We could never become consumers if we had no desire. It is poignant that despite maturity and judgement there remain visceral appetites within your heart that crave immediate satisfaction. Once awakened to a certain intensity, appetite races towards the object of desire. Your ability to discern or distance yourself from this drive becomes redundant. The adult returns almost to a child-like single-mindedness. In this sense, consumerist attitude is an obsessive and uncritical passion. It has a powerful and sophisticated ability to deconstruct all resistance. This new divinity is never abstract and does not insist on any major moral obedience. It touches our longing in a very concrete way. It ensures that it always targets the pocket as well as the heart. This is done with consummate skill so that we inevitably find ourselves magnetically attracted to the advertised icon, buy it, and bring it home. The advertisement is a tiny thought package inserted deftly into the mind; once it opens and expands, its control over us is immense. At a broader cultural level, it is astounding to watch it unravel the complex network of the folk world. Within a few years, this virus can penetrate to the very heart of an intricate way of life that had taken hundreds of years of history to construct. Before long, a distinctive and unique way of life is rifled, and the inhabitants exiled and drawn into the net of consumerist culture.
Desire is one of the key forces in the origin, evolution, and definition of identity. Blindly, but yet instinctively, desire brought you out of the invisible world, sowed you in the womb, and guided your way through a gallery of forms until you emerged as a baby. Instinctively, in the innocence of childhood, desire still directs your feelings and thoughts towards fulfilment. It leads you to explore new frontiers. When the innocence of childhood breaks and your consciousness becomes divided, your desire divides too. The belonging of childhood breaks; you feel confused and alone in a way you never were in childhood. New longings are surfacing, and you can find little sense of belonging. Part of your desire becomes focused on what you want to do with your life. This is the task of realizing your life’s dream. Your desire crystallizes in questions like: What do I want to do with my life? Where do I want to work? Whom do I want to marry or do I want to marry? This is a complex and difficult time.
Deep down you desire the freedom to live the life you would love. Yet life itself will rarely give you exactly what you desire and seldom offers it to you in the form you would long for. Consequently, you learn the art of compromise. You learn to do with what you have. Destiny often deals us unexpected cards. Perhaps you have your dream profession, live in a lovely area, and yet the person with whom you live has never managed to reach you. Often you look out at her/him from someplace deep within and sadly acknowledge that, despite the dignity and endurance of your daily affection and care for each other, she/he will never want to travel that landscape to meet you. Or it could be the case that you find that you cannot give love at all; this is a worse hell than not receiving love. In relationship, the initial passion often settles in such a manner that you instinctively agree to meet on a certain level; other regions are to remain undisturbed. Inevitably in life, we end up walking one path. This demands choice and selection; we harness and limit the call of desire. Yet to live with a sense of balance, creativity, and integrity so much depends on how and what we choose.
Though choice deepens and incarnates a way of life, your soul and imagination have an immensity and diversity that can neither be reduced to nor accommodated in your chosen path. If you neglect your own immensity, your life-path itself becomes repressive and unnatural. It cannot unfurl in its own natural rhythm. You have to push your way through; your life becomes over-deliberate. Every action and movement has to be forcibly chosen. You try to keep yourself together. You do not feel that you have taken a wrong path. No. This is the way life is. One cannot drift endlessly. Eventually some direction must be taken. That is all you have done. Yet you feel disproportionately disappointed; it is as if you have given up something that was unfairly demanded of you. Eventually it becomes easier. You have made the compromise that everyone seems to have to make at a certain point. You do not have to force yourself as you did at the beginning. Gradually something seems to close off within you and habit takes over so smoothly. Now it all happens automatically. You have achieved cohesion and stability in your life, but you have paid an awful price—the death of your longing and the loss of the future you long for.
