Desire for Spirit

Desire for spirit? Is there such a thing? It is easy to conceive of a desire for food or a desire for sex. Food and sex are so concrete. A substance. An act. “Spirit” is so nebulous. And even then, what would it mean to “desire” it?

Answers arrive when we glance around our culture, and notice patterns of dis-ease surrounding our mental or spiritual health that are remarkably similar to the patterns of dis-ease surrounding our relationships to food and physical intimacy. In all cases, large numbers of people are falling short of ideals that we as a culture seem to share, whether that ideal is physical fitness, life long passionate love, or, in this case, a sense of life as worth living. We are bored, depressed, overwhelmed, and wanting something more.

By all measures, the mental or spiritual health of people living in contemporary society is a concern. As a recent study by a professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School estimates, nearly half of all Americans will suffer a period of mental illness during the course of their lives. Depression, the leading cause of suicide, is at the top of the “Eight Most Common” list, and the ranks of those diagnosed with the disease are growing. Besides depression, the list includes social phobias, attention deficit disorders, and other disorders having to do with conduct, anxiety, oppositional-defiance, and intermittent explosive acts. (Notably, the list excludes substance abuse disorders; and major psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia and psychosis do not even rank.)

Many of these diseases are new—or at least, the names are new. There is disagreement over whether it is only our recognition of them as problems that is new. Even so, there is something troubling here: most citizens of the modern world, it seems, at some time in their lives, have a hard time fitting into the shapes of living that are expected of them.

And we are concerned. We are as riled about mental disorders as we are by expanding waistlines and declining rates of marriage. We want to be happy—we think that we should be happy—living well-adjusted and successful lives. Yet a feeling of lack persists. We lack the vitality or energy that keeps us going; we lack the sense of direction that gives us purpose and meaning; we lack a context within which our actions feel worthwhile.

What do we do?

Here again, the comparison with our desires for food and physical intimacy help to illuminate this desire for spirit. For most of our cultural responses fall far short of the mark as in the case of those desires as well. We have seen how we tend to respond to our sense of dissatisfaction with food and relationship by exercising mind-over-body strategies that perpetuate the problem. The same dynamic holds with our desire for spirit.

Just as we tend to misread “food” and “sex” as material, and feel justified in overriding our hunger and disappointment as we pursue pleasure; so we tend to think of “spirit” as a non-material, and again feel justified in prescribing for our bodies the ideals and practices—the movements they must make—to get the affirmation we seek.

We are likely to respond to our feelings of malaise by advocating more self control (and turning to the vast array of self-help literature), or by relying on medical or religious authorities to provide us with the drugs and therapies—the one true belief, the sure practice, the guaranteed set of operating principles—that will fill our sense of lack.

We may even convince ourselves that we will satisfy our desire for spirit by mastering our desires for food and sex.

From the perspective of bodily becoming however, we saw that mind over body approaches fail to provide us with what it is we really desire, for they overwhelm or numb or otherwise distract us from our sensations of dissatisfaction rather than guiding us to discern their wisdom. As it turns out, our desires for food and intimacy are not as concrete as they seem. It is not the substance or the act that guarantees pleasure.

So too with spirit. We so readily assume that our mental or spiritual health is distinct from our physical health; we are so willing to believe that what we lack in our lives dwells outside of our bodies. We take it for granted that the vitality, direction, and connection we desire will come to us from a higher power living over and against our sensory selves—whether that higher power is a spiritual entity or our own rational mind choosing to follow a prescription for psychotropic drugs. They don't.

Trained as we are to a mind-over-body sense of ourselves, we imagine that we will feel happy when we make the right choices in our lives about which paths and principles to follow, which traditions to uphold. When we can’t seem to choose the right way, we despair.

As I ponder these developments, a sense of danger lurks, familiar from discussions of our desires for food and sex. It is not so easy. If we, as individuals, pursue our desire for spirit by paving over our bodily sensations (including our desires for food and sex), we will lose any wisdom that our patterns of dissatisfaction are offering us. As one researcher warns: it is like treating kids for dysentery without cleaning up the dirty water they are drinking. The “cure” obscures the cause.

As the comparison with food and sex also suggests, our sensations of depression and anxiety—these bodily sensations of wanting more, of not having what we need to thrive—may be precisely what we need to guide us in making decisions about how to live our lives in ways that will satisfy our desire for spirit.

We want more. We want to unfold more, grow more, feel more, give more, be more. And that more has little to do with possessions or money or fame; or even with food and intimacy. Rather that more has to do with a sense that we are getting what we need to unfold who we are, and to give what we have to give.

From this perspective, any sense of dissatisfaction we have is guiding us to create the relationships that will provide us with what we need to unfold what we have to give.

Next week: How so?