Session 2: Beyond the Mind’s Desire
Positive Affirmation: I am more than a collection of wants. My desires have no control over me.
Seamus: We are now getting into the second session of our series, which is the mind’s desire. This chapter in your book is quite interesting, and you start out by telling the readers that the fulfillment of your desires was the catalyst for your depression. Tell me more about that, because I think there’s a little more to it than what you said last session.
Ned: Yes. I talked about that at the start of session one, about how I completed my list. For years, I was chasing my desires and what I noticed is that as soon as I’d fulfill one desire, another desire would automatically arise.
Let me go a little bit more in-depth with that. I wanted certain things in my life; for example, wanting my first car. For months and years, I had thought about owning my own car and the freedom that it would represent.
Then the day finally came, and as I was driving down the road, the experience that I was having was intense joy. I felt like I was blissed out. It’s funny, because my old teacher used to tell a story very similar to this about how desires create these experiences where you feel blissed out. What I learned many years later from my teacher was this: in the moment when I was driving my car for the first time, it wasn’t the car that was bringing me joy.
In that moment, I was desireless. I didn’t want for anything. I thought it was the car that was bringing me peace and the feeling of euphoria, but had it been the car, I would have maintained that sense of peace and well-being each time I drove it, but it doesn’t work like that. As soon as an object gets old and we’ve had it for a while, a new desire will enter your mind.
I started thinking, “Well, maybe I could get new tires for the car or tint the windows,” that became the next thing to chase. It wasn’t really the fulfillment of desire that brought me any lasting peace. What really brought about that sense of peace was I didn’t want anything. In the book I am That by Sri Maharaj Nisargadatta, he states, “Stay fearless and desireless.”
Seamus: Being fearful of certain things and having desires for other things are two things that I’m sure a lot of people experience. I think it’s common for people to have at least some of each of those in their life.
You talked about chasing your desires, and about how that leaves you with a greater attachment to your mind and its wants, keeping you trapped in your head. Can you tell me how our mind creates desires?
Ned: It’s a natural tendency of the mind. There is a constant flow of thoughts dropping into your mind, and then there’s you talking back to your thoughts. Desire is a natural thing that drops into us. It wants to try to repeat something from the past, or it wants to try to create something in the future. It’s never happy with what’s at hand. You must come to the realization that you are not your mind, nor will you discover yourself in your fears or desires.
Seamus: The thing with fulfilling our desires is that we start with small things that are easy to obtain. However, we notice that obtaining them does not fulfill us for very long, so the natural thing to do is to ante up. The little thing didn’t quite cut it, so maybe it’s a bigger thing I need. It takes longer to obtain those sorts of things. It takes longer to obtain a car than it would a drum set, just as an example. Is that like a pattern that people can get locked into? Because the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and hoping for a different outcome.
Ned: The real definition of insanity is to be trapped in your mind with no end in sight. Being lost in the maze of the mind—that’s truly insanity, because nothing ever changes. The problem with desire is that it does sort of go through its own evolution. As we obtain one thing, we then want to obtain something bigger. And often we trade up for something bigger because now we are not getting the same chemical response in the body.
In the fulfillment of a desire, the body releases different chemicals that help create a sense of euphoria, and each time we fulfill one desire, we need a bigger hit to get that same chemical release.
Seamus: That sounds like the premise of addiction.
Ned: Pretty much.
Seamus: Yes, because you start getting these chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin.
Ned: Yes, exactly.
Seamus: Exactly. This is something I’ve talked about on my drumgab podcast. It goes back to my very first episode. My friend Anton and I were talking about the cost involved. Here, we’re talking about the cost of desires. It’s very interesting because when we obtain something, there has to be a cost. There’s always a trade-off. Sometimes the reward is greater than the cost, and that’s an ideal situation. Sometimes it’s the other way around.
There’s a quote that I want to read from your book Be Love that talks about this a little bit. It reads, “What is the price for the fulfillment of what I want? Does it satisfy my soul? Are you willing to work overtime, lose touch with those you love, or pay with your health for what you desire? Is what you desire worth it?” What you must wonder is, what was lost in order to gain, and where should people draw the line with that?
