解构欲望的秘密

The Myth of Desire
From Anatomy of Desire: How to Be Happy Even When You Don’t Get What You Want by Gina Lake
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Desiring is wanting what is not presently true, or real. If it were true, or real, you wouldn’t need to desire it. Inherent in desiring is a feeling of lack—of something missing. Also inherent in it is the feeling, or belief, that if that were not lacking, you would be happy.
We long for what we don’t have because we believe that having it will finally bring us peace and happiness. We don’t realize that the lack of peace and happiness we are feeling is actually a result of desiring what we don’t have. The desire is the cause of our unhappiness, not the fact that the desire is unfulfilled.
When we examine this, this seems so obvious. Desire is painful. We suffer because we believe we are lacking something necessary for our happiness. That is a very sad (and untrue!) story, but it is essentially everyone’s story. Everyone feels this way because the mind is programmed to be unhappy with whatever is happening. No matter what is happening, the mind comes up with complaints about it or ways to improve on it. That is its job. That is what it is programmed to do, and it does it very well.
This situation is painful for two reasons: It is painful to not have what you want, but it is also painful to discover that there is no end to wanting, even after you do get what you want. What we really want is the peace that comes from no longer wanting. We hope to experience peace and happiness once and for all by getting what we want. However, peace and happiness are not achieved by getting but by loving what is, just the way it is. We are so afraid that if we love what is we will never get what we want, when that has been the secret to happiness all along!
Loving what is would seem to be the simplest thing possible. It involves no effort, no struggle, no longing, and no disappointment. But loving what is goes against our programming, so it is difficult. It requires vigilance to counteract the egoic mind’s automatic rejection and resistance to whatever is happening. To experience the peace and happiness that exist in this moment, it is necessary to stop listening to the egoic mind, which undermines this peace and happiness with complaints and judgments. These are the tactics it uses to take us out of the present and into its world of desires, hopes, and dreams. It woos us with fantasies of a more perfect world, a more perfect mate, a more perfect experience, and a more perfect you, all of which are unreal and will never be real.
Your fantasies, dreams, and desires don’t create reality or even reflect reality accurately, although they do affect your experience of it. When you are focused on your desires, dreams, and fantasies, you are not experiencing this moment, and you are missing out on the real richness, peace, and happiness that are right here, right now.
The Nature of Dreams
Most of us assume that our dreams are meant to be fulfilled. We believe that our dreams are meaningful and have a purpose. They spur us to take action, but is the goal—the dream—a worthy one? We assume so, or why would we have it? Like every other thought, we assume that our dreams are true and meaningful. We believe in our dreams, and they define us to some extent: “I am someone who wants….” Our dreams shape our choices and our actions. They shape our lives.
The problem with assuming that our dreams are meaningful and that they will  make us happy is that dreams and the desires that make them up are just thoughts, most of which come from the egoic mind, which is not so wise about what will make us happy. We assume that our dreams are our personal prescription for happiness, and that just isn’t so.
Dreams are just not that important. It is an illusion that our dreams are meaningful. Just because we have a dream doesn’t mean it is meant to be fulfilled. Everyone has dreams, and many people have similar ones. They are part of our programming as humans and not meaningful messages from “above.” They are messages from the egoic mind, but that is hardly a worthy guide for our lives.
Take, for example, the “dream house.” Nearly everyone has an image of a dream house. Does that mean you will have that house someday or that you should have that house, either by working for it or through some other means? That is often the assumption, which is not true. That image neither predicts your future house nor is it an assignment for you to carry out. A dream is just an image, a thought, which the egoic mind gives meaning to with more thoughts, and these generate feelings, which motivate us to act in behalf of our dream. This all starts with a thought that has no intrinsic meaning or truth, although we give it meaning by believing it has meaning.
