Desire, like sex, is something people make themselves uncomfortable over. Many people are scared of their feelings—of what’s going on just under the surface. We tremble a bit—such is the power of our desire.

Epstein describes Buddhism’s ‘right hand path’ as the path of the ascetic — on this path, the solution to life’s drama is renunciation. This is the idea that desire leads to trouble, and the only way to avoid trouble is to repress it, fight it, ignore it, or meditate it to death.

Buddhism’s ‘left-hand path’ is Tantra — on this path, the things our bodies experience become the tools of awakening. Desire becomes the energy for action leading to transformation.

If you think about it, that’s how we actually use the word.

Desire is the feeling that lies in the gap between what we have and what we want. Desire is the emotional or vibrational pull toward change. Desire is the burning drive to bring something new into being.

Desire is dynamic

The problems come when we forget that desire is dynamic. It’s a driving force.

As we desire, we are driven to make, to create, to merge, to enact. In other words, desire at its best causes us to move forward; it empowers new realities.

Things go off the rails when we attempt to possess [cling to] what we desire. To lock it down, own it, marry it, make it “ours”.

The paradox is that desire want us to get turned on enough that we actually do something with our lives, but the feeling of desire is chargy, and therefore addicting. So, rather than acting and moving on, many attempt to maintain the feeling of desire by possessing the “object of desire”. It’s confusing the feeling with the external object.

Clinging is all about trying to freeze something dynamic — trying to make it “hold still.”

Epstein writes:

“But this kind of satisfaction is impossible because the qualities that we project onto the desired object—of permanence, stability or “thingness”—do not really exist… The disparity between the way we perceive things and the way they actually are is at the root of our struggle with desire. Once we learn to make that disparity part of our experience, however, desire can be a teacher rather than an affliction.” [p 69]

Plagued by clinging

Most of the people I work with are plagued by their clinging.

They are looking for the perfect partner. They are looking for the perfect life, the perfect career, the perfect mind-set. But perfect is a static list of characteristics, and ignores the dynamic nature of life.

My clients tell me they want to be happy. As if there is a permanent state called happiness that someone, with effort, could cling to all the time, despite the reality that all of life is change.

I want to loosen their fingers from the death-grip they have on the object[s] of their desire, so that they can accept the paradox of their desire—you can never hold on to anything, including your illusions.

Buddha on desires

The Buddha said, in the first of the Four Noble Ideas, that “life is dukkha.” Epstein writes that the Sanskrit dukkha, [the word usually translated suffering] actually means something closer to “pervasive unsatisfactoriness.”

An example of dukkha is a potter’s wheel that is off-balance, and therefore always squeaks, annoyingly. Neat, eh? When you are miserable, isn’t that what life feels like? It’s not quite right, annoying, irritating, anger-provoking.

And then, the Buddha said [The Second Noble Idea] that the cause of dukkha was attachment to desire, which is better defined as grasping or clinging to desire. Thus, it is not the desire—the feeling—that gets us. It’s our endless demands for more of what we want, less of what we don’t want. It’s our ignorance—our clinging to our confused mental picture of the object of our desire.

This confusion is captured in the song title, “Hooked on a Feeling.” [B J THOMAS]

Note the lyric, “I’m high on believing that you’re in love with me.” The person is hooked on the feeling of believing, and none of that is external—it’s not about the other person. It’s a mind game—the writer is turned on by his own feelings!

Why suffering happens

Suffering happens as we try to freeze reality.

We feel the heat of desire and passion, and addict ourselves to the feeling. We look at the object of our desire [person, place, or thing] and instead of interacting with “the dynamic reality,” we go into our heads and create a story.

Our suffering comes from our attachment to our stories—our fixation with how we think things ought to be.

We then attempt to make the other person into the thing that we desire—into our very own “it.” We turn a dynamic person, for example, into a category, like “My husband” or “My wife.” We then fixate on our story about “how a wife ought to be” [for example] and make ourselves miserable when the “object of our desire” doesn’t match the fixed story.