Ned: I think the real question is, do your efforts or desires serve a purpose? I think that’s the first thing to ask yourself, when you’re about to start a new endeavour. It’s healthy to ask yourself, “Is this endeavour a pursuit of my mind or a pursuit of my soul?” If something serves as a purpose, then obviously maybe it’s something we will throw ourselves into.
If we answer yes, that our endeavour is purposeful to our soul, then maybe sixteen-hour days wouldn’t be enough. But for other endeavours, if you gave them more than five minutes, it’d be too much.
Life is not a win or lose situation; it’s about making it a meaningful adventure. The most purposeful life is an adventure, where we live from one moment to the next. There may be times in our lives when we do nothing for extended periods of time. Then, there are times where we work like crazy. If it’s purposeful, there’s no loss, no line to draw. You ask, Where’s the line to draw? If it’s purposeful, I don’t know where the line would sit for you, because the line would be different for all of us. I think the only thing to really look at is whether we are maintaining our love for self, and making sure that we’re not losing sight of reality or our ability to be loving and caring towards others.
Seamus: Where does the person check in with their purpose? Is it in your head? How do we determine it? Because some people might be listening and saying, “Well, I really believe that this is what I need to do.” What part of us is telling us what our purpose is?
Ned: The mind can only speculate about what the heart knows. The mind only knows what we’ve put into it. It’s a very limited slice of our experiences. Whereas the heart knows everything, and it knows all of eternity. I know that’s really abstract. The idea is that we make this into a practice of learning how to ask ourselves these questions. The first step when you ask yourself a question is to stop talking. I was doing a mentoring session one day and I asked my client, “Do you ever ask yourself questions?”
He said, “Oh, yes, all the time.”
In return, I said, “Have you ever stopped to listen for the answers?”
He just looked at me. I could tell the penny had dropped for him. He admitted right away, “No, I just kept asking questions.”
I think that’s the nature of our mind and the habit that we sometimes find ourselves in—that we never stop talking. Our mind is like a little child, and it chatters and chatters and chatters away. There must be a time that we pause and lean in toward the most quiet and still part of ourselves. Again, it’s practice.
Seamus: Yes, because for example, this project always felt easy, compelling, to me. I didn’t have to convince myself to do these interviews. It just came to me. It just immediately hit me, “Yes, that is what I need to do.” For whatever reason I’m not entirely certain yet, but I think we have something here. Whereas other things you feel like you’re forcing yourself to be motivated enough to do it. You think that if we’re on purpose with the things that we’re doing, then the motivation to complete those tasks comes to us more easily.
Ned: Yes, I believe so. There are times when a sense of importance comes over us when we are about to embark on a new project. There’s a knowingness. When there’s an automatic knowing— “This what I must do!” That’s our heart communicating with us. It’s not that the heart has a voice and it says, “Seamus, you’re going to do a podcast on Ned’s book.” That’s not how it works, but you know that you’re going to do a podcast on my book.
This is one of the reasons why the heart is such a difficult travel companion, because it knows things, and then if we’re quiet enough, we know what it knows, but it doesn’t always make sense. And some things seem out of context with our current life.
Seamus: The idea that we are “grinding it out” is trending now. There’s a connotation to that word that makes it seem like you have to sweat out the whole thing. That there’s very little pleasure. It’s like getting that extra rep at the gym. There’s pain associated with it.
That’s the way that I visualize the word. If someone says, “I’m grinding,” I see them struggling. They’re not necessarily motivated. It’s like they’re convincing themselves to put in that extra hour of work. Whereas I feel that when you’re doing something that you’re really passionate about, the passion drives that buzz. You don’t really have to work hard to find the motivation to do that.
The next topic I want to talk about is hidden desires. What does that mean exactly? Are there secret desires as well? How would you define hidden desire?
Ned: A hidden desire is a motivation inside ourselves that we may not be consciously aware of. For example, if you’re a person who’s insecure, you may have behaviours that are boastful or overly aggressive to assert your presence, or you may go the extra mile to affirm your worth. Your hidden desire is what’s motivating your behaviours.
Seamus: Another example might be, what if somebody has a need for acknowledgment? These things have a way of being deeply rooted within us. They might be things that go way back into our childhood. Is there a possibility that more of them are rooted in our childhood, or earlier in our life rather than later?