This doesn’t mean there are no true dreams that do have meaning for us; however, these don’t come in the form of specific images. Essence, our deeper self, releases impulses to create something in the world, like a dream house, but the specifics of how it will look are not given ahead of time by essence—or even known. Any specific image you have is generated by the mind, as it attempts to foretell and affect what will happen. The mind doesn’t like uncertainty, so it makes up a complete image and pretends that that is how it will be—or should be. This image may have little to do with what essence intends, and it has the potential of sidetracking or shaping the end result, but essence allows this. Thus, the manifestation of every dream is usually a co-creation between the egoic mind and essence.
If essence is co-creating your dream house with you, you will be inspired with ideas about it in the moment. The dream house (or any other dream) unfolds organically out of the moment—moment by moment—as each step in the creation process makes itself known in its own time. At times, you may be flooded with ideas; and at other times, they trickle in as needed. Furthermore, they may change as new information is assimilated. The creation of anything is a process that unfolds over time. The timing and manner of this unfolding is not under your control and can’t be anticipated, and it doesn’t happen in response to a static image held in the mind.
Although many believe that holding an idea in your mind long enough and strongly enough will cause it to manifest, this simply isn’t true. If this were true, then many more people would have exactly what they wanted and imagined. We all know that getting what we want isn’t as easy as that, and even when we do get what we want, it doesn’t look exactly like we imagined. It is impossible for anyone to imagine something exactly as it will be, and yet many feel they have failed because they haven’t been able to manifest what they have imagined.
The mind comes to some very irrational conclusions at times, and the idea that you can get what you want by holding the thought of it in your mind is not only irrational but contrary to all evidence. Nevertheless, the egoic mind clings to this belief because it wants this to be true because this would give it some sense of control in a world where the ego, in fact, has very little. Rather than delivering the desired result, this strategy brings suffering because it is ineffective and people tend to blame themselves when it fails. However, if they looked around, they would see that no one else is succeeding with this strategy either. But the ego doesn’t encourage such a rational approach because it doesn’t want the falseness of this cherished belief exposed.
The ego wants you to believe that it can get you what you want. It wants you to believe that it is a worthy and trustworthy ally so that you will continue to turn to it. If you didn’t believe in the egoic mind’s ability to guide and assist you, it would be out of a job, and it wants to exist in its current capacity, even though it fails miserably at bringing you happiness.
The Truth about Fantasies
Fantasies are dangerous. They have the potential to create a lot of suffering because they put a demand and expectation on life that will never be fulfilled. All fantasizing is doomed to failure and therefore destined to cause suffering. The amount of suffering is in direct proportion to the amount of time, belief, and emotional energy invested in it. The more you believe a fantasy, the more you suffer. There is no exception because fantasies are not true, and when you invest in something that is not true, you will be disappointed. Investing in a fantasy is like investing in a gold mine that doesn’t exist: You wind up empty-handed—and unhappy.
The reason fantasizing seems worth it is that we believe it has some value beyond the pleasure it gives. We feel that we really are able to predict, control, or create the future by thinking about it. This is the hook that keeps us tied to our fantasies even when they stop giving us pleasure. The mind goes back again and again, not only to get pleasure from them but to try to get some resolution.
Fantasizing leaves us with a sense of incompletion. It makes us feel as if something is missing in our life and that it won’t be complete until our fantasy comes true. As a result, the present seems like a time of waiting until our dream is achieved. We feel discontent with life as it is. Life feels less than it can be and less than it should be.
A desire that is unfulfilled is bothersome and annoying. Like an itch that needs scratching, we feel consumed with doing something about it. Consequently, every fantasy generates many more thoughts, which are all about how to get that dream to come true. The mind becomes very busy with this problem in hopes of putting an end to the sense of incompletion and the torture of desiring. Unfortunately, the mind isn’t actually very good at figuring out how to make our dreams come true because it is out of its league. The mind is just not powerful enough to get reality to go its way, although it pretends to be.
Having a fantasy is actually more painful than it is pleasurable because the pleasure lasts only momentarily, while the pain of not having what you want can interfere with experiencing and appreciating what you do have in this moment. It is sad, indeed, to miss this moment because of a fantasy, especially when that fantasy floods this moment with the pain of incompletion, frustration, worry, fear, anger, and sadness.
