One of my favorite stories comes from the Sufi tradition of
mystical Islam. It is a tale that tells us exactly what we will
have to face if we endeavor to walk the path of desire. A man sits
in the center of a Middle Eastern marketplace crying his eyes out,
a platter of peppers spilled out on the ground before him. Steadily
and methodically, he reaches for pepper after pepper, popping them
into his mouth and chewing deliberately, at the same time wailing
uncontrollably.
"What's wrong, Nasruddin?" his friends wonder, gathering around
the extraordinary sight. "What's the matter with you?"
Tears stream down Nasruddin's face as he sputters an answer.
"I'm looking for a sweet one," he gasps.
It is one of Nasruddin's most endearing qualities that he speaks
out of both sides of his mouth. Like desire itself, teaching
stories about Nasruddin always have two aspects. Nasruddin is a
fool, but he is also a wise man. There is an obvious meaning to his
actions, containing one kind of teaching, and a hidden meaning,
containing another. The first meaning jumps out from the story
right away. It is the basic message of both Buddhism and Freudian
theory. Desire never learns; it never wakes up. Even when
eliciting nothing but suffering, it perseveres. Our indefatigable
pursuit of pleasure keeps us doing some awfully strange
things.
Certainly, Nasruddin is modeling our lives for us: Struggling
against the tide of disappointment, we continue to search for a
sweet one. As his friends must be wondering as they gaze at him
incredulously, would it not be better just to give up? In this
version of the story, Nasruddin is rendering a conventional
spiritual teaching. Our desires bind us to the wheel of
suffering. Even though we know that they bring us pain, we cannot
convince ourselves to relinquish our grip. As Freud liked
to say, there is an "unbridgeable gap" between desire and
satisfaction, a gap that is responsible for both our civilization
and our discontent.