desire

The Loop

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I’ve been analyzing desires and obsessions lately as well as how we deal with them. I’m coming to the conclusion that some of the ways we deal with our obsessions end up fueling them. The poison isn’t the medicine, but the poison and medicine feed back into each other.

You think you’ve avoided negative thoughts by shifting to positive ones? Not necessarily.

I started coming to this conclusion two ways.

First, in my energy work, my own Quigong/Circulation methods (you know the ones I discuss carefully since such practices can backfire). Part of that practice is ensuring energies flow smoothly through the body, whether you consider these esoteric energies real or just a metaphor for awareness and relaxation. Such practices make you aware of how your body works, of when you are tense or loose, and how mind and body affection each other.

What I noticed was that, when dealing with stressful situations and ruminations, even when I turned to supposedly pleasant or virtuous thoughts, the tensions remained. In a few cases it would seem even if I’d directed my mind elsewhere, these supposedly more healthy thoughts made it worse. How could I get more tense despite having less negative thoughts?

In terms of Energy Work, it was like I’d have a loop of energy running around in my brain, powering negative thoughts – obsessions, fears, etc. But when I cultivated supposedly positive thoughts, it’d be just another loop. I’d play over something supposedly benevolent over and over, but I was still stuck in a loop.

(This is why, as I have noted, anatomical spiritual models are useful to rethink ourselves).

Secondly, as I noticed these tensions and such, I was analyzing the way my mind worked, supported by my breath meditation. Classic mind-on-breath/breath-on-mind meditations are important, as I’ve held forth on, but one useful side effect is awareness. Now I’m not saying you want to sit down to meditate with that as your goal (in fact, seeking is a barrier to meditation) but hey, enjoy the scenery on the trip

One thing I had noticed in meditation was how loops in my thoughts would work. It was easy to notice a bad habit, but also easy to try to replace it with a good habit. However, when you did that, you’d end up just leaping from habit to habit. Good or bad, obsessions are obsessions and habits can be for good or ill.

I also noticed that I could bounce between one or the other. Either way you got into a habit of looking to have a habit. Trying to get out of a negative obsession with a positive one was still an obsession. In a way you were creating a rut in your mind, and no matter what was in that rut, you would still be in a rut.

No matter the model I used it was pretty apparent – you can get into various negative psychological loops, and you could replace them with positive ones, but were still in a Loop. The two played off of each other.

That was quite a revelation as I had often found ways to cultivate positive habits and they were easy to use to replace negative ones. But the negative ones kept coming back. I had in short, worn a rut in my mind (or my energy channels) that was still there no matter what filled it.

Since that understanding, it’s helped me deal with emotional loops. I can recognize them and I have a metaphor (multiple metaphors) to understand them. I can cultivate habits to step out of the loops and just relax more in general. It’s also a reminder that it’s easy to think you have solved a problem, but are reinforcing part of it.

An emotional loop is a loop no matter how good it feels or what problem you think it solved. I’m also glad to everyone whose work and writing has helped me in meditative practices, they’re why I can see it.

–Xenofact

The Blind Hunger of Nothing

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As I write this in 2025, I’ve become fascinated by the amount of people in our culture that are Performative (capitalization intended). They want attention, internet clicks, regard, and engagement, so therefore do whatever gets them that. The Influencers, many a politician, no small amount of media personalities, and way too many social media addicts are Performative; some seem to be only Performative.

OK actually all of those kinds of people are Influencers. Anyway, let’s go on

A peculiar thing I keep noticing among these people for whom Performance is a lifestyle, is the only thing in their life, is an anger that burns inside them. It seethes beneath the surface, it bursts out in conflict far beyond something for attention. It’s seen in the glowering, contemptuous eyes and the edge in the voice that disregards most everyone if not everyone.

I’ve wondered as to the nature of this anger, as there are times it seems outright inhuman. The Performative people are all image, all anger, and in some cases seem barely human. There’s an emptiness there.

So, let’s talk desire.

Desire is the cause of suffering, a we are all too aware from our studies of psychology, Buddhism, Taoism, or just being alive and unhappy. Dealing with desire is a major part of mystical and not-so mystical practices.