These are the real fruits of fantasizing. Fantasy not only takes you out of the moment, which is actually full of everything you need and are looking for, but it fosters a secondary, or false, reality that results in painful thoughts and emotions. Fantasizing may seem pleasurable, fun, and harmless, but the short-lived pleasure and fun actually come at a great cost. Nevertheless, we don’t usually blame our pain on fantasizing but on the fact that our fantasies are unfulfilled. So, we keep going back to them rather than to this rich, present moment, which is so free of pain and full of peace.
Desires and Dreams Are Not Meaningful
The belief that our desires and dreams are meaningful is a core assumption we rarely question. We can’t become free from the domination of the egoic mind without questioning this core assumption because desires and dreams are key thoughts, which keep us tied to the egoic mind and keep us busy with plans for getting what we want. They also generate a majority of our feelings: When our desires and dreams are getting met, we are happy and confident; when they aren’t, we are unhappy, sad, angry, ashamed, and fearful.
We don’t like it when we are not getting what we want because this results in feelings we don’t like. In particular, we feel powerless and afraid. We feel that if our desires and dreams are meaningful, then we should be able to attain them. If we aren’t able to, we feel we have failed at something important. We feel as if our life is going wrong—or worse: We are afraid we will never have the life we want, and that will mean we are doomed to unhappiness, failure, and shame—forever.
We take our desires and dreams very personally. This assumption that they are meaningful implies that they are personally meaningful, that they are specially made for us. If we aren’t able to attain them (preferably immediately), we feel ashamed, as if we failed at a mission we were given. We feel betrayed by life and by ourselves. We thought we were powerful enough to make life happen our way, and now we see we aren’t. That is a blow to the ego, which assumes that it is that powerful. This humbles us, which is a good thing because it shows us the truth: We are not the one in control of our destiny. We co-create alongside something else that is shaping our life.
It can take many experiences of the failure of our dreams before we begin to catch on that maybe our dreams are not true. Maybe other things are more important than them. Maybe the dashing of our dreams and what is learned from that is more valuable than the fulfillment of any dream.
Having our dreams dashed forces us to see that life goes on, and it goes on as it always has: unpredictably and in a way that is beyond our control. Having dreams and desires gives us a story line, a sense of destiny, while life is never that clear. We don’t really know where our lives are going, but having desires and dreams gives us a script, so we think we know: The plan is to fulfill our desires. This plan, however, was created by the ego, and it doesn’t really know what life intends for us. It doesn’t know essence’s plan or even that there is a plan beyond its desires. It is convinced its desires and dreams are what life is all about, and we believe it.
Having desires and dreams gives the ego something to do. It gives our life structure. What will I do today? I’ll go after what I want. End of story. No need for further questioning. They also keep us focused on the mental world, where plans are made for getting what we want and fantasies are created, which drive those plans forward. All this mental activity keeps our attention off the deeper questions and gives us a pseudo reason for being. It would be one thing if this strategy brought us happiness, but its lack of success at doing this eventually causes us to question the value of our desires. If life isn’t about desire-fulfillment, then what is it about?
The ego has no answer for this, but essence does. Essence’s answer, however, doesn’t come in words. Its answer is released in the moment, as essence moves us forward toward more meaningful activities, ones that don’t necessarily fulfill our desires and dreams but fulfill us on deeper levels.
Freedom from Desire
You will never be free of having desires, but you can be free from the need to have your desires met. We suffer not because we have desires but because we feel we have to have them met. It is possible to have as many desires as you have always had but not suffer over them. We suffer over them because we believe they are essential to our happiness. This belief is actually what causes our suffering.
For most, the solution to the suffering caused by desiring what you don’t have is trying to get it. Consequently, many spend their lives going after what they want, which is what they believe they need to be happy. But there is another solution to this problem of desiring what you don’t have, and that is to see it for what it is: Desire is just the thought “I want….” Can a thought cause suffering? Yes, if you agree with it. Who is this I that wants?
