Purifying Desire - Part 1

 

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Purifying Desire - Part 1

The energy called desire has been condemned for centuries. Almost all the so-called saints have been against it, because desire is life and they were all life-negative. Desire is the very source of all that we see, and they were against all that which is visible. They wanted to sacrifice the visible at the feet of the invisible; they wanted to cut the roots of desire so there would no longer be any possibility of life. A tremendously great urge to commit total suicide has dominated humanity down the ages.

Desire itself can be considered to be God. Desire without any object, desire without being goal-oriented, unmotivated desire, pure desire, is God. The energy called desire is the same energy as God. Desire has not to be destroyed, it has to be purified. Don’t drop desire, transform it. Our very being is desire; to be against it is to be against ourselves and against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and the birds and the sun and the moon. To be against it is against all creativity. Desire is creativity.

In the East it is said that God created the world because a great desire arose in him — a desire to create, a desire to manifest, a desire to make many from one, a desire to expand. But these are only metaphors; God is not separate from desire. Desire means a longing, a great longing, to expand, to become huge, to be enormous - as huge as the sky.

Observe people, watch desires and you will understand. What the person who wants to have more and more money really wants is not money but expansion, because money can help one expand. We can have a bigger house, a bigger garden, we can have this, we can have that - our territory will be bigger, our freedom will be bigger. With more money we will have more alternatives to choose from.

Go deeper into the consciousness of the person who wants money, help such a person to meditate, and we will be surprised to find that the desire is not really for money, but for expansion. Similarly, it is so for all other desires – more power, fame, longer life, better health – but what is it that they really desire in these different things? They don’t want to be limited, confined – they want to expand.

But all these objects of desire, sooner or later, disappoint. The desire was for the infinite, and money cannot purchase the infinite. If we watch carefully, money, power, prestige - nothing satisfies. On the contrary, they make us more discontented. 

Why? - because when we were poor there was a hope that one day the money was going to happen and all would be settled and settled forever, and then we would relax and enjoy. Now that has happened, and there seems to be no sign of any relaxation. In fact, we are more tense than before, we are more anxiety-ridden than before.

….To be continued