In descentism I imagine my existence as an oscillation between two states: my first state I characterize as sleep, and my second state I characterize as waking. In my first state I am undivided and at peace. However, when the illness of awakening recurs, I experience a sequence of desire that ebbs and flows with the awakening.
In my awakened state, I have two categories of desire: essential, and inessential. My essential desire is one: lasting peace (see My essential desire). I experience it most strongly as a desire to remain sleeping when I first begin to awaken, and at the end of my day when I am drawn back to sleep. Through familiarity I characterize waking up and falling asleep as two different events, but they are actually one extended event interrupted by my inessential desires.
My inessential desires are the full collection of needs, wants, and aspirations that begin upon waking after suppressing my essential desire, and end prior to the re-emergence of my essential desire that leads me back to sleep. They begin as physical and bodily “needs” and reach the heights of long-term aspirations. The aim of all my inessential desires is the same: relief. It is the same target of my essential desire, but differs in one important way: the peace of my essential desire is permanent, whereas the relief of my inessential desires is transitory.
My inessential desires are attached first to my values. When I am just waking, it is clear to me what is most valuable: the peace of sleep. In this way, my value and desire are fused. But unfortunately, my illness has progressed to a point where I no longer command the value I perceive, and so I eventually suppress my essential desire for lasting peace and replace it with my inessential desires for transitory relief from the illness of life.
To understand the nature of my existence I have to understand my inessential desires. When I had forgotten my essential desire for permanent and lasting peace, I always felt as if I was missing something. I was constantly searching for something. I was blind to my first and last desire, and looked outward, into my projected inner and outer environments for the things that would bring me lasting satisfaction. But they only ever delivered temporary relief at the most, and unbeknownst to me, created ever more painful entanglements.
My inessential desires are at the root of my sense of “time”. My aspirations create the change I perceive as ongoing movement and the sense of time unfolding. These fluid movements expand the size of my inner environment, creating the sense of a past. As an ascentist, I am lost in a maze of inessential desires.
The objective of inessential desires can only be relief; a fleeting, ephemeral period of satisfaction and comfort that allays the pain and suffering of my illness. Relief never lasts, and can never deliver what it is that I truly seek.
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