People do this to avoid the hard work of relating to an ever-changing reality. And they despair [or change partners] when they realise the futility of this form of clinging, which doesn’t stop them from playing the same game with the next desirable object! The only way out is to find a way to stop clinging.

The Two Paths

The ‘right hand path’ suggests dealing with this tension and pain by rejecting or renouncing desire.

The ‘left hand path,’ being open to desire, is to accept it, respect it, and use it to work with the reality of dynamic living.

Passion, without grasping, is a way to open ourselves to encountering the other person as a real, dynamic human being.

This type of relating is an internal decision to

• be passionately engaged in an exploration of the gap that exists between myself and another.
• explore the gap between another and my perception of another.
• acknowledge that I can only know “of” another—and that my knowing is more about me than about another.

So, how do we open up to desire, after all?

Oddly, it’s as simple as acceptance. I accept that nothing stays the same, and that there is always a gap [and therefore a tension] between what is and what I desire. I use this tension to relax into being comfortable with my discomfort.

As I find the comfort of desire, as opposed to the pain of clinging, I can choose, moment by moment, to be in an intimate, flowing relationship with all of life.

Meditate on this: I am who I am, and my desire is a part of that. If I observe my desire as opposed to clinging to it, the desire will lead me to notice what I am doing, and allow me to step away from clinging to simply ‘being in the moment.’

Life is an endless tension between what is and what we desire. That is the nature of life.

The way to work with the tension is to simply be present with it in a non-grasping way.

Once I see that life is as it is, I can learn to be in my life, as opposed to trying and failing endlessly, to fix it.

Once I stop playing god, in other words, I can simply be me.

Like I have another choice…

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In our great epic, the Mahabharata: Bhishma Pitamaha, the divine son of the sacred River Ganga, is asked about the source of sin and evil in the world. Bhishma replies to his questioner, Yudhishtira, a young King seeking wisdom. “From greed, sin and all adharma flows, a stream of misery. Greed is the poisoned spring of all cunning and hypocrisy in the world. It is greed which makes people sin… Greed is the source of evil.”

Like lust, greed is also a severe internal affliction, a diseased condition of the mind that leaves us permanently dissatisfied, permanently insecure and permanently in a state of lack, want and need. As the wise old saying goes, “He who loves money excessively, never has money enough.” The more you acquire, the more you covet, and the more you dwell in want and insecurity. An offshoot of this insecurity is the fearful need to hoard, store and cling to the wealth you have amassed.

Hoarding and spending

Greed manifests itself in two broad tendencies — the impulse to hoard and the impulse to spend extravagantly. In the first case, the ‘victim’ is obsessed with amassing more and more wealth and putting it away safely for a future need. Such a man cannot trust Providence for the morrow: he is determined that he will be his own provider, and will not look to God to take care of his needs; he trusts his avarice and miserliness more than he trusts God’s generosity and compassion!

The ‘big spenders’, as they are called, are on an acquisition spree; they cannot stop buying things that they don’t really need. Bigger, better, newer, faster… whatever the excuse, they keep spending on luxuries and whims, indulging their urge to splurge and acquire more and more…

Root cause of unhappiness

I would say that this tendency to accumulate material wealth, the craving for more and more, is the root cause of human unhappiness. Greed, listed as one of the seven deadly sins in the Christian teachings, binds people with fetters that shackle their capacity for self-fulfillment and inner harmony. The more we are attached to a house, a car, a piece of jewellery or an object, the more we lay ourselves open and vulnerable to unhappiness. The desire to possess leads gradually on to the impulse to accumulate and hoard. Invariably, we begin “keeping up with the Joneses” as they put it in England – i.e. constantly comparing ourselves with our neighbours, and trying to be one up on them.

Our senses are instruments of cognition that Nature has blessed us with; they tell us to eat when we are hungry and seek warmth when we are cold. The fulfillment of such needs is essential for human survival. It is only when our needs and wants become unreasonable and obsessive that they cease to be natural and enter the danger zone of covetousness.