Desire cannot truly be sated, it always comes back. It can be satisfied temporarily, perhaps enough for regret or enough to move on. One may recognize the temporary nature of the satisfaction and employ that awareness for wise choices. However many desires have at least the illusion of satisfaction, and in turn there’s some chance of definition.

We want to get laid. We want a drink. We want to get that promotion. Desire has at least some definition, even if we’re deceiving ourselves.

But for those who are Performative, I think satisfaction is elusive. You may engage in Performative behavior to make money or sell something, but the Performative nature can overtake your life. Some people just want the attention – or end up that way – and their entire lies are just about putting on the act to get the clicks, the praise, what have you.

The desire for attention is inherently unsatisfying. It’s temporary, it has to always been maintained, and it’s easily challenged. It also doesn’t relate to anything. You may become Performative to achieve some other goal, but your goal is to be someone else for people you don’t know to get ephemeral attention in order to get advertising dollars or something. You end up abstract from your goals – to achieve solid goals you must be epehmeral.

And that’s if there’s even much of a goal beyond a desire for attention.

I think the Very Performative people are so angry because there is nothing that can satisfy them even temporarily. The become only an act, without even the solidity of the illusion that they can feel satisfaction. They exist as pure performance, always on, always for the ephemera of attention, always empty.

Imagine walking around knowing you are nothing inside. Whatever was there rotted away as you worked on The Performance. You can’t even feel right. Even your anger is just a bitter resentment of everything because you’re nothing.

This insight is helping me understand the Very Performative, that look in their eyes, their instability, their sudden outbursts. They’re a giant yawning gap of desire with no chance of satisfaction because they’re empty of even something to desire. Their a ghost haunting the empty house of their own lives.

–Xenofact

It’s All Grasping

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Lately I’ve been contemplating several psychological phenomena I see in my meditations and self-analysis. The funny thing is the more I look at the different problems we face – and that we address with meditation, psychology, and spiritual pursuits, it all seems a whole lot alike. In a way that seems very familiar. It’s all grasping.

I have talked before of what I call The Escape Capsule, that place in our heads and minds where “we” hide. Where we run away from things. Where we think we’ll be safe, but we are not safe, and our “we” is ephemeral.

I’ve talked of the Place of Death from the Tao Te Ching, where we hide, where we cut ourselves off from life, and where we usually seal our fate by being so disconnected. We can’t move through the world and flow with it, we can’t respond, and we fail. I noted it was a lot like The Escape Capsule, if not the same.

In contemplating Desire, I’ve seen how I have habits of mentally grabbing or seeking certain things. I’ll latch onto something, some urge or thought, and my mind is engaged in everything from rumination to playing with mental puzzles. In fact, my mind seems to want to have something to grab onto – I imagine you’ve been there as well.

All three of these things I’ve analyzed over time- and named, are reflections of one simple thing – Grasping or Craving. You know, what Buddha warned us about explicitly in his Four Noble Truths, and what everyone else warned us about. Buddha though really brought it to the surface with his gift for specific organization, so game recognizes game.

Needing a separate self, needing to wall it off (in a way that ruins it), and just craving really are the same thing. We’ve got all these grabby complexes in our heads, burrowed into our habits and even our physical postures and tensions, that are active. They also end up backfiring and making us miserable if they solidify too much.

Desire and fear, hiding away and reaching out, it’s all the same, grasping. You can feel that in the tension in your neck, in the worry running around your brain, in the obsession that makes you stare at the cigarette or angry email in horror. You’re stuck in the machine, and the machine is what you thought you were – and thought you enjoyed it sometimes.

As we get reminded, craving, what makes us suffer, is the problem. But this is a reminder it has many faces. The desire that torments us, the cutting off we create, the attempts to escape – they’re all the same.

This is where I get thankful for the legion of sages, therapists, mystics, artists, writers, and so on that keep reminding us that being alive isn’t the same as grasping, or having, or running away from danger. It’s being alive, flowing like water, present, there. That’s what meditation and therapy and so on are about in the end – seeing, understanding, but most importantly being there and being real in the midst of it all.

It’s all been said before, but I’m glad people keep saying it.

– Xenofact