Death-drive: The drive that manifests in the psyche as a tendency toward self-destruction, or more precisely – the elimination of tension–which can also be turned outwards, whereby it becomes aggression. Pleasure is only known in the context of pain, and vice versa.
Desire is a relentless hunger. It eats us from the inside driving us to oscillate between the myriad parts of our personalities as we attempt to satiate the devil of ceaseless wanting. It takes many forms: sex, food, material, power. In its most noble form, desire links us to the creative vortex from which we have been birthed and leads us to peaks of human experience. Without desire, the universe could not flower, nor would our bodies ripen and surge with the sweet fires that consume us.
On the other hand, desire that is unbalanced by will can lead us to the suffering of obsession, self-destruction, and emptiness; we become prisoners of our own devices. Unrestrained desire then becomes a devil, a drive to alleviate the tension of being in a body that wants and wants without end, a brazen hastening towards death. Indeed, it is a delicate balance to burn yet not be consumed.
This paradox is central to man’s spiritual journey: to be rooted in the earth as an unbridled animal, as well as to surrender to the Divine image, the ultimate object of his lust. Each of us must learn for himself how to contain his own fire, and then to cultivate it, and to co-create the containers in which we are able to burn through our dead matter in prolific flames while bolstering our abilities to focus them towards the evolution of our psychic landscape: sex as a vehicle towards spiritual enlightenment.
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