All of our human instinctive abilities are counted as the five desires. This is called the cycle of life or karma. Whether you are aware of it or not, it goes on and on. We can say that these are our natural needs, they are not bad things. Simply when we gaze at our own condition of life, we have to claim them. We have these things: to eat, to meet, to be known, to sense, and to sleep.
To eat means to take in physically and spiritually, to make other beings your system and energy. This eating maintains our life so you look back and use differences of yesterday and today; also your awareness of space in time, space to move in, and desire of material possessions. You cannot live in the sky, in empty air, so settling on the ground. You have to have certain places to be.
Desire for the maintenance of life appears, the desire for generation. This is the basic point where man and woman come together. When time is ready, it is successful to have right generation.
To meet is the same as kāma. For man, in meeting with woman you form yourself. If you are female, in meeting with male.
To be known--usually you say to be famous--but this is more to be understood, to be known by others exactly how you are, not to be alone. This is awareness of friendship and family and little community; the organic system of life. You have to know someone and be known by someone.
We have the human body so we have to sense; to see forms, shapes, feel the earth, outside world. By listening also you understand where it is, how it
is. That means where you are, how you are. Our human nose is not working so good, very dull. But intuitive smelling we have, we feel the vibration. What color you choose, it is not the sense of eyes, it is more smelling, tasting. This taste is not just of food but all involvement of language; speaking, listening, music and silence.
To sleep, to rest; the one who is tired, exhausted, has really safe feeling when he finds a still place, quiet and dark in order to rest.
Another element is the five āvaranas or coverings which cover your pure existence. They are greed, anger, heavy mind, excited butterfly mind, and doubt.
Doubt causes you to seek great knowledge but causes your isolation from other beings. The origin of this doubt is not lack of faith, but the effort of ignoring things.
In zazen these coverings fall apart and drop off from you. They are not so difficult. When we find out, we are embarrassed. "Oh, that's simple, I was caught in those traps." But ignorance is a really deep thing which stands beneath them all.
How to conquer ignorance, how to know how ignorant we are is the most basic point whether you are satisfied with your existence or not. The root of ignorance is very deep. By putting hand in the mind we cannot reach to it; it goes to the past, many lives away. It is a little frightening thing to feel how deep our ignorance is. By intellectual understanding, very comparative way of thinking, you cannot reach to this ignorance because it relates with the historical advance of human kind; so it is more than a personal problem. One individual life contains the whole history so you begin to feel, "I live the present progress of this history".
Ignorance and the āvaranas work together in the development of our desires. When we are not aware they develop very rapidly and they grow in strange ways so that they restrain our life. We fill the refrigerator with so many foods, we are pushing on the door to close it. By sleeping many hours we become tired.
Most of us know that endless development of desire doesn't give true peaceful satisfaction. In some degree all experience that this is endless and, already I am bored with it. So I begin to look, is there another way to satisfy me? This is the beginning, sprout, of religious mind, because the development of desire gives you a strong feeling of dying, uselessly dying. "I made this much effort, I got this much." Very sandy, tasteless life. You see death in the middle of life and feel something was missing in the very beginning.
Desire is also energy so how to form this energy to a completely different way is important. What is pushing, directing your desire? If ignorance, you go on and on endlessly. If something else, it goes very bright way. To conquer desire we must purely see our desire and purely let it go.
Old master Dogen Zenji said: Sitting meditation--"Shikan taza, is like dancing on the heads of devils". They cannot catch you because you go so freely, like the wind. This expresses how your action of zazen cuts through the many temptations of devils. Devils, evils are just a very negative way to express desires and their result.