True desire is desire for reunion with God, desire for truth, desire for an end to suffering. This true desire is the core of all other distorted and misplaced desires.
If passion for truth is not recognized, then all the distorted imitations of true passion, all the other usual passions of greed, hate, lust, and envy, arise and lead to suffering.
Be honest with yourself. Ruthlessly honest. Ask yourself, What do I want?
Do you want to be free?
Do you really want to realize the absolute truth of who you are?
If you just want a nice spiritual high sometimes, you are welcome to it, of course. That is somewhat like putting your toe into the ocean. It feels very good, and the ocean doesn’t mind if you just put your toe in. Yet you have the possibility of diving into the ocean of truth totally, with no hope of reemerging. Dive and see.
I’ve heard you say put all your desires into the one desire for freedom.
Yes, that’s right. Freedom is the true desire.
Well, what do I do with that?
What do you “do” with it?
Do I act on it or what?
If you put all your desires into this one desire, it does with you, totally. Freedom is vast. It is impossible for you to do anything with it.
Who you imagine yourself to be is annihilated by the revelation of freedom. You, as you have known yourself to be, are no more. You, as you have imagined yourself to be, are revealed to be nonexistent. There remains only the unimaginable truth of who you are.
Don’t imagine that you will do something with freedom. This idea is the arrogance of egocentric mind. You will be enfolded in such an embrace that there is no thought of you left. Freedom is nothing that can be “done with.” “Doing with” has to do with everything else. The power of mind can appear to do something with something. However, in true realization, all powers of mind are consumed by the source of mind.
Divine consummation is the feast of the divine on its soul.
Surrender! Let yourself be eaten by God however God pleases.
Sometimes I feel like that desire just burns inside, and I want to bring it into everyday reality.
Give up the idea that your insatiable thirst and search for truth are separate from everyday reality. Relative reality appears in absolute reality. Everyday reality cannot be separate from the absolute.
There is no everyday life without truth. There is no appearance of any phenomenon without truth. All belongs to truth.
If you have the desire to realize the flame of truth, and you imagine that you can somehow put the flame aside until your life is convenient, you are tricking yourself with postponement, tricking yourself by keeping the illusion of separation active.
I go back and forth between external searching and going within. I feel I need something outside myself.
I, too, felt I needed something outside myself. I was not able to do it on my own. I knew intellectually that it’s all within, but I wasn’t experiencing it. So I met my teacher, Papaji. He appeared to be outside myself while saying, “I am within you!” This appearance occurred in my everyday life. Do you get the import of this?
If you have an insatiable thirst for truth, finally you will discover that distinctions of outside and inside are inaccurate. There is no outside separate from inside. These boundaries are mental boundaries. They appear to be real and are thought to be real, but in truth, they are not real.
I am on the apparent outside pointing to that which is both here in myself and here in you, that which is in every moment of your life. You will not find truth someplace else and then bring it back into your life. It is already present.
If you really have a thirst, you will see truth everywhere because it is all you will be looking for.
I want to be slain in the desire for truth. Please slay me.
The only thing that needs to be slain are your concepts.
Die to the habit of following any thought that defines who you are. Die to everything you have ever known about who you are.
If you don’t follow thought, it can’t stick anywhere; it can’t continue. Realize what remains when there is no thought. This that remains has no need of a thought to be. It is before and after all thought, and has no use for the terms “inside” or “outside.”
I don’t use special magic here. If I did, then satsang would be simply an exchange of trances. Maybe you would feel good, and maybe there would be pleasant energy moving through the body, but personal identification would remain intact. Reality is much simpler. There is no need for special magic if what you are searching for is permanent and eternal truth located everywhere, in everything, with no possibility of being excluded from everyday life.
The truth is that no one can slay you. You can be invited into annihilation, into the ocean, or into satsang. By accepting that invitation, you discover you are beyond annihilation. Only ideas of who you are can be annihilated. By accepting the invitation, you realize you are the one who offers the invitation.
Is it time to accept your true self?
You have free choice. You are free to continue your personal trance, you are free to suffer, and you are free to put suffering behind you.
