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Desire and Its Object

Desire is one of our life forces. To deny desire or to want to cut it off is to deprive ourselves of an incomparable dynamic; it is to head toward becoming dried up and drained of life, the mark of so many of the “religious.” Religious means “bound.” What better bond than desire? The Kashmiri masters recognized this power, and their questioning was not concerned with desire in and of itself, indispensable, but with the bonds between desire and its object.

If everything proceeds from consciousness, then no one action is more worthy than any other. The desire for God is a desire; the desire to renounce desire is itself a desire. It is therefore impossible to follow a spiritual or mystical path while eradicating desire. For tantrikas, desire is the mark of the endless creativity of consciousness. In cutting it off, we cut off an important part of our consciousness.

Stanza 105 of the Vijnanabhairava Tantra,¹⁷ one of the most ancient Tantric texts and the source of all nonpostural yoga, describes this choice position: “Desire exists in you as in everything. Realize that it also resides in objects and in all that the mind can grasp. Then, in discovering the universality of desire, enter its radiant space.”¹⁸

For tantrikas, desire is the very movement, the very nature, of the universe itself. In order not to have to cut it off, they considered it in its absolute form and asked themselves the question: “What do we really desire?” We can readily believe—and this corresponds in general to our fragmented experience of the world—that we desire to possess people or objects. Hence, we go through the world as predators, seeking to appropriate for ourselves everything our desire can touch. After a short time, we realize that we are dissatisfied, and this mechanism of truncated desire pushes us unceasingly to desire more objects, in an endless cycle that eventually gives way to frustration.

“What if desire were to desire something other than objects?” the Tantric masters then wondered. If desire were simply the incandescence that gives us the feeling of being alive, were intensity, were the tremoring vibration that carries us, then it would be absurd to allow it to be consumed by objects and to lose it once we possess the object or realize we cannot attain it. This profound movement is life itself, and this tremoring is the one that all yoginis and yogis experience, precisely because they remain in the incandescence of desire without rendering it dependent upon the object. In this instant, objects are seen as maintaining incandescence and not as reducing it.

In the Tantric sadhana there is a particular practice, connected to the stanza cited above, wherein the yogi sees the world as desire. Everything—a leaf falling from a tree, the sky, the snow, the water he drinks, his food—desires him. In this way he enters into an extremely subtle and refined relationship with objects. We do not touch in the same way a teacup that desires us, we do not look in the same way at a tree that desires us, because each contact with reality becomes a celebration of the universality of desire. Fixation on a single object thus ceases to exist.

“You miss one person and the whole world seems empty of people”: Lamartine’s verse well expresses this kind of absence to the world in which we become completely unbalanced by a desire centered on one single person, on one single thing that obsesses us to the point of masking the world from us.

The obstacle to our continual satisfaction is that we reduce our desire instead of allowing it to blossom out over all objects. A reduced desire blocks the fluidity of consciousness, sensations, thoughts, and emotions. When a single object takes an exclusive place in our mind, when our being reaches toward this object in a sort of contracted tension, movement ceases within us and suffering finds its home in us.

On the other hand, when our desire occupies all of space the absence of one object goes totally unnoticed, because the flow of our awareness remains free to come into contact with thousands of others. This is the way tantrikas live: in constant presence to the whole of reality. They are thus incessantly showered by the world’s infinite variety. They no longer have to seize, to stifle, objects; they leave them free, and the contact they have with the world is of such richness that lack, frustration, or solitude never comes and finds its home in them.

The incandescence of the desire that burns from its own indistinguishable fire is what makes the tantrikas’ gaze shine so brilliantly, what makes them perpetually in love with reality, what makes them so alive, so tremoring, whereas, all the while, they consume nothing, or almost.

In Devi’s company I perceived the supremacy of her desire, which included all objects, while mine spent its time exhausting itself by isolating one object after another, absent to multiplicity. For us, everything is consciousness, and everything that manifests itself leads us unceasingly back to consciousness. The senses thus become a marvelous palette that we open to the world, painting it with a thousand colors so that reality unceasingly leads us back to our own Self in a loving, fluid, and unfettered dynamic.