Ontology of Desire

(In this post, everything good came from people specified or from Avivah Zornberg. Everything else, including punctuation, comes from me.)

All things have Needs and Aversions.
Even the basic Carbon atom experiences the Need to share electrons in the outer shell with their Hydrogen compadres.

Certain things are averse from others, such as those which are repelled from water.
Conscious things convert some or all of their Needs to Desires and likewise Aversions to Fears.

DESIRE is Need transformed by consciousness. FEAR is Aversion transformed by consciousness. In a child, the Need for food changes over time until at the ages two or three the child begins to pick and choose which foods he wants to eat. Thus, the Need for food transforms into the Desire for ice cream.
Likewise, the Aversion to Being-Startled may transform into a Fear of loud noises which itself may have a subset called Fear of fireworks. Desire and Fear fill out the DETAILS of the SELF. This entity has needs and aversions.

Over time, these needs and aversions are detailed and become the desires and fears of the entity who now has a name and a sense of self. We define ourselves by our desires and fears: that which we want and that which we do not. Therefore, the self is defined by desires and fears.
Since we have previously said that Humility is the virtue by which we redefine the conscious being from being the center of all things, this means we must radically affect desires and fears. At this point, we remember the Lord Buddha speaking of Dharma:

 "Thus, desire, having a strong will to live as its basis, seeks that which it feels desirable, even if it is sometimes death. This is called the Truth of the Cause of Suffering. If these thirsts and illusions are traced to their source, they are found to be rooted in the intense desires of physical instincts." 

This brings to mind our statement that those who are not humble are sometimes so arrogant that they must be the center of everything, even the end of time.

At this point, we should recall that religious statements and statements of taste are not to be assigned truth values. There is, then, a similarity between them and religious statements might well indeed be called "matters of taste" if we mean that Taste implies Desire.

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