Desire, Want & Need

Jared: Welcome to Delicate Fire. Today we'll be exploring the Aphorisms of Effective Choice by Forrest Landry. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Be sure to like and subscribe and follow along. Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Forrest, it's wonderful to be here, and I'm just so grateful to be with you in this inquiry. And I really loved the distinctions between wants, needs, and desires. It is a little foggy though in terms of what it means in my own life. And so I'd love to get a little more clarity on this. For example, I just came from a kickboxing class, a martial arts class, and I love it. I really truly love this practice. It has been incredible for me. Is— do I desire going to kickboxing? Do I want to go to kickboxing? What do I need in kickboxing? Help me out here. Make this more clear for me. I'd really love to hear this.

Forrest: Awesome. Great to be here with you and to start this with you. Yeah. The main idea behind how to distinguish between which is which is to imagine that you drew an envelope over yourself, like just outside of your skin, over your whole body, and to consider whether or not the origin and the resolution is happening within that envelope, outside of that envelope, or fundamentally at the boundary of the envelope and crossing it, basically.

So a need is going to arise from within that envelope, from within yourself, and it's going to be resolved in yourself. Whereas a want's going to come from outside of yourself and it's going to be resolved by going outside of yourself. Whereas a desire is going to be something that is in the relationship between yourself and the world, a relationship between self and others. So it's going to fundamentally originate kind of in between crossing the envelope and its resolution is also going to be in between right on the envelope or in the crossing essentially.

And another piece to sort of keep in mind aside from this distinction of like, where does it arise and where is it resolved is to just notice, for example, that while we can describe these concepts distinctly, their occurrence always involves all three aspects. It's just where is it primarily coming from and where is it primarily resolved? Wants, needs, and desires, although they may be distinguishable and in a certain sense identically distinct from one another, they do co-occur.

So when you're asking, hey, for my kickboxing thing, I notice that it's not always so easy to tell. Like, part of it is that there's a need being handled, i.e., you're growing, right? You're building muscles, you're learning coordination, and these are things that you can't purchase. It's like I can't go to a drugstore and just buy a pill that's all of a sudden gonna make my muscles stronger in that instant that I've taken the pill. No, I have to do the work. Moreover than that, anything like food that is integrated, your body has to do digestion, it has to turn it into tissues. All those things are happening at this microscopic scale deep within the body. And in this sense, originate from within your cells, from within your body, and they're resolved there. And so in a certain sense, the kickboxing is helping you to be physically healthier. So that's a need. And as you notice, it's not the case that you can only solve needs one way. It's not that kickboxing is the only way to get physical exercise, but it's a good one. So in this sense, as long as you don't injure yourself, I'd say, yeah, it sounds like a great thing.

Similarly, when we're looking at wants, we're basically thinking like, oh, there's an advertisement. Somebody basically said, oh, you should have this car because it'll give you this status and your community will have higher regard and more respect for you or something, or you'll get the girl. And in that case, there's kind of a want leading to desire sort of thing, because you desire the girl. The relationship is an interface kind of quality.

So in that sense, given that kickboxing can be a — as a martial art tends to be, like there's a sort of interactive component to it. Like when you're doing sparring with another person, it's a bit like a dance. And part of the nature of how we interact with one another is this sort of back and forth flow of communication. They see the moves you're making, you see the moves they're making, you respond with a move that's compensatory for what they're doing and vice versa. And so in this sense, that interactiveness fulfills a sort of fundamental desire to communicate. We are social beings and we desire social connection. And so in that sense, I would say that the social aspect, the interactive aspect, the sparring, the play of it, basically — we desire play basically.

And then when we're looking at things that we can purchase. So for instance, if you are paying for instruction or you're renting the space or where there's some sense of transactional exchange going on, well, that's fundamentally happening outside of your body, right? The currency is changed with other currency, but it doesn't — you never consume it. You never eat it. It's not something that you put in your head. The idea of money and the actual abstraction that is the social relationship is wholly outside of yourself. So you may want lessons or you may want to learn more techniques. In that case, the want is connected back to something that's transformation. So learning is a need, but the wanting of learn this rather than that, or from this person in this place rather than that person in that other place, that's the way in which we can see that it's actually a want that we're talking about.

So in this sense, there's a whole sort of spectrum of things that start outside and move inside or start inside and move outside or generally originate in the interface and kind of stay in the interface. And it's that orientation that allows us to make use of these concepts in a good way. Because if we notice, for example, that we're in some conversation with someone and there's a kind of sticking point, like there's a debate, it's really helpful to know, is the difficulty, is the conflict seeming to come from a want, a need, or a desire?

