Since reading Steven Levitt's "Freakonomics", I've been reflecting on the idea of an economy of human behaviour, a science of motivation, why it is that people do what they do. Self-observation reveals two consistent driving forces behind my own actions: the pursuit of physical pleasure/comfort and the craving for psychological gratification. Although these broad categories cover any number of permutations and contradictions, I can't think of any motivating factor which could not be categorised under one or the other heading. And at the same time, I can't help feeling there's something rather humiliating about this "Binsenweisheit". It's as though, despite my unceasing efforts at contriving to find myself "interesting", "clever", "creative", "original" etc., I am blindly driven by automatic desires in a manner not dissimilar to a clockwork mouse. And the worst of it is that, almost by definition, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". Gratification is, at best, momentary and straightway I am off in pursuit of the next "experience" that will make my life complete. Our lives are constantly projected into a notional ideal future, a state of affairs which effectively chains us to the treadmill of time. I am reminded of an old Captain Beefheart song, I forget the title and the album, but it goes more or less:

There ain't no time to stop in,
There ain't no time to stop in,
And there ain't no Santa Claus on the evening stage.

Buddhism urges us to free ourselves of desire - a seemingly impossible task; the driving force of desire is at the core of human existence. The only possible clue to unravelling this conundrum lies, it seems to me, in a new understanding of the nature of time. As Maurice Nicoll argues in his "Living Time" (see earlier postings), our usual, linear sense of time is only one dimension of time; in a higher dimension all time is reconciled in the eternal Now. It seems that it is given to man, in potentiality at least, to live in these two dimensions of time simultaneously; that this is, in fact, man's proper purpose, demanding a special effort to free his consciousness from the promptings of his automatic desires and his fantasy of himself. I leave you with a few lines from Eliot's "Burnt Norton":

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and present are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial extasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.