This is a moment of reckoning. Do not take this moment casually or trivially. Recognize that for whatever reason you are aware of the possibility of realizing the truth of yourself as limitless consciousness. This possibility has somehow penetrated your conditioned personal existence. What good luck!
The habit of thinking is very strong. The pain and suffering are so very strong that nothing seems to penetrate.
Ask yourself, What do I want? What do I really want?
There’s still a lot of wanting things to come out right.
When you say, “I want to end the suffering, and I know how the suffering should be ended ... It will be ended if certain things turn out a certain way,” then the habit of mind is fed. This statement ensures the habit of thinking and discussing.
When I say “thinking,” I am not speaking of fresh insights. I am speaking of those same old thoughts that are thought and rethought over and over and are unnecessary mental agitation.
Who you are is wisdom itself, and wisdom is not found in obsessive thinking. You are intelligence itself. You are clarity itself. Relax and allow that to reveal itself. Allow clarity to surprisingly reveal itself, with no thought of how it should reveal itself, or what the revelation will be when it does reveal itself.
Obviously, you are free to continue the habit of commentary. You are free to discuss forever. The power of mind is a toy, and you are free to continue with it or to put it aside. In putting the habit aside, see what hasn’t been played with, what hasn’t been touched, what has never moved.
You are always free to pick up the mind and begin the play again. If you don’t overlook for a moment what is before, during, and after all mind activity, unnecessary suffering is finished.
There may be enormous pain in any individual life. Pain is part of the texture of life. When pain is met as it is, as simply pain, it can even be experienced as beautiful. It doesn’t need to be anything different. When it is rejected and something “not painful” is reached for, pain is experienced as suffering.
The true spiritual quest is not necessarily comfortable. Many people begin the spiritual quest searching for comfort. However you begin it, what is finally revealed is a depth of being that leaves all notions of comfort and discomfort behind.
True joy includes both happiness and unhappiness. Recognize that, and you are no longer bound by grasping for pleasure and rejecting pain. True joy embraces all polarities, all action, and all inaction.
There comes a time to examine your life with ruthless honesty. Has true, deep desire really been touched by the accumulation of any object, physical, mental, or emotional? Speaking the truth is opening to the recognition that true fulfillment has nothing to do with circumstances. In the willingness for circumstances to be as they are, in that moment of stillness, you recognize what is untouched by any circumstance.
In that moment of humility, the arrogance I know what it is I need to make me happy is unmasked. Arrogance unmasked has no power. Recognize what has always been present, waiting to be seen.
What I am saying is very simple. I am saying you are already free. Who you are has always been awake. You have just been playing a game with yourself, and since you are who you are, this game is quite intense. For a moment, put the game aside.
I am not asking you to remember who you are. I am asking you to put everything aside and discover what has never really been forgotten. See what has always been present. Then this love affair, this true love, can reveal itself.
Self-love is not about liking the body or liking the personality. I am not speaking of the body or the personality. The body may be beautiful or ugly; it doesn’t matter. In true self-love, what is loved is what is unaffected by evaluations of beauty, ugliness, or personality.
I am speaking of discovering who you truly are. In this discovery, you discover you are in love with that.
Do you desire things for the future at all, or is it a matter of riding the wave of the moment?
What I desire in this moment and in the future is your awakening. Please, satisfy this desire. Then I will leave you alone.
I desire this in past, present, and future. I have chosen to reincarnate in this moment only to fulfill this desire. Now what do you desire?
I desire to express myself.
You cannot truly express yourself until you first discover who you are. Before that discovery, you are just expressing some idea of yourself. Generally, in our culture, expressing yourself means saying what you think and feel. This is expressing thoughts and feelings. Discover who you are, and your expression is that.
Is it greed or wisdom to want to be in your presence?
Maybe it is greed for wisdom.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be in my presence. Through this desire, you may discover who I am. If you discover who I am, then you must, in that same instant, discover who you are. This is what your greed is for, what the yearning is for.
In conditioned existence, divine hunger gets funneled into distorted passions. This is then called greed and has a nasty connotation because distorted passions always lead to suffering. In the hunger to realize true self, wisdom itself is found. Then passions are no temptation. They are dull by comparison. Feeding the desire for truth reveals fulfillment. Lesser passions are never satisfied.