Goal of life

Artha or wealth, is one of the purusharthas or legitimate goals of life. But we must understand that amassing wealth is not the sole aim of our life on earth — it is only the means to a higher end. Our money, our assets, our car, our house and all our worldly goods (acquired by fair, honest means) can help us and our loved ones lead a life free from want and deprivation. At a higher level, they can help us help others who are not as fortunate as we are. In other words, wealth is an aid to living life well; it cannot be the ‘be all and end all’ of our life!

Unfortunately, our society today recognises and equates accomplishment and success with money. In business, sports or entertainment, a ‘star’ or a ‘leader’ is valued by the millions he has amassed, the size of his bungalow and the car he drives. I do not grudge these celebrities the money they make but I am pained by the fact that we lesser mortals compare ourselves to them, and feel frustrated, inadequate and insecure!

Happiness and success cannot be measured in terms of money, power, position, wealth or social status. For a man may have all of these and still be miserable. The world thinks that a millionaire is a ‘successful’ man. Success is measured by the yardstick of inner happiness – your ability to be happy and make others happy; the ability to love and be loved by others; the ability to live in harmony with those around you, with your own self and God’s cosmic laws.

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• Introduction: Laws of Attractions vs Laws of Creation
• If you don’t create your future, fate will
• What you accept, you experience
• Testing the limits of your potential
• Creating your own reality
• Knowing what you really want is important
• The 10-step approach to creating the reality you desire
• Learning to drive your experiences
• Reinventing your reality
• Conclusion: See what you can become

Introduction: Laws of Attractions vs Laws of Creation

The Laws of Attraction are concerned with how to draw close the things that you value and wish to acquire. This is achieved by forming the image of what you want, then attracting that within your reality. If what you want doesn’t already exist, you either need to create it or wait for someone else to do so.

The Laws of Creation are not about attracting what you want, but rather creating through desires, imagination, expectation, belief, persistence and energy the things that you wish to exist within your life.

Humans throughout the ages have created everything that can be observed within today’s physical world. Inventors, explorers, artist, architects, and others have created within reality what previously didn’t exist by using their knowledge of the Laws of Creation.

If you don’t create your future, fate will

The Laws of Creation or The Laws of Attraction are both vulnerable to procrastination, weak desires, lack of perseverance and the inability to maintain focus until what is desired is achieved. Many give up because what they wanted hasn’t been obtained within the limited time-frame they imagined. This could be due to lack of programming or not persevering long enough until what they want becomes real.

As the creator of your own perceived reality, your actions, thoughts, beliefs, and your mental and physical health, all contribute towards what you finally experience and perceive. If you don’t spend the time and the energy to create the future then fate will do that for you.

When you create the future you have choices but when fate creates your future you have to accept what comes your way almost unconditionally, at least initially.

What you accept, you experience

What you are prepared to accept is what you usually end up experiencing. Making no attempt to change or manage what is occurring means that you accept that such a state has the legitimate right to exist within your reality.

Creation is not only about bringing what you want into your life but also controlling what you wish to accept or reject. When things don’t go right, when undesirable situations get legitimacy within your life experience, the sole reason for their continued existence is that you didn’t negate or change them.

Your abilities are infinite, beyond comprehension, being limited only by your potential to perceive the possibility for success. All that is necessary are the desires, belief, expectancy, focus and perseverance, together with the application of the necessary energy levels to achieve your heart’s desires.

Testing the limits of your potential

It is important to wake up to the reality that there is no necessity for anything to be difficult, and that with the right mentality, everything does indeed become possible. Don’t be a “creation” of circumstances, challenge who you can be.

Readily accepting what has become the current condition, or surrendering to fate without even considering or testing the limits of the potential that could exist is how most people live their lives—this is a completely unnecessary state to endure.

Without searching for and pushing the boundaries of reality, the full potential of what can be achieved will never truly emerge; what is currently experienced will always be the basis of your ultimate reality. Only by testing the limits of potential is it possible to maximize life’s experience to the full.

Creating your own reality

Reality is based solely upon desires that are given perspective through imagination, and then the credibility to be brought to life by your firm belief in them. You create life from the pieces of reality that you bring together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Every moment is an opportunity to create what you desire most—by clearly focusing your imagination on what you want first, then through expectancy backed by belief to make desires legitimate.

