There is nothing wrong with desire. It's an inevitable part of being in a human body. When someone clamps a hand over your nose and mouth, you want to breath. If you are out enjoying a bonfire and a spark lands in your hair, setting it on fire, you want to put it out. Desire is the human experience of contrast—of lack.
If you are miserable, of course you want to be happy. If you cannot feed your children because you have no means of income, of course you want to feed your children.
If you are hungry and someone sets a plate of food in front of you, chances are, you'll happily give up your hunger and eat. Hunger is not seen as a terrible thing in this situation, but as an inevitable part of life.
All of these things involve manipulations of physical matter. Transportation, really, of one thing to another thing. We all know how to do this, by and large. It's all about "getting."
Where we go wrong is when the wanter—the part of you that is in charge of "getting"—becomes involved in the spiritual search or in any kind of emotional transaction involving ephemeral non-physical qualities.
The wanter works by getting you to focus on what you do not have and through that focus, arrive at an idea of what needs to be obtained. If you are hungry on your way home from work, you begin to imagine the type of food you are going to cook when you get home. Desire leads you to this visualization. If you are reading this blog, chances are good that you do not struggle overly much with access to sustenance.
But chances are also good that you do struggle with access to God, or to peace of mind, or to enlightenment. The reason for that struggle is that you have put the wanter in charge of the process. The wanter looks outside of itself and tries to find. This is what humans do. Humans believe they are separate and apart from each other, and that things are finite and must be amassed. It's part of the game.
What we who are in human form often do not realize is that these intangibles—peace of mind, enlightenment, God—are not additive. They cannot be added to you. They are already a part of you, already within you, integrated into and one with (not separate from) your being. You, as you are, right now. Plain old you.
The reason we cannot experience this is that we have put the wanter in charge and it's looking outside of your experience right now. It's looking outside, as though these were physical quantities, rather than already existing vibrational ranges.
When you want these things—like peace of mind, or enlightenment, or God—you begin to vibrate with the lack of them. You vibrate in such a way as to say "I do not have these experiences in my repertoire." That which is like unto itself is drawn. As you vibrate with the lack of enlightenment you attract more of lack of enlightenment. As you vibrate with a lack of love you begin to attract to yourself more lack-of-love—more of a sense of poverty, scarcity, aloneness, separation.
This is why we place an emphasis on the present moment. On this, right here, right now. On just this. On stopping. It's because you need to stop vibrating with what you believe you do not have in order to see that you have never lost it. You need to put the cart firmly before the horse and behave in a way that confounds the wanter. You need to be a haver. A plain old ordinary, appreciative haver in whatever little ways you can, to experience the deep and incredible richness of this, right here, right now.
Plain and simple, it is the experience of being the wanter that makes you feel as though you are separate, as though you do not have. When, in this intangible search, you act from what you want for yourself, you lock yourself into a closed system in which there is no solution. You cannot get what you already are.
Marian, this post really resonates with me right now. Thanks!
Posted by: Aileen | August 19, 2009 at 12:05 AM