Anatomy of a Desire

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You must not desire the truth. You must let the truth desire you. For truth has the greatest desire, the most efficient one, to which yours is but a pale copy. It is the desire to be itself alone, unaccompanied, unsoiled. In the fulfilment of that desire, truth will swallow you, will undress you and render you transparent, nonexistent, naked. You’d be inspired to let go, to give in, to trust that desire which is so greater than yours. For your desires are small, inadequate, vile, selfish. They won’t get you where you truly want to be. They will miss the mark. Every time.

So don’t desire truth. Don’t make it like something you can possess. Truth is in fact already possessing you, the only one in command. So undress your being of the superfluous. The superfluous is all the beliefs attached to yourself, that makes you a self that feels separate, an entity in a body, delineated by its thoughts and feelings, that looks up to experience, and betrays its profound suffering through its constant desire for fulfilment.

Notice that your desire has no true owner. The one that desires is not really there. It is but an idea, a desperate attempt to feel that you are complete. But you won’t feel complete by means of desiring, for desire is already the sign of your incompleteness. The problem with being a desirer is that it places you ahead of your natural identity as being. It is a position of ignorance with a plan and a hope. The desirer is a made-up entity whose unacknowledged goal is to consolidate itself. So don’t make truth like a projected goal to be achieved. The desired object of enlightenment, or realisation, was never intended. It was in fact all for the desirer, to strengthen your false identity as a self, to adorn the temple of separation, to attach yourself to another idea. Liberation is not in desiring to be liberated.

So there is no one to desire the truth that you desire. It is a vain enterprise. It is but a mimic. For the self that you are is not here for the desired object. In desiring, you aim to consolidate your sense of being a separate entity. Desire is desperation, a ‘trying to exist’, a refusal to die. Desiring is the wanting of something you already own fully, but push away with your very craving for it. You are already the object of your desire. See that you already have what you’re after. So there is no need for a desire, let alone a desirer. You only have to simply look at what is. To let all desire go is a form of sacrifice, for you let go of your seeking self, and you lose yourself in the sought.

Have you ever seen how a bee approach a brightly coloured flower? How it seems to hover for a while, before being engulfed in its seamless attraction? The separation between the bee and the flower evaporates in a resolute surrender to its mission, which is but the truth of nature’s purpose. Or the nature of truth’s purpose. When you have stopped wanting, desiring, projecting, resisting, becoming, the nature of your being is seen just as it is, and is revealed as God’s loving, effortless, and inescapable purpose.

So render yourself malleable to the attraction of truth. Do with truth like a bee does with a flower loaded with pollen. The bee doesn’t choose the flower. It has no desire for it. But she is the prey to its attraction. She is under its influence. She serves a silent purpose. Our purpose with truth is to feel its seamless attraction, to be rendered defenceless, compliant, vulnerable to the flowering of your own silent being, and willing to serve the purpose contained in that supreme intelligence. In fact, be like with a beloved. Let the attraction act for you. Don’t desire. We don’t desire to meet again with a beloved. We just meet her inside. We just feel his attraction and succumb to it.

You’ve got to simply feel the attraction itself, and give in to this sacred pull. You will find yourself in the right place, which is your temple of being. But don’t impose your own desire. Disencumber yourself from yourself. Have this humility. Have this poverty. Your being is God’s ambition for you. Its sacred work of art, which you can make your own. Keep God’s desire stainless, by not interfering. That’s your ultimate abandon: to be without desire, and fall off the pedestal of your self. To be engulfed in that sweetest of pollens, and die there: in God’s desire.

But we would often rather stay a beautiful desirer of truth, a traveler with a destination, than to embrace our own immovable being, devoid of improvement, deprived of a hope, of all the prestige contained in a grand and glorious aspiration. But truth has no pride. It is contained in one’s own natural, completed, already given, innermost being. In being, you may have all the desires you want. For they will come from a place of desirelessness. From a place of fulfilment. These are the most efficient desires. The honest ones. Leave the place of being virgin of your identities, of your ambitions to be someone, something. Clean it of your thousand accumulations. Plant your desires in the soil of no desire. That’s how they grow unhindered by all the beliefs, accumulations and hopes which are the backbone of your self. Your desires will then take off on the wings of God’s desire. 

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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