All around me today, it feels that many people find themselves immersed in craving. Much our consumer culture rests on a foundation of creating an urge to immediately purchase something or engage in an activity, encouraging impatience and baking craving into our culture. At the same time, many people are ambivalent about the impact of craving on our lives, and fear that that excessive desire will transition to dysfunction and addiction. Even so, many of us feel resigned, and do not see a path to calming our cravings.
While I have never personally struggled with an addiction, I’ve certainly felt intense desires, and found my life unsettled by the fever of craving. Perhaps the first time I noticed this was in high school, back in the 1990s. At that time, access to the internet was rare, but I attended a public residential school focused on science and math, and we had excellent internet access in our computer labs.
At some point, maybe in my junior year, a friend introduced me to a simple online text-based game (a multi-user dungeon, or MUD) based on the Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. While it lacked the polish of modern video games, I found myself consumed by this fantasy world as I became more invested in my character, and enmeshed in the relatively small online community. Slowly, I became more and more preoccupied with the game, spending much of my time outside of class in the computer lab, and eventually entire days on weekends.
At some point, people around me recognized that I had fallen into an unhealthy rut. They staged an impromptu quasi-intervention, and I found myself physically carried out of the computer lab. I remember being very angry, mostly out of embarrassment, but that moment did bring into focus how dysfunctional my relationship to this game had become. I could see that my life felt off balance, but for a time I still struggled to make a change and disengage from the game. In the end, I gave it up entirely, as I found that it was too difficult for me to continue to play without being pulled into preoccupation and obsession.
Since high school, similar things have happened with a few other games. While still challenging, those periods were easier to deal with, in part because I had become more aware of my own susceptibility. Also, it helped that as I’ve grown older, I quite honestly feel that I don’t want to spend hours of my limited time playing these kinds of games.
As for other kinds of addictions, I have never experienced truly intense challenges, for which I am thankful. Though I enjoy the occasional drink, I’ve been fortunate to never experience a strong draw towards alcohol or drugs. I have experienced intense, usually transitory, desires in other areas, like cravings and urges around food or sex. Or less intense, and longer lasting cravings that can draw me in to binge an excessive number of episodes of a show, or eat most of the junk food in our house (or to waste money on lottery tickets).
While none of these areas ever became dysfunctional in my life, I do remember that in some of the more intense moments when I was younger, I wished for some way to silence these cravings. I wondered if there could be some kind of drug that could go in to my brain cut off craving at its roots.
This wish to be free of craving might be part of what helped me be open to Zen practice. I was very interested to encounter teachings that pointed to greed and craving as one of the key ingredients in our suffering, and offered a path to end craving. However, when I first encountered these teachings, I think that for a long time I struggled to really understand what a healthy life without craving looks like.
Reading respected texts in the Zen tradition, I came across advice to give up our worldly sentiments, including our preferences. Or in the advice to monks to even to give up their families, which called back to the image of Siddhartha Gautama leaving his home and his wife and child to pursue practice. It seemed that the path being recommended to truly cut off craving might include severing my affections to other people, which did not feel like a healthy way to live. So, while I had some faith in the practice, I was also uncertain about what these teachings were really pointing to, or what it would mean for me to live that path today.
More recently, I was glad to come across the recent book, The Roots of Goodness, which I was reading for a discussion group. This text is a translation of Kosho Uchiyama’s commentary on Dogen’s Hachi Dainin Gaku (the eight qualities of a “great person,” or in Uchiyama’s words, a true adult) has been a real treasure for me as we explore what it means to carry practice into our whole life. The two first qualities – “having few desires,” and “knowing one has enough” – touch directly on craving, and Uchiyama’s commentary resonated deeply with me as I chew on what it means for me to live today with “few desires.”
It has also been helpful for me to look at these teachings through the lens of psychology and neuroscience. Research in these areas have explained the origins of liking (our actual experience of pleasure) and wanting (our desire to move toward that which we think we like) in a way that I think complements Zen practice.
