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Ayella, the writer
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OPINION
There is a social performance most of us have absorbed so thoroughly that we no longer recognise it as a performance. It goes roughly like this: the person who wakes at dawn to meditate, who fasts, who reads sacred texts, who speaks of enlightenment and union with the divine — this person is engaged in something elevated. The person who wakes at dawn to trade, who negotiates hard, who reads market reports, who speaks of profit and accumulation — this person is engaged in something base. One is pursuing the higher things. The other is mired in the lower ones.
This hierarchy is so widely accepted that questioning it can feel almost transgressive. Yet it does not survive examination.
The monk who renounces the world wants something. The desire for enlightenment is still a desire. The longing for oneness with the universe is still a longing. The pursuit of spiritual liberation is still a pursuit — structured, deliberate, organised around a goal the person has decided they want and does not yet have. The architecture of that wanting is identical to any other form of wanting. What differs is only the object. And the object, it turns out, tells us very little about the nature of the desire itself.
This is what the spiritual hierarchy obscures: the source of all human desire is the same regardless of its destination. Whether a person wants God or gold, peace or power, enlightenment or acclaim — the wanting originates in thought, is sustained by thought, and is pursued through thought. You cannot separate desire from thinking. The moment you want something — anything, however elevated — you begin to think. You plan, you imagine, you strategise, you evaluate your progress, you adjust your method. The merchant calculating his returns and the mystic contemplating his liberation are both, at the level of cognitive process, doing the same thing. Both are beings who want something they do not yet have and are using their minds to try to get it.
The distinction society draws between these two figures is not a distinction between higher and lower faculties. It is a distinction between socially approved and socially disapproved objects of desire. In certain traditions and communities, spiritual aspiration carries prestige. In others, material success does. What changes is the value system determining which desires are respectable. What does not change is the underlying mechanism. Human beings want things. They think in order to get them. The category we assign to what they want — spiritual, material, noble, base — is a layer of social meaning applied after the fact, not a property of the desire itself.
The person who claims superiority on the grounds that their desires are spiritual rather than material is making a curious argument. They are saying, essentially: my wanting is better than your wanting. But wanting is wanting. The feeling of insufficiency, of reaching toward something not yet possessed, of organising one's life around an outcome not yet achieved — this is the same feeling whether it is directed at a bank account or a state of grace. Dressing it in sacred language does not change its psychological structure.
There is also a particular irony in the spiritual claim to superiority, because most serious spiritual traditions are themselves deeply suspicious of exactly this kind of ego investment. The Zen tradition warns against attachment to the idea of enlightenment. The Christian mystics cautioned against spiritual pride — the sin of believing oneself holier than others — as one of the subtler and more dangerous forms of vanity. The Sufi poets wrote extensively about the self that pursues God while remaining fundamentally in love with its own reflection. The traditions themselves recognise the trap. It is their popular interpreters who so often fall into it.
None of this is an argument for or against any particular way of living. A life oriented around contemplation can be profound. A life oriented around commerce can be equally so. The point is not that spiritual aspiration is worthless. The point is that its worth cannot be established by contrasting it with material aspiration and declaring itself the winner. That move is not humility. It is hierarchy in disguise.
The monk and the merchant both want something. Both are thinking beings using the only instrument available to them — the mind — in pursuit of it. What separates them is not the purity of their desire but the story each tells about why their particular wanting is the respectable kind.
Strip away that story, and what remains is simply two human beings, reaching.
