The Urge

Sometimes it strikes you. The urge. And, after acting on it, suddenly you wonder where it came from. Indeed, the author had an urge to write a blog post, acted on it, was left wondering what to write, reflected on the urge itself and decided to write on the urge to do something! The word 'urge', one would guess, shares a root with 'urgent'. So then, let us define an urge as a desire that seeks to be urgently satisfied. Seemingly incoherent from prior thoughts, it is not clear where urges come from. When one notices an urge very keenly as it arises, it sometimes dissipates like foam caught in the hand. But sometimes, most times, the body-mind reacts very mechanically to the urge and before you notice it, you are there at the fridge, gorging down on unnecessary deserts; or switching the TV on, watching movies that lie somewhere between stupid and idiotic; picking up the newspaper and poring over the news that makes one wish our ancestors had stayed put on trees. Now again, where does the urge come from?

The traditional vedantic/yogic view of the mind gives an answer - vasanas. The urge comes from an inner vasana, a hidden desire in the most interior crevices of the mind. For the rationally minded, one can postulate that a vasana is a small sub-network of neurons of the brain that fires in sync and causes a particular body/brain reaction such as flipping the TV on and sinking into the welcoming arms of a nicely cushioned sofa. If we ask why we have the vasanas, pat comes the answer: from satisfying past urges, i.e., actions. So which came first? The urge or the action?

Because an urge is towards some action, whether physical or mental, another allied question logically arises: Why do we respond to urges the way we do and not otherwise? Because we react to urges in a particular way and no other, it is logical to posit a physical/mental reward (punishment) that gets reinforced when the urge is satisfied (or not), so as to reinforce the neuronal sub-network. If this the case, if the urge is something which is unhealthy - say junk food - why do we allow the urge to etch its "groove" on the brain? For instance, when we eat something that results in food poisoning, there is often violent purging from the body, a vital survival mechanism of the body to eliminate toxins. When the body/brain can recognize a poison that can be fatal in the short term, why doesn't it recognize things which are pathogenic in the long term such as gorging on food more than what is healthy over many years of life only to be abruptly woken up by a heart-attack. Clearly, there must be something that fools the brain into thinking that something is okay right now, even though it's potentially fatal in the long run.

In sum, there are two questions, perhaps not independent, that beg answers:

• Which came first - the urge or the action?
• Why do we respond to urges the way we do?
  

Here's an attempt to answer these questions. The first urge towards a seemingly innocuous action is by happenstance. Imagine a child that eats its first gulab-jamun in life. Now every human being likes sugar to some extent; this is genetically programmed into us because of our body's need for instant carbs. So clearly, the child's brain has some genetic pre-disposition, an evolutionary trait no less, towards a seemingly simple desire for sugar. On tasting the jamun, the child's brain realizes - appropriate neurons fire - that a jamun is a good source of sugar and notes it as favorable to the body, while the tongue realizes a more compex taste than simple sugar. The biochemical reactions triggered on the child's tongue from the fried ball of dough soaked in sugar syrup, a complex mix of animal and vegetable fat and protein from the milk and the oil accentuating the simple taste of sugar, make the tongue tells the brain through neuronal intermediaries that the jamun has a rich, complex taste, in nature akin to, but more subtle than, simple sugar, an existing desire, and hence more desirable. Because our memory is designed to make and store comparisons, which again is an evolutionary trait, the tongue's biochemistry creates a memory in the brain - the groove, the neuronal sub-network, or the vasana - for the jamun. Animal brains stop here, that is, when they trust their senses to decide when to eat, then eat till satiation (again determined by biochemical reactions) and stop. Human brains don't. Human beings associate the memory of an action (such as eating the jamun and the consequent biochemical reactions on the body) with a name and form (a juicy, round, golden brown jamun, oooh!). In other words, we form a mental association between the food's name and the physical biochemical reactions stored in our neuronal memory. It is ironical that even this mental association between the food's physical properties and its name, are in turn, stored in the neuronal memory, which is physical!

Thus when one is pretty much bored, the brain in order to use its "idle cycles" orders the memory to throw up something that can enliven the proceedings by producing biochemical reactions that make the physical body feel good. Voila! Thus rises an urge! A sliver of memory comes to life. Out pops the idea that eating a jamun will make your body happy! No longer a child, we gorge upon jamuns even if we are not really hungry and appreciative of its rich taste, under the illusion that our memory serves, of the taste we encountered maybe eons ago. In other words, the brain has substituted the current taste or lack thereof with the jamun's taste in its memory store. For a second taste, third taste of jamun to form further memories, the biochemical reactions have to be stronger - this phenomenon lies at the root of many a drug and other addiction.

Thus a random event randomly becomes etched into the brain. A pattern arises out of the randomness. So in some sense all karma is random, but gives rise to patterns. If we agree to this premise, this also supplies an interesting solution to the what the author calls the initial value problem of the theory of karma. In other words, if one's current life is due to karma from the past life. So what about the actions in the past life. It should logically be because of the life prior. In which case, this leads to an infinite regression, leading to the question : What was the karma one brings to one's first life as a human being? The typical vedantic response in many ways is that one cannot understand this mystery. An equally good alternate explanation seems to be that the initial karma is random, which seems to be the starting point of vasanas also. This also squares with the ajaata vada of advaitha vedanta that there is no karma!

To conclude, an urge is an ossification of a random event into a pattern, seeded by randomness and nurtured by repeated action. And, we act the way we do in response to an urge because that action is also inseparable from the urge. In other words, both come to life together and can go only together.

So how cometh the urge to give up urges?

The author shall wait for an urge to answer that!