“Moods dictate my behavior,” wrote Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Belief.
“If something makes me feel good, I want to have it; if it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state of conflict: emotionally pulled one way and pushed the other. Yet underpinning both attraction and aversion is craving: the childish and utopian search for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and have repelled everything I dislike. Deep down I insist that a permanent, separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence.
“And I invest my icons of craving with absolute finality. Be they sex, fame or wealth, they shine before me with an intoxicating allure unsullied by the ambiguities of lived experience.
“I do not consider their implications. Diapers and tantrums figure as little in my fantasies of sexual conquest as do journalists and taxes in my daydreams of fame and wealth.”
“Instead of solving my problems, this new situation replaces them with others I had never suspected. Yet rather than accepting this as the nature of living in an unreliable world, rather than learning to be content with success and joy and not to be overwhelmed by failure and pain, rather than appreciating life’s poignant, tragic and sad beauty, I grit my teeth and struggle on in thrall to that quiet, seductive voice that whispers “If only…”
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