Because you'll notice that needs aren't really that negotiable. I mean, you kind of have them and you can solve them one way or another, but one way or another, they kind of need to be addressed. I mean, that's kind of associated with the word. And wants to some extent aren't so easy to negotiate either, because if that fancy car can only be purchased from that particular dealership, first of all, their advertising is really good to get you to want to do that. That's the whole point, right? They want to convince you to purchase from them. And so that's a want sort of thing. And obviously there's not a lot of negotiating room. You either negotiate with that particular auto dealership or you don't.

And so in this sense, conflicts can arise pretty easily around needs and wants. But when it comes to desire, we can actually do this extra thing. We can do this move, which is we can think about desire in an impersonal way. Rather than just a personal way. So I can think about desire as something that involves both of us rather than just myself. So I can talk about our desires rather than just my desires. And it's our capacity to move this into larger scales, even our family's desire, our community's desire, our world's desire, our nation's desire, whatever the ecosystem locally or whatever range of scale you want to play with. There's a kind of transformative capacity, there's a transformation capacity that's available when we are in right relationship to the notion of desire.

And in order to do that, we have to not be confused about whether we're coming from a place of need or coming from a place of want, which doesn't have that flexibility. So in this sense, really being clear about the difference between wants, needs, and desires can actually help us to navigate our conversations, to actually make it easier for us to resolve wants, needs, and desires, because the techniques we're using to resolve those are commensurate with the nature of the thing itself. And that's a big part of the reason why this is important.

Jared: Beautiful. So I'm hearing that in my kickboxing example, the need for physical movement and energy expenditure — that would be the need. I have a desire for play and the dance of the martial art, basically dance with people in that way. And the want is very specifically the gym that I go to. I want to go to this gym because I know it is close by and it is here and it's convenient and all of these other things.

Forrest: Is that close? Yeah, that's close. And moreover than that, it's your friends, right? It's like, I want to be playing with my friends rather than with some stranger, for example. So that sense of community is something you go outside of yourself to encounter. And that's a beautiful part of it. Or it might be that you go into nature and you experience a beautiful scene or a river or a valley or something like that. And all of these things are worthwhile.

Of course, we can be manipulated through our wants or needs and desires. So to some extent, noticing which is which and understanding that if it's coming from something external to yourself, you might want to check the intentions of the person that's suggesting, hey, you should have that want. And they'll try to convince you that it's a need or a desire in order to do the marketing thing. And so in effect, there's a sense of this clarity will essentially make it harder for other people to sway you pretending that you need that car or you need that particular person or you need that particular thing. And it's like, well, actually I don't. Thanks.

Jared: So what is — I almost have this sense, like, is it, if I'm orienting around wants, is that bad? Is it bad that I like am looking at something and saying, I want that? Or is there ever a situation in which it is good, good for me?

Forrest: Well, there's actually quite a bit of literature about this. So for instance, if you look at the Eastern traditions, Buddhism being like a sort of key example, there's this notion of non-attachment. And so when I go into the world and I start thinking about things in the world or associated with world, the first thing that is pretty apparent to everybody is that it's a world of form. It's a world of shapes, of symmetries and laws and all sorts of patterns of causal manifestation and so on. But as it's just inherent in the dynamic of that is just the reality of change. Everything changes.

And so if I become too attached to these forms and they change, then the likely thing is I'm gonna be unhappy about that because it's like, well, I liked it the way it was, or I'm dependent on receiving from the outside. And either because of that dependence of dependence on something external to myself, there's a kind of weakness or vulnerability to that. And moreover than that, it's gonna change anyways. So given that my attachment to the way it is is gonna basically be the result of time passing is gonna result in my no longer having that. There's a sense of loss that's associated with, well, I liked it the way it was and, or I had it then and I don't have it now. And so there's this sense that suffering results from that attachment to things in the world.

So I think that in some senses, we want to be very careful about that. Like if we don't track that, hey, all of this stuff that's going on in the world is kind of ephemeral. It's going to be changing. It's always going to be moving. And so as a result, I don't want to depend on things being a certain way. I don't want to have to rely on that because otherwise I will be suffering for basically needless reasons and of my own cause, bad choices, basically.

So there's a sense in which we can appreciate life. We can appreciate the beauty in the world. We can appreciate experiences of awe and we can discover, again, like, hey, that car is really fun. But it's a momentary experience and it passes. And after that, it becomes maybe a maintenance headache or just really expensive. And there's a sense in which the feelings that you are having as a result of these exterior experiences, you can appreciate them, but you don't want to get dependent on them. You don't want to get attached to them.

