The world we typically see is a world of mostly unexamined, needs-based personal imperatives struggling to preserve individual living systems. From a biological perspective this is a sane and necessary pursuit. From a psychological point of view it is madness. It forces us to live a lie. We are forced by the need to survive to live lives of seemingly separately existing individuals. Lives of quiet desperation. Lives in constant conflict with our true interdependent existence.
It is said that to free ourselves from this madness we should let go of the grasping and striving created by our desires. What isn’t usually understood is that to truly let go of all desires we must let go of the desire to live itself. The desire to live is the parent of all other needs and desires. We cannot be free of desires if we are not free of the root desire to survive.
A biological necessity for living systems is that they have some kind of mechanism whereby the system’s interior aspect (body) engages in the acquisition of vital substances from its exterior aspect (environment). A living system is not just its body. It necessarily includes the environment in which the body exists. The point here is that there are no independently existing living bodies. There are only interdependent living systems comprised of interacting interior and exterior aspects.
So can the internal aspect of a living system, such as human body, let go of its fundamental necessity to acquire substances from its external aspect (environment) and continue to exist as a living system. Obviously not.
If it is true that we must let go of desires to achieve psychological freedom we are doomed because this is impossible. Perhaps what is more possible is to understand the purpose of our human needs and the way they drive our thoughts and behaviours. This understanding would allow us to witness the survival drive in action giving us life-changing perspective on what it means to be a needs-driven biological entity.
Freedom then is not from needs or the desires arising from them but from blindly reacting to the urges they produce. With an understanding of the way survival needs operate we need not treat their urgings as sacred commandments. We have the freedom resulting from understanding with which to formulate a more situationally appropriate response than is possible in mindless, knee-jerk reactions. We can appreciate the survival role played by needs but we can also, in non-crisis situations, see their urgings as subjective suggestions rather than infallible imperatives.