenced.  What has always been unclear to me is the difference between what we see in public life and what goes on behind closed doors.  Most private lives remain unseen and unrevealed.  In Three Women, Lisa Taddeo unveils the real truth of what goes on in the minds and lives of more people than we probably imagine.  She examines, in intimate detail, the sex lives of these real-life women from behind closed doors and secret places.

What struck me about the book was not only the passionate desires the women had for exhilarating sex, but also the delusions they had about the men they romanticized both physically and emotionally.  All three women truly believed that the objects of their desires would reciprocate their feelings and commitments.  All were terribly let down – the men were simply satisfying their desires and rationalizing their infidelities.  Our capacity for self-justification is boundless.  Men’s desires ended with their orgasms – their desires climaxed at climax.  Women’s desires and delusions kept right on going beyond the sexual encounter.  Taddeo found complexion and beauty in the women’s stories – not so much with the men.  In fairness, she made it clear from the beginning that all three stories were written entirely from the women’s perspective alone.  Still . . . . the stories rang true for me. 

Taddeo, however, provocatively paints another side of desire as well.  On the other side of the depressing, devastating and derailing consequences of unchecked desire is that it saves each of the women from the numbing mundanity of their routinized lives.  Maggie finds some color in the bleak landscape of Fargo.  Lina finds an escape from the loveless, sexless reality of her marriage.  And Sloane is able to define her identify in the freedom of open and transparent relationships if only for fleeting moments.

My insight from reading these two books about desire and delusion was that the critical difference between healthy and unhealthy desires and delusions rests in our ability to distinguish between noticing and needing. 

To me, having desires in not unhealthy.  Even though some highly evolved Buddhists may have eliminated their desires (does desiring not to have desires constitute desire?), most of us ordinary folks all have desires.  The questions are 1) do we notice the desires when we experience them?, 2) do we acknowledge that we are human enough to have such desires – culturally accepted or not?, and 3) are we able to make healthy choices about how we act on those desires?  The culturally accepted notion is what gets tricky.  In America, it’s culturally acceptable to desire boundless wealth, possessions, and fame but the boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviors are rigid, narrow, and restrictive, i.e. don’t cross the line of traditional borders. 

Desires become unhealthy when we either fail to acknowledge them or convince ourselves we need to satisfy them at any price.  The three women discussed above all paid dearly – fairly or unfairly.  For me, it’s important to be awake to our desires, to make conscious choices on how to act on those desires (or not), and to be willing to live with consequences of our choices.  If your desire is to be rich and famous, than you need to accept the reality that achieving that desire may involve endless obsessiveness and may result in a meaningless, unfulfilling life or early burn-out.  Your choice.

Delusions also have two sides.  If I notice myself becoming a little delusional about my intelligence or my impact in the world, I can either enjoy that fantasy for a moment and then return to reality, or I can become extremely needy for affirmation of my profound brilliance and lasting impact in the world.  Taking a fantasy ride every once in a while never hurt anybody.  Needing to hold on to an inflated image of vast superiority doesn’t usually end well.  As my grandfather would say, “Don’t you fool your pants!”

Alcoholics are a good example of the vagaries of desires and delusions.  Alcoholics have unquenchable desire and the delusion that they can handle a drink or two.  I would imagine the trick is to acknowledge the strength of the desire and to kill the delusion that you can handle “normal” drinking.  When I asked a friend of mine who has been sober for over 21 years if this was true, he sent me a paragraph from a book on alcoholism: “The idea that somehow, someday an alcoholic will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.  The persistence of this illusion is astonishing.  Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”

I think the Dalai Lama got it right about practicing contentment:  “Oh yes, I already have everything that I really need.”   AND, Martha Beck also challenges us to reconsider our delusions of powerlessness just because we are afraid of what other people might say if we were to act on our desires.  Yes, there are delusions about powerlessness just as there are delusions about power. 

The questions are 1) where do we pay the biggest price – living under limiting restraints or acting selectively on our desires?, and 2) where do we find the biggest payoff – freeing ourselves from cultural restraints or living routine lives with little or no pleasure and passion.  The choices and consequences are up to us. 

May we notice more and need less.  And may we all find the right balance.  Perhaps we should add that one to the eightfold path.