If you get to a place where you're dependent upon the feelings that you're getting from outside of yourself. And by the way, feelings can only be felt inside you, right? So in effect, it's kind of like the signal has to get to your nervous system and then pass through your nervous system in your brain. So in this sense, anything that you experience as sensation is actually something you're doing internal to yourself. And so in that particular sense, if you are therefore depending on something externally to maintain something a feeling internally, then effectively you're in a kind of addiction. You're basically trying to go into the outside world to have this experience over and over and over again, and you're using this tool to try to create that. But of course it always changes as things do.

And so there's this sense in which, yes, we can appreciate things out there, but we want to appreciate it as it is in the moment and not expect it to happen again. And not be attached to whether it happens that way again, and to really just be in the flow of the here and now in a kind of fully integrated way without necessarily trying to project into the future or to depend on the past or to compare to what it should be in the future or what it has been in the past. Anytime you move into the sort of shouldness of it, you're kind of forgetting the isness of what is, and that will create disconnection, will create separation, especially in conversations.

So in this sense, I would say just in general, it isn't that there's anything wrong or bad to have wants. It's just that you want to be pretty careful about how you hold them because it can lead to suffering if you're not careful.

Jared: Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. That really brings up more curiosity as well. Is it like a complement in the same way if I'm orienting around my needs? Is that also a failure point? And how would I be doing that if I was orienting around my needs?

Forrest: Yeah. I personally, again, I'm speaking kind of from my own sort of thinking and life and experience, it's not trying to be authoritative about any of this, but just to say, I noticed that if I'm only oriented around my needs, I'm kind of not actually really reaching into the sort of more creative dimensions of life. The notion of Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes up here. And so if I'm oriented around needs, it's probably going to be lower on that scale, right? Because at some point or another, and this is a big part of why all of this is important, is that you want to — after you've kind of addressed your basic needs, you want to kind of go higher up in that hierarchy of needs and to get to a point of self-actualization ideally.

But I think one of the things that has happened in sort of the Western philosophical mindset of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is that there's this notion that self-actualization is the end and that's all there is. And I would say really specifically, no, that's not the end. There's world actualization. There's a sense in which I go beyond my own personal creative process and I move into our creative process. We start to collaborate and to create something that is greater than ourselves. And to become part of creation that is greater than ourselves, the wellbeing and vitality and life of this world.

And so in this particular sense, if I'm just oriented around needs, I can't make this transition to the desire to co-create with fellow human beings and life itself to have more vitality and more experiences of awe and beauty and more breath and more conscientiousness and consciousness and all of the good things that come from the miraculousness of being born at all.

And so there's a sense in which we really need to move beyond just a need orientation, because if we get stuck as just doing that, then frankly, life is going to kind of suck. There's a sense in which you really want to be able to progress beyond just the satisfaction of your own needs.

And I think that in a real sense, as a kind of human being, as a sort of apex species or whatever, there's a sense in which we need to provide for more than ourselves. I'm interested in how do I give back? Like, what are the ways in which we can provide for one another? How do we help and support one another? And all of these things go beyond the self. And so if I'm not skillful in terms of how I live to basically produce a surplus of value, right, go beyond just meeting my own needs for food and shelter and so on, there's a sense in which I've kind of failed in life. I failed to experience life and I failed to beget life.

And so there's a sense in which I personally think that we can just as easily be trapped in the spiritual or transcendental notion of, well, I got my enlightenment and everyone else can fuck off. It's like there's a sense in which it really only matters to the extent that it becomes something that is shareable, something that is creating prosperity beyond my own self and ideally beyond just even my own family or beyond my own friends. It's like I want the community to become alive and I want the community to be in service to its regional ecosystem and that to be in service to the vitality of the planet. There's a sense in which unless we actually extend in these directions, we're kind of miss the joy of it, really.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I hear that. And I hear this, yeah, this desire to act from desire in this way. As you're speaking about this, it's like, it's more and more clear to me that the desire I have to play, to open to others, to enable the choice of others, it's just very clear. And I'm wondering, like, how would I know if I'm acting from a place of desire as opposed to maybe a place of want or need? Like, what are the qualities of the action from desire specifically? Like, what does it feel like to act from desire?

Forrest: Maybe there's a quality of clarity. I mean, so part of the reason I'm basically trying to distinguish between want, need, and desire in this way of drawing an envelope is to just make it as clear as possible, right? So that it's like, this is the orienting notion. And if I'm orienting from just a self-oriented perspective, or if I'm orienting from just an other-oriented perspective, there's gonna be an imbalance. And anywhere there's an imbalance, there's gonna be some sort of boundary between the inside and the outside. And that boundary is gonna be like the thing that creates a kind of division between inside and outside. And so in that sense, you're gonna feel a sense of limitation.

