Miki Kashtan

I want to encourage people to read Miki Kashtan’s piece in the current issue of Tikkun, and then if you can to come to our February 15 daylong conference “Support Obama to be Obama!” in San Francisco where she — among several outstanding others — will be one of the presenters.

I woke up this morning thinking of Miki’s piece “Wanting Fully Without Attachment,” and an old credit card slogan wafted into my head, which promised us that “It Takes the Waiting out of Wanting.”

If the entire downside of consumerism and Wall Street greed and irresponsibility could be captured in a phrase it might as well be that one. It was used by Access (now part of MasterCard) way back in the 1970s (in the UK, I’m not sure about the States) when the banks were first trying to put credit cards — which until then had been a convenience of the wealthy — into every wallet and purse. Teaching us to want more is critical to the whole modern economy, but supplying credit so we can have it now and pay later has been the seductive titillation.

Hard on its heels a counterphrase — “It Takes the “Must Have” out of Wanting” — appeared in my mind to describe Miki’s approach. I added the “how to” in the heading above because Miki combines a theory with a psychological method. We need “how to” guides that actually work for us day by day.

Googling the Access slogan brings up various delicious riffs on it, from the music CD “Looting Takes the Waiting out of Wanting” to British journalist Libby Purves in the London Times in 2008 calling it the “brilliantly corrupting slogan” behind thirty years of “carnival excess” by the banks that led to the financial crisis, to a site promoting non-commercial Christmas that calls the pre-Christmas period of Advent the practice that “puts the waiting back into wanting.” As they say there, “Greed cannot wait, so to learn to wait is a simple antidote to greed.”

If there really was a simple antidote to greed, then our job and Obama’s — assuming he does want a caring society, as I believe he does — would be rather easier.

It’s easier to say we must wait, than to tell us how to do it. Advent, and also Lent (about which Libby Purves was writing) are traditional Christian approaches and similar periods, like Ramadan or a weekly Shabbat, in other religions approach the question by giving us structured time-outs from normal consumption. In tightknit communities the communal pressure works to help us live by these disciplines. But in our pluralist, individualist society it comes down to individual choice even to join such a community.

I have nothing against Lent, Ramadan or Shabbat… for other people. I have never found them or their like appealing myself. But even for those who revel in them, there’s the question of how to be during the rest of the year or the week.

Weight loss is for many of us (certainly for me as someone who just loves to eat) one of the places where we have to learn how to deal with desires of our own that seem to inexorably lead to bad consequences. Most of us know by now that the way to lose weight is not to go on crash diets and then go back to our previously normal eating. Crash diets or various kinds of fasting definitely help some people. But then we all have to develop healthy eating habits that we can keep up permanently, which gradually move us to a healthy body and keep us there. And a key to that is for the food and the eating to be a pleasure, or to have a great deal of pleasure in it. Small and very tasty meals are key, plus the curious fact that tastebuds can often be retrained (I used to hate tea without sugar and now hate tea with it). But there’s something else too, an ability to have a different relationship to our hunger — an ability to stand away from it and look at it, and say, ah yes, I’m hungry, and there are probably excellent reasons for that, and what is it telling me about what to do next? I have found that not having food in the office means that often it’s halfway to the coffeeshop on the corner that sells brownies and currant scones that this voice kicks in and I find it more possible to choose to be OK with both my hunger and with not eating the brownie, or with going two blocks the other way to buy an apple instead (or else getting the brownie and enjoying it without guilt).

But what’s a daily discipline to “wanting” that can cover the whole spectrum from food to money to status to power…? An approach that brings more joy than martyred sense of sacrifice or loss, or of self-disgust? An approach that helps us stop either forcing ourselves to hate our desires or — the worst option — forcing others to provide what we want or getting it at their expense?

So many of the ascetic religious traditions seem, at least when they reach the likes of you and me (whatever they meant to the saints who got high on them), to involve repression of ourselves and our desires. We come to feel that our wanting itself is the problem, is bad in itself. The Christian culture down the centuries has been particularly burdened by self-disgust and a denigration of the body and its “filthy desires” (often diagnosed by male theologians as a particularly female problem) as opposed to the pure light of the spirit. I’m no expert on Hinduism but I did find persuasive Arthur Koestler’s assessment (in “The Yogi and the Commissar“) that much yogic discipline flows from body-hatred and romance with death.

My Buddhist friends tell me my wariness of Buddhism is due to my misunderstanding its central teachings about desire and suffering. But I still find it hard to get their point. It still seems to me that desire — “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is the very center of life, the driver of evolution itself, a glory not a problem — and that Buddhism somehow sees desire itself as a, or the, problem. Buddhist friends tell me it’s not the desire but the attachment that’s the problem, and that the way through is by major disciplines of meditation.

I’m probably just a slow learner — well I know I am. But maybe also I need a different way of learning. As soon as I read Miki’s article, I thought, this either puts right what’s wrong with Buddhism, or else it explains to me in psychological terms that I can understand what it’s been trying to tell me all along. It helps me that she’s not tying it to a religious tradition. Anyone can get this, whatever their religious belief.

I won’t try to summarize Miki’s article. But hopefully this has been enough to get a few people to read it.

Miki Kashtan is a co-founder of BayNVC, which is becoming increasingly well known beyond the San Francisco Bay Area (to which its name refers) as a promoter and developer of the NonViolent Communications practice and theory founded by Marshall Rosenberg. She is occasionally blogging with us.