Today’s flight plan reads:
If there is nothing you want – nothing has any power over you.
Physical desire keeps you alive. The other kind can make life more interesting or irksome. “Tell me sir: since ‘being-alive’ is most basically what-you-are, how can it somehow irritate you?” “Get away boy, your questions are killing sales.”
All that lives desires to live, and all who want – want to keep on wanting. Desire is to the body as want is to mind. Physical desires are the body’s needs; mental wants are what the mind imagines it wants, (imaginary wants are all that are necessary, since the only things available to the mind are imaginary). Kiddy pilots who want to fly to Olympus offer as incentive to cut back on satisfying their physical desires. If Zeus will allow them a fly over, they propose to give up rutabagas and the doggie position.
Physical desires have a minimal sub-flooring past which you cannot go and still operate a can opener or talk on the phone. There is no limit, however, to the deletions you can make to your want list, without it doing yourself any harm, or in fact, having any substantial effect on your list, (itself regenerates). Physical desires make you alert and intelligent. Mental wants make you drowsy and distracted, (okay stupid). “Do you realize that inside of everyone is another person?” “Yes, but do you realize this is not so until you hear it said?”
Consuming food satisfies the desire to eat. Dining on a particular dish or at a particular restaurant is the satisfying of a want. Eating food keeps you alive and eating certain foods under certain conditions makes life more interesting, for most. For either to flourish, the body’s gotta desire and the mind’s gotta want, but if you want more than your body and mind now provide, you gotta tinker with the wanting-machinery.
Only those with hidden head tumors, perceive reward in denying their body its desires, and no one in this man’s army ever asks permission to look into the nature of their mind’s wants.
“Captain, I am prepared to meet the challenge. I am ready to give up wearing my silk underwear, if Aphrodite will be mine, but what‘s this other crap about me looking into my mental drawers?”
J.