The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Weak

Life is not simple.  There are many aspects of day to day living that confound us, where clear answers to the questions confronting us are not discernible, and may not even exist.  The world is full of contradictions.

For example, we are encouraged to resist the temptations of the flesh by our religious teachings.  In many western religious texts, our ‘natural’ urges are presented as diabolical ploys of the evil one. There seems always to be a dichotomy between the call of the spirit and the pull of the flesh.  Earthly pleasure is perceived to be of secondary importance and at best a distraction for a seriously spiritual person.  Some pleasures are seen as outright sinful, while others are judged to be permissible as long as they do not dominate one’s life or thinking.  But higher commitments to the spiritual life seem to involve a negation of worldly pleasures and cravings.

In eastern religions, the concept of suffering brought on by worldly desires is central.  These desires are not necessarily viewed as evil in any moral sense, but they are the source of pain, discomfort, longing – all of the things that make life so difficult for many people – and are therefore to be mastered or eliminated.

For the non-religious, this dichotomy of flesh and spirit seems antiquated and puritanical.  And the repression of desire is perceived as a recipe for psychological disaster in the form of various neuroses and mental illness.  Worldly desires are understood as natural phenomenon that have evolved in humans and other animals for very good reasons.

All of us struggle with balancing our desires and our discipline.  Only the most decadent libertine will argue that every desire can be indulged without harmful consequence.  And only the most ascetic monastic will proclaim that all desire should be purged from life.

In this struggle to find a middle way between succumbing to all desire and imposing an iron rule over our natural impulses an interesting question arises.  Is there a path that is morally prescribed?  Is there a higher calling to tune our natural selves to be in harmony with a universal morality or ‘right way’?

Human sexuality is a good example of the challenges we face in life.  Clearly, sexual desire is a natural, biological urge.  Repression of this desire has been proven to be a harmful thing in most cases.  Yet it is also clear that unbridled sexual behavior can also be dangerous in many ways.  Is there a ‘morality’ that could guide our sexual behavior that does not vilify it but also does not encourage acts with negative consequences?  If we are doing things that have a significant probability of hurting ourselves or other people, then is this not the definition of an immoral act?

This kind of definition of morality is loose and does not lend itself to well-defined laws or codes, but it provides a basis for decision-making and it also avoids the often arbitrary nature of culturally or religiously prescribed moral statutes.

But it also acknowledges that there is a need for us to rein in our natural impulses to some degree, to apply discipline to those biological and natural urges.  Just because something is ‘natural’ doesn’t mean that it is necessarily ‘good’ or desirable.  We can celebrate nature and evolution for their profound beauty and complexity, but we are still sentient beings with the opportunity to temper and mold ourselves to create a more just and harmonious world.

A second example of the option for refinement and discipline over our natural impulses is our penchant for violence.  Earlier cultures celebrated warlike behavior and prowess and encouraged their development.  Conquest and even annihilation of other groups were greeted with rapturous enthusiasm. Our present sensibilities no longer find this type of full-throated embrace of war and conquest acceptable.  We couch our violence in terms of ‘defending the homeland’ or ‘spreading democracy’, but we still secretly admire and envy the courageous deeds of the special forces and the covert operators, or watch with fascination the brutal encounters between UFC and MMA fighters.

Is there a higher calling for us to evolve psychologically beyond this addiction to violence?  Aggressive, violent behavior is to some extent natural.  Nature is filled with stalking and killing; indeed, it depends on it.  Is our conflict and killing just another aspect of this natural world – a way to control population and weed out the weak and undesirable?  Or are we ‘called’ to leave all of this behind and forge a new path, however frustrating and ‘unnatural’?

There are no easy rules for living.  Some will choose to pursue a more ascetic path, eschewing pleasures of the flesh and finding their joy in the undiluted pursuit of spiritual connection.  Others will revel in hedonistic delights, riding the fine line of self-destruction or broken relationships.  Most will try to find a balance somewhere in the middle.  Morality, whether secular or religious, is an elusive concept that defies any sort of absolute interpretation.  We will continue to fumble in our efforts to define the best path, but perhaps our religious and materialistic perceptions are slowly converging to a unified sense of what a righteous and just life should be.