When you see that the I is the ego and not who you really are, it puts wanting in perspective. Wanting is forever coming out of the ego. If you give your attention to it, you will be chasing one desire after another. The ego is in the business of manufacturing desires. There is no real rhyme or reason to what it desires; it wants one thing and then another. Often, it wants opposite things (e.g. “I want a relationship and I want to be independent”). It wants whatever it thinks of or whatever it sees. It is easy to see the ego at work in small children in stores: “I want that. I want that. I want that!” People are designed to want. It is automatic and not meaningful.
Once you are able to separate yourself from this I and see how undiscriminating, random, and constant the ego’s wanting is, you gain some distance from your desires, and there is freedom in that. You can be more objective about them. They no longer seem like they belong to you, and that makes them less compelling. What makes the “I want” so compelling is that it is happening inside you, so you identify with it and believe you do want that—and need that to be happy.
Once you have some distance from this I, you are free to choose whether to listen to it or not. You are more able to evaluate the desire and come to a conclusion about it yourself. Sometimes desires are worth listening to, or at least harmless. The desire for some ice cream, for instance, or for some other pleasure, can bring enjoyment if it is not indulged in too often.
Giving Your Attention to Essence
It is exhausting to be wanting so constantly and so strongly. If you give a lot of attention to the ego’s wanting, it increases, and so does your suffering. By giving the ego’s wanting less attention, you decrease your suffering. Then, it is possible to give your attention to something more rewarding: essence. When your attention is being given to the ego’s wanting, it is not being given to something more fulfilling and true. Shifting your attention from the ego’s wanting to essence not only lessens your suffering but increases your peace, contentment, joy, and happiness. That is a good tradeoff!
The peace, joy, happiness, and contentment of essence are right here, right now, but we overlook them because we pay attention to the loud and noisy mind and its demands: “I want!” They get our attention not only because they are so loud in comparison to essence, but because they are so insistent and full of fear. The ego tells a story that makes its desires feel urgent and important: “You may not survive, and you certainly won’t be happy unless….” The fear that is stirred up fuels action, but it is painful to have this as a motivator.
The Desire to Be Free
Eventually, you surrender your other desires to the one desire that is left—the desire to be free, to be liberated from ego-identification. You can’t have your other desires and this desire. This doesn’t mean you won’t ever get what you want, though, because by “losing your self” (your ego), you gain everything. You see that you never needed what your ego desired anyway. Once you see this, it is easy to give up these desires. If you are everything, is there anything that you lack? What you discover is that you lack nothing, you need nothing, and yet everything that is meaningful is given to you in full measure, including some of the things you desired.
Giving up your desires is nothing more than giving up a thought of wanting. Giving up your thoughts of wanting simply means not giving them your attention—ignoring them. These thoughts have never helped you be happier or even helped you get what you thought you wanted. Wanting is not valuable, so giving up wanting is giving up nothing except for your suffering. Are you willing to give up your suffering? That is a question worth examining because, the truth is, the ego doesn’t want to give up its suffering because it has no purpose without suffering.
We think desires are so valuable. We think we will be deprived if we give them up. But it is like giving up a dream of cake for a real piece of cake. The fantasy can’t compare to the Real, to this delicious moment, which is full of everything you really want and need.
Finding Happiness in Whatever Is Happening
To be happy regardless of what is happening requires choosing certain desires over others. Essentially, it requires choosing what essence wants over what the ego wants. The ego would rather have its ideas, beliefs, opinions, judgments, memories, fantasies, and desires and the separation they cause than the unity and happiness that essence desires.
Essence also desires experience, growth, challenge, not knowing, discovery, and creativity. As a result, it loves and accepts duality. It accepts reality the way it is because it intended it to be this way. If we are to be happy, we also have to learn to desire these things more than we desire ease, comfort, knowing, and the other things the ego desires.