You create each moment from the massive number of thoughts that you have, either consciously or subconsciously. Some experiences come to dominate your life, while others are fleeting in their ability to have an effect, yet they all contribute on some level towards your reality. The remainder of reality is either created by others or randomly by fate.

By taking full control of your thoughts, it becomes possible to take back the management of each element of your entire life, which can then be controlled as you specifically desire—outside the influence and manipulation of others or by chance.

The path that you create or follow does become the story of your life.

Knowing what you really want is important

Many are deluded into desiring various things that are basically just passing fantasies. There is a common trend to constantly shift desires, which change depending upon a particular infatuation at the time. Very few people stop to think clearly about what they “really” want or need, then put all their energy into pursuing that vigorously.

The decisions as to what you wish to pursue in life is your right; you should pursue those desires relentlessly until they become part of your life. Challenge the future by making changes that will come to enrich your life.

The 10-step approach to creating the reality you desire

The five pillars of creation are: imagination, clearly defined desires, positive expectations, belief, and persistence. Combining these elements of thought you are able to create in reality the things that you truly desire.

Reality is born through your imagination, which is crystallized into form by your desires, given impetus by your expectations, and made real through your beliefs. You create life from the pieces of reality that you bring together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Let’s look at each step:

Step 1: The objective

An important factor is to identify clear and precise details of what exactly you want, then to hold that image with a strong desire. Focus only on one specific desire at a time.

Step 2: Imagination

Utilizing the powerful combination of intuitive thoughts linked with creative inspiration, determine “all” the various elements that make up what you want. Remember to be thorough, for whatever is left out, fate or chance will fill in randomly. These elements are the main points to focus the imagination upon. What you seek cannot be drawn to you or brought into existence until you define it clearly.

Step 3: Desire

The energy of your desires set the stage for the potential you can attain. Desires are the basis of making things possible; to bring your thoughts into reality more clearly and precisely. Strongly desire what you want to be yours; drawing it to you with a focused intent.

Step 4: Visualization

Visualize in great detail the factors making up what you desire, then focus on those images intently, keeping the desire fixed and unchanged until what you desire actually becomes yours.

In order to gain the full benefit of what you wish to obtain or achieve, it is necessary to visualize your desires as existing in the current time and place—as if it has happened or is happening here and now.

Step 5: Belief

Your beliefs give legitimacy to your desires. The key to attracting or creating anything is by believing it to be yours, living your dream and playing the part like it can, in fact, become real.

Belief is what enables you to perceive in your mind’s eye what you desire. How quickly your desires materialize will always depend upon the intensity of your beliefs and your keen perception.

Step 6: Expectancy

Your expectations govern how your life will turn out. Have a strong expectation that what you want will become real within your reality; expectancy gives your desires energy to manifest within a reasonable time period.

Step 7: Perseverance

Persistent effort is required to keep focus upon what is desired until it is actually achieved. Don’t give up. Without changing the key elements you can embellish the various elements you isolated with more detail. Then continue the focused intent on the desire until what you want is achieved.

Many find they can’t hold the desire long enough, losing focus or changing their direction continually when what they desire doesn’t materialize immediately.

Step 8: Effort

Nothing was ever achieved without effort, both physical and mental. Determine whatever you need to do in order to create what you want within reality. And be willing to do whatever it takes.

Step 9: Dreams

Fortify your desires with dream planning. Think intently about your desire and what you wish to become real within your life. Prior to sleep follow the steps of imagining exactly what you want, together with a strong focus of desire, believe the desire is achievable, and expecting that what is desired will be yours for sure. It is ideal to cycle through the imagining, desiring, believing and expecting stages a number of times.

Step 10: The Meditation

Everyone has a favorite method for achieving a meditative state, these techniques can be quite fast, or be elaborate and take time. Meditation, when used proficiently, with suitable supervision can empower the ability to create within reality. As with dreams, focus your attention during a meditative state upon imagining exactly what you want, placing a strong focus of desire on obtaining what you want or wish to achieve, believe the desire is achievable, and expect that your desire will manifest without fail.

