When I was going through the knowledge share of The Sovereign’s Way Greg Paul was talking about desires. I thought I had the desire to know myself but I soon figured out I didn’t really, I had the desire to think that I had the desire to know myself but I had a stronger desire to block this through my addictions. I was blocking it because I did not want to feel my fear and feelings of inadequacy. If knowing myself was gong to be fun and easy then I was all for it.
Now that I have been feeling those blocked feelings I have started to realize other desires that I have been blocking as well. I blocked these I think because I couldn’t access my feelings so I couldn’t release my desires because that would cause more feelings to come about.
One desire that came up was buying a motorcycle. It has a bigger desire attached to it, that being taking a road trip that follows the path that Robert Pirsig and his son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco in 1968. Robert Pirsig is the author of the books Zen and the Art Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. His writings have been a mainstay throughout my life and I learn things each time I reread them.
I need to become comfortable and safe riding a motorcycle before I can contemplate taking a long road trip. The bike I have may not be suitable for such a trip also so this is a long-term desire.
Another desire that has come up has to do with photography. I was looking through some older work and thought of how good it was. Almost always when first looking at work I have done it doesn’t appear as good as I thought it might. Some of it though, after a time of not looking at it, the quality shows through and I see it with fresh eyes.
This seeing has prompted me to start building a website for a lot of my photography. I had a website before but had abandoned it for one reason or another. I had done some teaching of photography and ended up teaching full time for two years. That collapsed quite quickly one September and after that experience I have not been as excited about photography. I don’t quite understand why. The experience with the students went quite well. The experience with the schools administration was very bad.
Anyway, I have started building a website and am excited to get my work out there again.
Thinking about and looking at photography recently has also brought a desire that I have never acted upon. I have always appreciated and respected what some photographers do in street photography. I did a small amount of street photography when I attended school in Kitchener Ontario and I spent some time in Toronto. I never felt comfortable and I was never sure my nature was cut out for street photography, however, I always thought it would be a good thing to practice for an extended time. For this to work I will need to be immersed in a street that has stuff going on. There is no such thing close to where I live, or it is of a very limited amount. To do this properly I would like to immerse myself in a city environment for whatever length of time I could arrange. This is another long-term desire but now that I have considered it I will see where the desire takes me.
The photograph depicted above of the woman running is my best street photograph from Toronto. The original is from slide film and this copy is from a flat bed scan. The scan quality is not great so the image quality is lacking and I need to get a better scan done at some time. However the essence of the photograph is clear and I could (and may at a further date) go into why I think this has many good qualities about it. This one photograph has maintained my belief that I am capable of doing something worthwhile on the street. The rest of the little street photography I have done is feeble by comparison.
To reiterate. I am beginning to feel desire that I have blocked for most of my life. I have been unblocked as a direct result of my listening to The Sovereign’s Way knowledge share. I do not understand the completeness of the knowledge share though each thing I do in relation to it adds another bit of understanding.
I sometimes feel frightened with what I am sharing in this blog. I have been so secretive in my life as if it was a sin to expose myself to anyone. So it goes.
I do not speak for ‘The Sovereign’s Way’; I am just sharing some of my experience that has come about because of TSW course and my relationship to it. https://thesovereignsway.com/law-for-mankind-options/?link=45555
Desire works like this. The mind creates the sense of separation and therefore differentiation (there is me and everything else). The unconscious motivation of everything we thus do is the desire to satisfy this mind-created separation/differentiation. But Humpty Dumpty and All the Kings Men can never-ever put Humpty back together again.
Desire is thus the fundamental driving force of everyone's motivations and actions. Even the desire to "go to heaven" and/or to be "saved" by believing in Jesus (and being goody-two-shoes good) when one dies.
The purpose of TV and advertising altogether is to stimulate ones never-satisfied desire.
Stuart Ewen wrote about this in his book Captain's of Consciousness.
Modern bright-shiny , ever-so-clean-and-sterile tightly controlled (keep the dirty-smelly-noisy- rif-raf out) shopping malls are the Temples/Cathedrals where supposedly much of the TV created desire is temporarily satisfied.
Thanks for your explanation Jonathan. Tim