What is it that we all want? What is the central human desire, the longing found in all mens hearts? That is a question that we all ask ourselves at one point or another, what do I truly desire. Though there may be many obvious answers on the surface for many of us, the deeper we dig the more universal the answers become. 

We desire to be wealthy maybe, but what lies behind wealth. What lies behind the desires of fame, wealth, and love. What is it about having material and psychological status and prestige that excites us? Maybe it is the desire for pleasure, but pleasure is impossible to last forever, it is a very short lived sensation (like all sensations). Do we desire safety then? A life without want? But this desire for security is itself problematic, no matter how much safety we attain there is always a chance that something may go wrong. 

We desire security because man lives in the world of the past and the future. He does not live in the now. This desire for safety is destructive because it removes us from life. Life is not safe, it is not secure. It is fluid, changing, dynamic. Life flows like an untamed river, ebbing and swaying around and over the boundaries set to stop it.

So if the root desire of all man’s life is security and pleasure, two things that are each illogical and impossible, it explains why despite all the material gain we have amassed in the last century so many of us are still unhappy. 

By craving lasting safety and pleasure we have set ourselves apart from the flow of life. We feel removed and distant, our minds preoccupied with past mistakes and future dreams. We have no capacity to live in the moment. We are incapable of viewing the gorgeous mountain unless we have an assurance that it will still be there after we leave. We see our own lives blown away like ash after a fire, and as we see our own constructions, bodies, and families get lost in the winds of time we begin to feel scared. We see that we will too soon be blown away and join the dust of centuries past. This scares us so we decide to cling harder.

As we cling harder and harder our clutch on life grows slimmer and slimmer. We are stuck seeing our only chance of permanent happiness slip away. 

Now it is true that every human being needs a minimum assurance of food and shelter to live their life without overwhelming anxiety, but it seems more and more that even those with the means to assure their own lives and safety for countless lifetimes are still struck with angst and horrid anxiety.

It is by removing ourselves from the uncertain that we perpetuate our fears. We desire permanence in our pleasure and security. We desire to be separate from the flow of life, we desire to be a mountain instead of a river.

Due to this desire we seem to feel more and more cutoff from life. We feel more and more removed creating a larger and larger feeling of anxiety. This increase in our anxiety causes us to remove ourselves from the flow of life even further. Thus we perpetuate a cycle of suffering where the perceived way out is right back in.

The harder we grasp the harder we squeeze out the beauty that is in front of us. What are we to do about it?

What are we to do to escape this cycle of suffering? What can we do?

To desire to escape the wheel of desire is to perpetually move the wheel. We want security in a world where security is impossible. Then after hearing the security is impossible we desire to live securely by ridding ourselves of security. 

It is a trap. And the only way to exit the trap is to accept that we cannot exit it. It is our wanting to be safe that is the cause of our unsafe feeling. It is our desire for pleasure that causes us pain. Our wants to be safe and secure makes us feel unsafe and insecure.

This plays out in day to day life too. Aside from the larger existential issue we see this occur in our everyday wants and desires.

It is the desire to be skinny that makes us feel fat. It is our desire to be rich that makes us feel poor. Our desire to be loved makes us feel unloved.

So what are we to do about it? But when we ask that question we fall right back into the trap. There is no method that can remove the unsettling feeling at the root of our being. For the method is simply just another quest for safety and pleasure. 

You cannot shovel the dark out of a cave. The only way to get rid of the dark is to bring light. The asking for an answer to this problem shows we do not understand the question.