Learning to drive your experiences

Belief in the outcome is the fuel that drives reality

I took part in a speech contest against a number of professionals who were far better and experienced speakers than I was at the time. A few days before the event, I started imagining taking part in the contest, focusing in detail that everything would go perfectly. I imagined actually winning the contest, and visualized receiving the award. I won against all odds, surprising others and beating the favorite who had won many years in succession.

If you don’t decide exactly what you want fate will step in to rule your life

There was a man who desired a red sports car. Every day he imagined this car parked in his driveway, diligently. One morning he opened the living room curtains to find a red sports car in his driveway as if by magic. Rushing outside he met his neighbor who was very apologetic for parking his new car in the wrong driveway as there was no space in his own.

On analysis the man had gotten exactly what he wanted, simply a red sports car in his driveway. He had forgotten to add into the imagining the desire, the belief, the expectancy, that it was paid for, but most importantly that the car would belong solely to him.

Reinventing your reality

It is the combination of imagining every detail with a strong unending focus of desire, together with the belief that what you want is already yours—not will be or maybe—but already is yours; this is what will make your desires manifest within your reality more easily.

You have the sole responsibility for what happens to you in life, and are limited only by the unwillingness to take action.

Conclusion: See what you can become

The future will either be what you want, what others want, or what fate throws your way. Only by fixing your destiny clearly in your mind will you be able to achieve your dreams and life desires. Life will only give you what you demand, and then pursue.

The cost of anything is what you are prepared to do in order to achieve it. Don’t be a creation of circumstances, challenge who you can become. Open your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist for you by harnessing the powers of creation within you to make a life you truly deserve.

Don’t be so wound up in who you are that you fail to see what you can become.

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16 centuries later, I find wisdom in what Socrates said. His values are relevant even today, perhaps more than ever before. The more I think about the wisdom of Socrates, the more I am convinced about the pointlessness of our heavily consumption-oriented world. Ironically, we are consuming more and more and getting less and less satisfaction from it. Consumption has become a malaise, an epidemic gone unchecked that has led to a massive imbalance of resources and caused widespread discontent. Worse, it has made us a slave of the very things we seemingly own.

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There is a widespread conviction that we will be happier when we buy more stuff. When we buy into this belief, we fall into a vicious trap—in order to buy more stuff, we must make more money; in order to make more money we must work harder or longer; in order to work harder we must compromise on our priorities—round and round in circles we go, even life is reduced to hankering after stuff that we want, never really stopping to reflect if we really need it.

More stuff = less joy

I know from experience that stuff never brings happiness. Sure, it brings momentary pleasure but only to give way to a feeling of dissonance along with the desire to get the next item on the endless list that is freely fuelled by our consumer-oriented society. Desire, by its very nature, is insatiable. That means I am never satisfied with what I have—there’s always something better, bigger, more advanced and with more features out there that I must own… a more lavish apartment, a bigger car, a more hi-tech handset, more clothes, shoes, ties, belts and so on.

But do I really need them? This question brings me to the values of frugality that Socrates practised. In today’s context, we could call it minimalism: owning only those things which are absolutely essential to live comfortably.

What truly matters

To me, minimalism seems to be a sensible way of living. It leaves me with ample time and resources to explore the many dimensions of life that are veiled by my obsession with consumption. Because I don’t have to care for my possessions, I am left to care for myself and what I truly value—my loved ones, my health, my personal growth and this vast, beautiful, breathtaking world. What’s more, it frees me up from the stress of having to make more money to buy all those things that I probably don’t need. It also allows me to give away my stuff and my time freely, leaving me with a feeling of abundance.

How do I go about discerning my needs from my wants? By understanding myself. Socrates advocated that individuals should strive to know and understand themselves and unless they do so, their lives have no real meaning or value. Once I know and understand myself, I know what and how much I need. No unnecessary clutter, no wasteful expenditure, no stress, no dissonance. Only a life that is rich with love, joy and peace. Hence, the mantra for maximum living is “minimise your possessions”.

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