If you're just navigating the space of needs, you're kind of living in a constrained world. And if you're navigating everything from just the space of wants, you're also kind of living in a constrained world. It's like you can only really do a limited number of things within those two particular contexts. But if you're orienting from a place of genuine desire, and by that I mean, in the relationship between self and world or in the relationship between self and other, or, and I'm going to extend here and say in the relationship between self and spirit and this notion of soulfulness or this notion of divinity or divineness or God or whatever you want to do it. I'm, again, I want to be a little careful here, not try to imply that that's the only way to conceive of such a thing.

But basically there's a sense in which we have a noticeable difference when we think about the relationship with world as a kind of materiality and the relationship we have with other people as essentially agents or as consciousness or as peers. And similarly, there's a kind of difference in nature or difference in kind when I'm thinking of relationship with spirit or relationship with what I might call profound self. Like from the conscious into the unconscious and from the unconscious into something greater. And that something greater doesn't really have a clear way to be described because it doesn't have a thingness associated the same way I can point to a rock, for example, and say there's a thing. It doesn't have a shape or a pattern. It's got a quality and a kind of potential for agency, but it isn't really an agent per se.

So there's a sense in which I can talk about these three kinds of betweenness. And when I'm thinking about desires, when I'm looking at what are the nature of being in right relationship, being in clear relationship with world, with others or with essentially this deepest nature of the essence of one's own origin of self, origin of one's own consciousness, then in effect, there's a sense of not just clarity, but motion. There's a sense of flow and wholesomeness that comes with that. It feels holographic. It feels integrated. It feels connective.

And so when we're looking at, say, flow states, like you can study group process and you can talk about creative people and how they move into flow states. Moving rightly with desire is to enter into and to remain within a flow state. And that's a skill. I mean, it's not actually something that is very easy to do the same way. It's not necessarily easy to solve desires or to solve wants. Like if you want to be a CEO, you're going to have to work pretty hard and basically maybe sacrifice quite a few other things. And similarly, if your need requires some particular medical treatment, that's going to require some real skills on your part or someone else's to navigate that.

So there's a sense in which when we're looking at how do we navigate the spaces of desire without getting caught in, say, addiction patterns because we got confused as to where to resolve it or how to do so, or we got stuck in some sort of manipulative tactic because you met the local narcissist in town. I mean, there's a sense in which as you get more skillful in terms of how to navigate the fundamental nature of these concepts and how they're realized in self, when you begin to recognize that state of flow, for example, you say, oh, this is what it feels like to be in right relationship. This is what it feels like to be in right connection and how to have my desire become our desires and our desires become connected to the well-being of the world in some real sense.

That's the kind of skillfulness that ultimately we're striving for. And there's a sense in which the philosophy of this metaphysics, this way of thinking about relationship between life, the universe, and everything, so to speak, is essentially a way to help us to not only be in touch with those desires, but to be in touch with those desires with increasing clarity, with increasing mobility, with increasing skill, so that the flow states and the comfort and the dynamic of how we manifest and integrate with those desires starts to touch larger and larger dimensions of life. And this is a good thing.

So rather than trying to solve wants or needs primarily, I look at how do we get skillful with desire? Because if we do that, it tends to be the case that the wants and needs get resolved along the way. If I think about the relationship as being more basic than the things related, the interior and the exterior is essentially contingent on the quality and integrity of the relationship between them, right? The boundary. If all of these things are defined in terms of the flow from inside to outside perceptions and expressions, then in this specific sense, if we get that flow right, then interior flows and exterior flows become kind of a just natural thing that happens.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: And so, yeah, please go ahead.

Jared: Yeah. Can you tell me more about the flow itself? Like how does the flow go in this, in this way? It's beginning with desire.

Forrest: There's a sense in which as I'm trying to basically give you an answer to your question about what is the experience of orienting from a desire in a way that isn't going to lead to, say, the suffering of attachment? There's a kind — I'm describing a skill that is both desirable and worthwhile in the sense of how it manifests in desire and how it manifests wants and needs as a kind of side effect, how it produces a superabundance. And that skill is not something that I could just say to you. It's not something that is easy to convey, but I mean, the whole series of sessions that we're doing and setting up is essentially the first conveyances of the basic principles of that skill.

So this is really just an introduction to the answer to that question of how do I do it? What does it mean to be in right livelihood in this way? And so, yeah, we're going to explore that question increasingly with greater and greater depth, with greater and greater process in the entire series that we're working on. So that's just the best I can point to the direction of where you will be at some future point as a result of developing these skills.

Jared: Incredible. Well, I really look forward to learning this over the course of the series.

Forrest: Excellent. Well, this is a good start.

Jared: This was Delicate Fire. Thank you so much for joining us, where we explore the aphorisms of effective choice. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Please like and subscribe if you want to follow along. And I look forward to seeing you next week.