Ned: If we look at hidden desire and break it down into the simplest form, it’s our motivators. Our motivators can stem from early events in our life. They can also come from current events.
Our hidden desires are not always obvious to us. They’re deep inside our motivations, and they have a lot to do with our behaviours and how we respond to the situations in our life. Nothing happens without motivation. Learning to pause and look at our motivations from time to time can be very enlightening. Why do I want this? Or look at your motivations to behave certain ways. For instance, I can be an overachiever; I’ve been an overachiever all my life. What drove me to be an overachiever was my insecurities. I was very insecure, and I didn’t feel I was good enough.
Now, at this point in my life, I can use that energy to achieve something positive.
Look at why you do the things you do. It’s a way of peeking in on your life. Look in on your life like it’s not your life that you’re living. Put yourself in a third-person position. You can learn a lot about yourself, and it also helps you gain a greater perspective of the moment at hand when you’re not so deeply entrenched in your own mind and emotions or behaviours.
Seamus: If we take inventory of our hidden desires and start to look at that and we trace it back to certain things, what if some of those hidden desires are a by-product of a conflict that cannot be resolved? Maybe it’s a relationship with someone who is not here anymore. If resolution isn’t within the realm of possibility for some people, how do these people learn to accept what can’t be resolved?
Ned: That’s a good question, because there are many scenarios that play out in life where somebody harms us and then moves away, or we lose contact with them, and we really feel we need resolve with that person. There is a portion of our hidden desires that are created from unresolved conflicts. Now, just because you can’t resolve your conflict with someone from your past doesn’t mean that you can’t heal yourself and move on.
I think if we hold on to a conflict just because we can’t resolve it with the other person, we’re placing our power in another’s hands. It’s a matter of claiming your own power, not requiring anyone to do or say anything to help us heal. We must learn how to heal ourselves. The world does not have to change for us to be at peace.
You’re saying that, that person holds your peace, but they don’t hold your peace: you do. Your ability to let that conflict go in you is what’s going to help move you into healing. When you heal your unresolved conflicts with the past you no longer allow them to alter the moment in you are in. We’re going to talk in a little bit about how to heal, and how to heal conflicts with other people.
Seamus: Now, another topic that you talked about is secret desires. Let’s talk about secret desires and how we get into them. Could you unpack that a little bit for us?
Ned: Secret desires are one of my favourite topics to talk about. When it comes to desires, secret desires are a concept that I created through my own experiences.
By my definition, a secret desire is a desire we have that we seldom express to another, but when the other person doesn’t fulfill that desire, we become disappointed, hurt, upset, or outright angry.
I noticed in my past relationships that secret desires happened frequently. For example, I would work nonstop for weeks on end. When a day off finally came around, if my partner asked me to cut the grass, I would lose it.
I had an expectation or a secret desire in me that she wouldn’t dare ask me to do anything for her on my day off. That played out many times in many scenarios in my past. I had these expectations placed on my ex-partner, and she had no idea what I wanted, but I was angry because she didn’t live up to them. When I noticed I was imposing my secret desires in my past relationships, it became obvious that communication would have solved a great deal of my problems.
Seamus: Why do you think a lot of people avoid communicating those desires and things they would like to have to their partners do?
Ned: One of the tendencies of the mind is to expect things. We assume that other people know what’s going on in our mind. That’s quite an assumption to make. I would assume that my partner knew what I needed or at the very least was observing how busy I was. We project our secret desires onto strangers as well. For example, I was out for a drive with a friend one day and as we were pulling into the parking lot there was a pedestrian in his way. He instantly started screaming at her, “Get the hell out of my way!”
As I watched this scenario play out, I could see that he expected the woman to see that he was trying to pull in. However, he could have parked anywhere in the lot or he could have rolled his window down and said, “Excuse me.”
Seamus: Maybe because at the same time, you’re thinking of all the things that you wanted your partner to do and they haven’t done them for you. Then when they ask you to do something for them, you may think, “Why would I do more for you?” We’ll get into that later with the relationships chapter. I suppose it’s the give and take; it’s fifty-fifty. In a relationship, you give and you take.
