30/10/2024
25 retreatants following me into the abyss of our perpetual longing The Buddhist Retreat Centre, Ixopo, South Africa "In the spirit of Camus (1975), we cry out to the universe but there is no reply. We are all and seemingly always, in a state of longing for something. This perpetual state of longing seems to define us. As a phrase often attributed to the German Romantics illustrates, “Tell me what you long for and I will tell you who you are”. We seem to be nothing but incomplete bundles of longing, longing for an impossible completion. There is no evidence that this “completion” has ever been found. It not only exists in religious fantasy, but in our everyday craving. In fact, philosophers like Peter Rollins (2020) suggest that the worst thing that can happen to us is to get what we want. Getting what we want only leads to “abject horror”, as we realise it doesn’t leave us with the sense of completion we had been fantasising about all along; it only reaffirms our sense of lack. We live in a world between who we are and who we would like to be; between what we have and what we would like to have. We essentially live in this gap, and we live in a world that promises that you can get rid of that “gap”. The “sacred and secular” promise that you can be who you want to be and get what you want to get. He describes achieving your dreams as an “abject horror” because we then realise that the “gap” is never filled through the fulfilment of your dreams. Mark Epstein (2006) would propose that the only option available to us is to fully enter into our own longing: love is not some sense of completion we reach; the longing for love is the experience of “love”itself. In our anxious relationship to our own existence, Epstein considers desire as the other side of anxiety. Love and desire flow from our ceaseless longing." An extract from my book On Being No-Thing-Ness.
Join our next retreat Emoyeni Retreat Centre 8-10 November 2024
