I’ve been thinking about why pursuing a spiritual life can be so difficult, and I think I can boil it down now to one, core issue:
Our needs are complex, but our desires are basic.
That is: although our essential needs are very simple – such as nearness to God – by this selfsame token they are complex. Meanwhile, our desires are exceedingly basic, requiring constant training and attention to raise them to a higher standard.
Simple versus complex
Because a system is complex does not make it complicated. A complicated system defies understanding because it is filled with too many distinct ideas; a complex system, on the other hand, defies understanding because of the richness of its core simplicity.
As an example of this, consider the binary number system. It’s composed of exactly two digits, no more, no less: one and zero. It could also be expressed as true and false, black and white, up and down, right and wrong, etc., etc. Any world described in opposites is a binary world.
Binary is handy because computer systems are binary, representing their digits as “high power” and “low power”. You could say all a computer is is a binary machine to manipulate electrical and magnetic fields. That these binary-based manipulations result in pages being printed, screens filled with pictures, or sound coming out of a speaker, does not change the fact that at its core, everything is encoded and decoded in terms of simple, 0 and 1 values.
Think about that for a moment: Everything you see or hear from a computer, whether it be Beethoven’s 9th symphony, watching Find Nemo, or writing e-mail to a friend in Des Moines: all you see and hear can be represented as a combination of ones and zeroes. If it were any more complicated than this, a computer would be incapable of processing it. Yet this is also what makes it so complex: that even knowing a DVD is made up of ones and zeroes cannot help you understand how it works.
Basic versus advanced
While our needs as spiritual beings may be ultimately simple, what messes us up is that our desires are at the same time exceedingly basic.
What I mean by basic is this: A person stranded on an ocean without water will sometimes, if they get thirsty enough, drink seawater in an effort to make their thirst go away. Their knowledge that it won’t help the situation is overridden by the nature of desire itself. The mind knows, “I need water”, but the body says only, “I want to drink”.
A basic desire is heedless of the quality of its choice, or the consequences to the individual. Hunger says, “eat”. It doesn’t know about eating healthily or wisely. And the stronger a desire gets over time, the less it confers with the rest of one’s being in seeking its satisfaction.
What this means is that, from the very beginning of life, we must train our desires to be more profitable. Children may try to eat anything, but maturity makes us more and more discriminating. Teenagers might even choose to diet, preferring health or beauty over the demands of their stomach. Then comes eating the right things, avoiding harmful or useless foods, etc., etc. By the time a person is older they must be very conscious of what they put in their mouths, or else their health (and perhaps even life) will suffer the consequences.
The same is true with desire in general. Although desire is valuable for pushing us toward our goals, we must make informed choices. How often desire chooses an unworthy target, with a compulsion very real and powerful. But we must master those desires, so that, like a bloodhound, they can be turned away from lesser prey and focused again on our truest need.
Aye, there’s the rub
This is where it seems we have a difficult road ahead of us: our needs are elegantly complex, a bar of notes arranged into a symphony; while our desires are crude and basic, more like a toddler banging on a drum. This turns us into creatures of confusion. We know we need something, but we can’t identify it despite sincere effort; meanwhile our desires scream for whatever is nearest at hand or in our thoughts.
What chance have we, then, if what we need is beyond our understanding, but what we want is destructive to that very need? How much easier to crown our desires with truth so we can pursue them whole-heartedly and freely, than to rule our burning fires in the name of an Unseen!
I think it is in answer to this very state that Scripture was given to us. It offers enough of guidance to entince us along the Right Path, but little enough substance so we don’t mistake it for the Goal itself. It says to me, “That you want is right and true, but for what you want: there is Better.” That these binary-based manipulations result in pages being printed, screens filled with pictures, or sound coming out of a speaker, does not change the fact that at its core, everything is encoded and decoded in terms of simple, 0 and 1 values.
Think about that for a moment: Everything you see or hear from a computer, whether it be Beethoven’s 9th symphony, watching Find Nemo, or writing e-mail to a friend in Des Moines: all you see and hear can be represented as a combination of ones and zeroes.
… What I mean by basic is this: A person stranded on an ocean without water will sometimes, if they get thirsty enough, drink seawater in an effort to make their thirst go away.
… This is where it seems we have a difficult road ahead of us: our needs are elegantly complex, a bar of notes arranged into a symphony; while our desires are crude and basic, more like a toddler banging on a drum.