I don’t want to remove your hunger. I want to feed it. I welcome your hunger for self-discovery. It is the desire for the true embrace.
Make your hunger an all-consuming desire to know your true self, to live that, to speak that, to give up the choice of any possibility of denying that. Yoke yourself to your hunger for truth.
Truth is being evoked in you. That evocation seems to come from me to you. In reality, what is calling for itself is also evoking itself. Follow your yearning to its source.
I welcome you in my presence. I recognize you. I know you to be my own self. I see that, I confirm that, and I point to the endless revelation of that, in sickness and in health, in pain and in pleasure.
It is through divine grace that satsang has arisen in your consciousness. The invitation is extended to never leave satsang. Leave behind all denial of satsang. Leave behind all denial of the truth you hunger for.
Do you have any suggestions on how to cultivate more of the desire for liberation?
Honor it. Respect it. Do not trivialize it. Do not make it just another conversational topic. To recognize the truth of who you are is the most sacred, precious, unimaginable gift.
What a gift of this lifetime, in these times, that somehow true desire is revealed. The opportunity is to foster true desire, to let it live your life, to let it reveal its fulfillment. What a lucky birth. Don’t squander the treasure of this birth.
I’m feeling some appreciation for the statement I’ve heard you make: “Need nothing, and then see what happens.” I could feel the parts of me that would resist even the idea of needing nothing. Then I heard something else coming from the core. You didn’t say to “have” nothing. You said to “need” nothing.
Well, now I say, “have” nothing. Have nothing, need nothing, be nothing. That which has been feared the most—to be nothing, to be nobody, to have nothing at all— be that, and see if what you have feared the most does not hold the greatest gem.
Could you speak about the contradiction between having desire for true self and the sense that there is a “me” here, particularly in regard to work and relationships?
You are true self. Everything is that.
If there is no desire for recognition of true self, then there is preoccupation with me and my work, my relationships, my eating, my sleeping, my acquiring, my losing, my victories, and my defeats. All of that is “me and my story.” Suffering is the general condition of “my story.”
In a very rare lifetime, there arises a desire for recognition of true self. When this divine desire appears, satsang appears. Satsang reveals that never, even for a moment, have you not been that true self.
Satsang is not an invitation to get more for “me.” There are many opportunities in the world for that. Satsang is about the ending of the preoccupation with “me-ness.” Mysteriously, in the ending of the personal story, you experience completion and fulfillment.
If there is no desire for true self, then it is not time to realize who you really are. Desire for true self arises mysteriously and unbidden. Who can say why? It has nothing to do with background, family, culture, race, or prior knowledge. It arises on its own.
We all know the hell of being tormented by personal desires. Perhaps now you recognize the exquisite torment of a true desire that calls you inward, calls you to silence, calls you to surrender all false, distorted desires.
You know the desire for more—more wealth, more food, more shelter, more experience. You know that there is never final satisfaction in following these objects of desire. There may be momentary satisfaction, and for that moment, there is desirelessness. What peace! What glory!
Because of mistaken identification, this peace is usually attributed to the acquisition of something. Finally, there is recognition that desire is never satisfied through acquisition and accumulation of objects. This recognition is maturity. Now you can finally ask yourself, What do I really want? What is it that I truly want?
You believed that you wanted more things, and you got more things. Eventually, there is a glimmer of understanding that things will never give you what you yearn for. Whether you have more and better things or whether you don’t have them, things are secondary.
You believed that you wanted more personal power. Then you wanted more proof of personal power. You acquired proof of personal power, but personal power also didn’t bring final satisfaction. No accumulation of objects has released you from the suffering of desiring.
What is it that you want, really, finally, so that with the last breath of your lifetime you can honestly say, “I received what it was I wanted”?
I ask you to consider who you are really. I promise that if this is deeply considered, your lifetime will not be a wasted lifetime. Your lifetime will not be lived in vain pursuit of false and misdirected desires. It will be lived as a celebration and an invitation. It will not be a lifetime of regret. It will be a lifetime of inspiration. It will be a lifetime that is a beacon.
By recognizing the depth of the answer to the question Who am I?, the fire of true identity will spread.
It has spread to you. Let it spread through you. Let it be revealed in you.