I was again doing a 5 day fast. Already on day 4 and, as you can probably guess, super-duper hungry.  I walked by a burger joint and the smell wafting from the shop was soooooofrigginnndelicious. Desire, hunger, snapped-up in me in an instant.

Committed to the fast, I kept walking, thinking to myself how desire doesn’t really NEED to be addressed or satisfied, I could just let it pass. And as I let it pass, I started considering what this desire really is: My physical form, a nose, meets with a physical phenomenon, the burger and I smell. Then my consciousness sorta registers it as food. Then my memory recalls my love of burgers, my imagination comes up with some fantasy of what it will taste like/ be like to eat it and voila, I have desire. Desire made even sharper by the physical state of a body unfed for 4 days. Burger craving, just the output of the process of the aggregates. There is nothing special or meaningful about it at all. 

I thought back to my last fast, to countless fasts before, the moment I break fast with that first bite of food…I have reflected before that actually, that break fast moment isn’t really the moment of delight. The delight comes as I near break fast, the anticipation. The fantasy about what I will eat, how it will taste and feel. Each time I actually eat though, I fill-up fast. It’s over before it starts, never quite as tasty as my fantasy. Only to be hungry again a few hours later. I have reflected before that fullness is fleeting, hunger, that is the basic state. In such a world satisfaction can’t be found.

Now though, as I consider the role of the aggregates in the arising of my hunger, my desire, to begin with, something else is abundantly clear: : That burger is not ever going to be capable of satisfying me because a burger just feeds me, it doesn’t extinguish the process by which desire pops-up in the first place. Hence why am I always hungry again a few hours later. Hence why, even as I eat the physical food, my aggregates continue to wander and weave stories of side dishes, and other burgers, and other restaurants, and future fasts and break fasts, a 1000 twisting and turning tails before I have finished chewing the first bite.

Obviously, to stop this process, it is easier said than done. But I suppose the first step is to see the dukkha of hunger. And then to kill the hope that the object of my hunger, my desire is going to satisfy me. And as I see the mechanics of hunger arising, I am also just a little starting to seeing the hopelessness of trying to quenching it with chasing, consuming, claiming, holding.