Ned: In my past relationships I held the fifty-fifty mindset. I have a whole different scenario that I’m going to introduce later, and it may come as a surprise to a lot of people. We’re going to discuss some interesting concepts that are not so traditional.
Seamus: Right. Why don’t we communicate these secret desires? When you talk about working extra hard, and that you’re expecting dinner, you’re expecting these things from your spouse—where do you think that comes from? When you were saying that stuff to me, I was thinking that that must have been a routine that you were familiar with when you were younger or something, and that became something you’d come to expect while you’re growing up. Maybe that’s the way things were in the household. Is that true, or is it something else?
Ned: Yes, I think it’s a combination of a few things. It’s a combination of our past and the dynamics we set up in our relationships. Often the mind is most happy when it’s recreating the same scenario day in, day out, because the mind has the same thoughts day in, day out. There’s a certain comfortability to the ego when we recreate old scenarios.
If our parents did something a certain way, we may do it the same way. Again, that’s where I think it’s important to back up from your life and peek in, and say, “Is this serving me or is it loving? Is this what I really want?”
Seamus: Another thing that comes to mind is the need to be understood. That’s a sign of appreciation I think that people like the thought that someone else knows how to respond to them without having to be reminded.
Ned: Yes, we want our partners to know how to respond and take care of us sometimes without communicating that. Again, that’s what forms the basis of a what I call a secret desire: wanting somebody to do something without being asked.
Seamus: You sum up the chapter where you’re talking about how your peace does not come from your desires, but instead comes from surrendering them. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Ned: By surrendering the mind, you open a space for peace to arise in. If our peace resides behind a closed door, surrender is the motion of turning the knob that opens the door. If we don’t surrender the mind, we can become trapped in it. Desires don’t come from the heart. That’s a fallacy I’ve discovered. My heart doesn’t want anything.
Want is from the mind, whereas my heart knows. It simply knows. That’s the difference between a desire and a knowingness. How do we learn what the heart knows? We do it by surrendering the mind and the desire to mindlessly keep talking in our head. The mind is going to constantly want for things. For example, when I used to be trapped in my mind, a simple lineup in the grocery store could be painful for me. My mind had many temper tantrums when my desires were very out of balance. What I’ve come to understand about the mind is that it always wants something different than what’s happening now. You could be having the time of your life, and your mind can creep in and say, “This would be better if…”
I once knew a person who, no matter what was happening in their life, would say, “Well, it could be better if...” If they bought a little gadget they’d say, “It’s too bad they didn’t put this button over here.” It was almost comical when I caught on to what was happening. This person felt that they needed to micromanage and control everything.
Seamus: When you say the word surrender, it sounds like giving up. How is it different from that? Because if people are hearing “surrendering your desires,” does that mean giving up on them? Is it okay to have some desires, or are desires all bad? Are there some good ones? Where is there a healthy balance of good desires versus bad ones?
Ned: The only part of us that needs our desires is our ego. A healthy desire? I don’t know. I think it’s either I will, or I won’t, or I need to, or I don’t. A purposeful endeavour is something that you will do, and it’s just going to happen.
It’s a matter of learning how to look at what the mind wants, because the soul doesn’t want: it wants for nothing. It doesn’t mean that I think that we should sit around and do nothing, but I think what’s more important is to plunge yourself into things that are purposeful. Life is more enjoyable when we are flexible and allow life to reveal the subtle nuances of how it’s going to unfold.
We can’t control how life is going to unfold. We try to, and that’s where our desires create a lot of our problems. From my perspective, desire is born from the mind, and it’s the mind seeking peace. Our peace cannot be experienced in the mind, for it’s not a conceptual idea that’s contained in your mind. Peace is a pervasive experience that delivers us into the nature of our soul. It’s the result of the direct contact we have with our soul. Our connection with the divine grows when we have contact we have with our soul.
Here is a quote about desire that I pulled out of my book.
“Desire invites the mind into the past and future because it is never content with the moment at hand. Your desires will place burdens on your life and your friendships. When you are desireless, you remove some of the needs you may place on others. It makes for more harmonious relationships when your friends, family, and acquaintances don’t feel required to keep up with your expectations.”