He's a vampire. He wears a black leather coat and bleaches his hair and says things like —
"I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
— while staring at a woman who actively despises him, who has punched him through walls, who keeps him at arm's length as a matter of survival. And somehow, in that moment, he is the most psychologically honest person in the room.
I came back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer during one of my brain-numbing phases and found myself completely arrested by James Marsters' face. The swagger, the coat and all-too-colorful character helped. Yet the face. You can see everything happening on it that most actors spend their entire careers trying to hide. The ache. The hunger. The specific particular longing of someone who is painfully aware of what they cannot reach.
He watches Buffy like someone simultaneously worshipping her; starving for her; grieving her; wanting to consume her and wanting to protect her and not fully knowing which one he's actually after.
Sometimes all of this in a single look. I've seen that look before. Not on television.
Desire, Tantra, and the Psychology of Longing
Spiritual culture does something very tidy with desire. The first pile: attachment, the root of suffering, the thing you transcend. The second pile: divine longing, the soul's beautiful reaching toward God. Both piles are clean. Yet we humans actually live in the in-betweens — which is contradictory and ungovernable and looks a lot more like Spike than it looks like either a Buddhist monk or a Rumi poem.
Spike inhabits the dangerous middle. The place where you genuinely cannot distinguish possession from devotion; hunger from love; wanting to consume someone from wanting to become worthy of them.
He doesn't distinguish these things because the current running through him is too strong and too undirected. The same force that makes him capable of extraordinary cruelty also makes him capable of extraordinary loyalty. The same longing that drives him toward destruction drives him — eventually — toward full power grace.
The energy isn't the problem. The consciousness of the energy is.
That's a deeply Tantric idea. And James Marsters plays it without ever having been asked to.
What Spike is actually saying in that line is: yes, longing makes a fool of me. I am dragged around by it and I cannot control it and everyone can see it on my face.
And I'm choosing it anyway.
He refuses what most people do with desire that gets out of hand — which is to compress it, manage it, perform a cooler version of themselves over the top of it. He stays porous to experience even when it destroys him.
That's why people feel Spike more viscerally than Angel. Angel is (let's be honest) quite disciplined, tortured and managed. Well also super hot; but that`s not the point now. Angel is desire as restraint. Spike is desire as immersion. And immersion, whatever its costs, keeps something alive.
The question I kept asking myself watching him: what would it mean to want something that intensely and not try to dignify it? Just to be inside it completely?
Spike, Self-Transcendence, and the Transformation of Desire
As his journey evolves; so does the transmutation process of this desire. All the way towards an arduous challenge for retrieving his soul. And as a consequence of it feel the pain of all his past.
Season seven. Episode two. Spike is draped over a cross — actually draped, being burned by it, not caring. Speaking in fragments. And at some point he looks at Buffy and says:
"Can we rest now? Buffy… can we rest?"
Before the soul, desire moved through him and he couldn't feel the suffering inside his own craving. Now he can feel all of it. The soul doesn't arrive as purity. It arrives as the inability to remain split.
Consciousness doesn't make you better immediately. It makes it impossible to keep pretending.
Spike's arc is not the arc of release. He doesn't process his obsession into wholeness.
What happens — slowly, non-linearly — is that the longing gets redirected. The current that at first points only at Buffy as an object gradually starts pointing at something else: meaning, protection, becoming someone capable of goodness.
At the start: I want her.
Later, almost underneath everything: I want to become worthy of what I want.
The desire isn't cut. It's refined. Daniel Odier writes about this in Desire: the Tantric invitation isn't to cut desire but to release the grip on the object and find the absorption in the essence of desire itself. See that energy as a current that, when met with enough presence, can take you deep.
Spike's entire arc read through that lens: compulsive eros trying — painfully, messily, never fully — to become luminous agape.
Tripura Sundari, Feminine Power, and Conscious Longing
Tripura Sundari.
She's often invoked as a goddess of beauty and divine love. She actually represents the refinement of desire from the inside. She doesn't destroy longing. She beautifies perception itself, so the same force that once drove compulsion starts driving something closer to devotion.
Spike without a soul is her raw material. Spike in that church, finally conscious of his own craving — that's where her work begins bearing fruit.
The question she asks, and the one I keep returning to in contemplation: not how do I want less, but what is this longing actually asking for?
Because underneath almost every obsession, if you're willing to look, is metaphysical hunger. Longing for union; for recognition; for home. The object was never going to deliver it. But the longing itself, when met with consciousness, can become the path.
And that is why I spent an unreasonable number of evenings watching a vampire show and felt like I was doing contemplative work.
If the relationship between desire, consciousness, and feminine power is territory you want to explore — Tripura Sundari module of the 10 Wisdom Goddesses Program is your jam [→ Find out more here.]