Liking and disliking seem to be given in our lives, just as immediate and direct to us as our experience of color, or sound, or taste. But in themselves, there is nothing in the world that is inherently pleasant or unpleasant. The quality of pleasure or displeasure is fundamentally about how an event or stimulus is interpreted, or about its value to us. Pleasure and displeasure depend on specialized circuits in the brain, especially on deep structures such as the nucleus accumbens, and the ventral pallidum. Neuroscience studies suggest that these areas are critical to processes that have been called “core liking,” the basic step that the brain has to take in order to point to an experience as pleasant or unpleasant.
In these areas, the brain’s own opioids are key in signaling pleasure and displeasure. These natural opioid systems are the same ones that are exploited by drugs like oxycontin or fentanyl. In studies of rats, tiny injections of opiate drugs that manipulate directly into these systems can dramatically affect measures of liking (often measured using facial reactions).
Depending on where these drugs are placed in the brain, activating opioid receptors can dramatically increase liking facial reactions (lip smacking, and turning toward the taste) to a somewhat sweet compound, or dramatically decrease aversive facial reactions (gaping facial expressions, and turning away from the taste) to a bitter one.
Humans have similar opioid systems, and our own opioids are likely constantly tuning our responsiveness to any given sensation. This subtle tuning of our brain’s pleasure circuits is probably an important part of why the amount of enjoyment that we get from any particular experience (say a bite of chocolate) can depend on many factors, such as the needs of our body, the context we are in, and even our expectations about chocolate.
While this variability in how the brain responds to a reward may feel a bit capricious, or even unfair, it is an important part of how the brain orients us to focus on what is valuable. We generally experience something as pleasant if it is (or, if we believe that it is) helpful to continue our existence as an individual (such as food) or as a species (such as sex). Even our more abstract pleasures are fundamentally rooted in our well-being, as the pleasure that we take in learning about the world around us and in the company of others are critical to our species, and our ability to cooperate together with others. The ability to tune our liking and disliking allows us to shift our focus towards what is most valuable to us in the moment.
Desire, or wanting, is closely connected to our likes and dislikes, and the experience of desire can be colored by feelings of pleasure or displeasure. We can feel anticipation as a pleasure as we feel we are drawing close to something that we want. We can also feel desire as unpleasant, as we are impatient or feel obstructed from the object of our desire.
But, desire is a fundamentally a motivation, which propels us to move toward that which we want, and to move away from that which we do not want. Desire, or the experience of wanting, is born out of the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Or, where we imagine that we could be. Our brain’s opioids are likely important for the feelings of pleasure and displeasure that can come with desire. Other systems, such as the dopamine released in areas such as the striatum or nucleus accumbens, seem more important for wanting than for liking.
Infusions of drugs that trigger dopamine receptors directly into the brain do not seem to have a strong impact on liking or disliking in rats (as measured by facial reactions). Rather, these drugs have a powerful effect on wanting, and can increase food consumption dramatically. This is one of the reasons that drugs which act on dopamine receptors, either directly (cocaine, methamphetamine) or indirectly (alcohol, nicotine) can be addictive: they can recruit the circuits in the brain that trigger our desire.
Craving can be seen as a very intense form of wanting, falling on the far end of a normal continuum of desire. If we are very much in need of food, then experiencing something like craving is very natural and normal, as we need to find sustenance to survive. More often, we may notice craving most clearly when we are drawn towards something that we don’t really need in order to live: playing a video game, placing a bet on a game, watching pornography, eating rich foods, and such. When I think about what it means to have few desires, or to know that I have enough, I am more concerned with these kinds of moments of feverish desire than with normal pangs of hunger.
What then is the path to calming unhealthy desire? Early in my practice, I did think that teachings around attachment and desire were pointing towards the elimination of liking and disliking, or even feelings in general. Technically, this would work to eliminate desire: if we don’t enjoy anything, or dislike anything, then we never need to seek out a different state. Generally, though, a total lack of pleasure or displeasure is not a settled, balanced position, but rather a symptom of psychological challenges, such as depression. The total extinction of liking and disliking can be a great hindrance in our ability to function skillfully in the world.
Without getting rid of pleasure, it can still be possible to work more skillfully with desires and to calm our cravings. Research on meditation, and especially mindfulness-based approaches, have shown promise in this area, and can reduce craving for individuals dealing with substance use. Some of the impacts of mindfulness on cravings seem to come from shifting how people experience rewards. One important practice comes from encouraging people to more directly attend to and savor everyday positive experiences. By opening up to noticing the pleasant aspects of ordinary experience, one can find that there is an opportunity to experience pleasure even in the moments that we often pass over.
And, by also becoming more open to noticing one’s actual experience when using a substance, one may have a direct insight that many of the effects of a drug are actually unpleasant, or fall short of one’s expectations. This combination of cultivating positive emotions for natural rewards and reshaping how drug rewards are perceived can shift how the brain responds to natural and drug rewards. And this process appears to be important in decreasing drug cravings in people struggling with opioid addiction.
The body of research in this area has been very helpful in identifying some of the important mechanisms for how meditation can be supportive in calming intense cravings. This kind of knowledge is interesting even to people who are not dealing with the challenges of addiction. And, this work can be helpful in our practice, by giving us a better sense of what the specific impacts of practice may be.
But I think that the deeper point for our practice is that having few desires goes hand in hand with knowing what is truly valuable.
Liking and disliking are grounded at their roots in that which supports life (our individual lives, and that of our species). So, it makes sense that cultivating pleasure for everyday, natural rewards over drugs is a healthy shift. We should not stop there, though, and we should continue to explore what is truly valuable in life. This is especially important when it seems so easy to be captured by the pursuit of money, influence, recognition and the lot. Each may be useful, but at their heart, they are not valuable in themselves.
As Uchiyama points out later in his commentary on Hachi Dainin Gaku, it is our very life that is most valuable:
“… my life is what is most important – this must be our most fundamental value. This value is not something given to us by society. The living force that flows through me is a value this is more important than anything else. The living force that I am speaking of is of one life that is inclusive of all the dharmas, all the dharmas are identical with one life.”
Uchiyama, The Roots of Goodness, p. 201
I’ve come to appreciate the importance of this point, and believe that it is one that is worth exploring closely and carefully. And, while I can’t express the subtleties of Uchiyama’s point here (or probably at all!), I do want to mention how much I trust very deeply in the point that life itself is most valuable. Not our individual, or personal life. And also not life in the abstract (some intellectual appreciation). From our position as living beings, what could be more valuable than life itself?
If we step out from the position of life, and consider that of the Earth, or our solar system, or the universe, there we find that nothing is valuable, and so is nothing good or bad. Good and bad depend on having something that you value, and value itself depends on the ability to have some kind of goal or preference. From the position of a rock, there are no preferences, and nothing has value. A rock sits with an indifference that is fully outside of the understanding of a living being.
As living beings, we do not find ourselves sitting in the position of a rock, and from our position, there is good and bad. And what is good, what is most valuable, is life itself. Life has an aim, toward continuing life. Not just the life of one individual, or one organism, or one cell. Life as an individual makes no sense at all, as each living being only exists in a set of relationships with other living beings.
We will sometimes talk about the “web of life” as if it were something abstract, or separate from us personally. But the connections between living beings are deep and connect every living thing on our planet. Take any single living being and place them on Mars, and they cannot survive. If life were to ever to truly flourish on Mars someday, it will not be as an individual, but as a community, working together to support life.
Life itself is most valuable to life, and we can truly be at peace if we understand this point. Not an understanding that is just in our thoughts or beliefs, but in our bodies and in our flesh and in our bones. If we truly appreciate living – not as an idea, but as this direct moment – then likes and dislikes will still be with us, but perhaps shifted a bit. If each moment of living is truly valuable, then the so-called ordinary moments may not feel as drab or mundane. Even unpleasant moments can be held a bit more kindly, with the appreciation that these are moments of life are precious.
Knowing that life is most valuable invites us to appreciate where we are. Craving evaporates in a moment that is truly savored. At the same time, this is not a path of complacency or stagnation. To truly value life is to treasure it, to take delight in living, and in the same moment to see clearly the need to care for life. To aim our efforts towards continue to allow life (our own, our communities, our world) to flourish in a healthy way. As we move toward what we value – supporting life – we will find desires still come and go, but perhaps with somewhat softer urgency, and we may find that cravings lose their heat.