Finding happiness is not so much a matter of giving up desires but giving your attention to the right ones. If you desire what essence wants—peace, happiness, love, contentment, and joy—above all other desires, then you will have them. We choose what we desire by giving our attention to it. What are you giving your attention to? That is what you desire. Are you sure that is what you really want?
This may sound obvious, but you have to want happiness to have it. You have to want to be happy more than you want to be you (the egoic self), with all your stories, beliefs, opinions, judgments, dreams, and memories. Happiness will never be found in being you, not even in being a better, improved version of you; it can only be found in losing your self—losing all thoughts that relate to the me—and finding your true self.
This is the price to be paid for happiness. Happiness is not attained by working harder on improving yourself or working harder in general or by having more money, more beauty, more success, or more friends because you will never have enough of these to make you happy. As long as you are focused on this you, you will not find happiness because the you doesn’t know how to be happy. Only in realizing that you are not this you that you think you are will you find true happiness. When you discover who you really are, you don’t need anything to make you happy because you already are.
The real you has always been happy, and it has always been possible for you to feel this happiness. Whenever you stop thinking or stop paying attention to your thoughts, there it is: peace, contentment, happiness, and joy. It turns out that the only thing in the way of your happiness is your thoughts about you. Involvement with this you (the egoic self), is the cause of suffering. This you and suffering go hand-in-hand: You can’t have one without the other. So, the choice is clear: You can be involved with all your thoughts about you and suffer or you can be involved with essence and be happy by ignoring your thoughts.
Happiness Is a State of Not Desiring
When are you the happiest—when you are desiring something or not? Happiness and desiring can’t co-exist because desiring is an assumption that something is missing, and what can be happy about that? We think we enjoy desiring, but do we really? Through fantasizing, we like to pretend we already have what we desire. But what is better—having what you want or having a fantasy about what you want? Desiring creates a sense of lack when there is no reason to feel lack, and fantasies reinforce this sense of lack.
This moment is exactly as it is meant to be. What is missing in that? The ego’s answer to that is “a lot,” but is that true? Are you going to take the ego’s word for it? When you are aligned with essence, nothing has changed about whatever is happening, but suddenly everything seems just fine the way it is. If you have had even one moment like this, you know it is possible for many more moments to be like this. Nothing changed but your state of consciousness. You changed your mind, or more accurately, you moved out of your mind and into your Heart, where it is possible to feel that this moment is exactly right—for now.
Every moment is completely unique, and it is not long before it changes into something else. We are participants in each moment, but we are not creating it nor do we have the power to change it (it is already too late for that). We do shape the next moment to some extent with our choices, but so much else that is beyond our control is appearing in every moment that we can hardly assume we are central to it; and yet, that is the ego’s attitude. The ego assumes that it can control and change reality, and that its desires are an adequate reason to do so. This is egocentric and unrealistic, and it is good to see this. Once we do, we can relax and stop trying so hard to change things according to our will.
There is another will at work here, much more powerful than ours. It is making life happen all around us, and we are only a small part of this ever-moving, ever-changing experience that we call the moment. We can stand in awe of it, play in it, rejoice in it, or we can lament that it is not the moment we wanted. The ego’s relationship to the moment is ludicrous, although the ego doesn’t see it that way. Fortunately, we are able to separate ourselves from this point of view. What a blessing to see the truth, and what a burden it has been to try to control, change, and fix this blessed moment. Once you are done with that, you can begin to enjoy the moment just the way it is.
It is really possible to enjoy life no matter what is happening because the only one here who is not enjoying life is the ego. There is something else that is enjoying it immensely, and you are That! The secret that happiness lies within is this secret that you are that which is happy, has always been happy, and will always be happy. And the only thing that has kept you from seeing this is the ego. Now that you know yourself as other than the ego, it doesn’t matter how the ego sees things. Its judgments, complaints, fears, and desires don’t have to be yours anymore. They never really were yours. They were just the conditioning you were given.
Loving Your Desires
Essences loves; it doesn’t reject anything. Acceptance is a form of love, and it is the way essence loves. It accepts. It even accepts the ego and desire. Any lack of acceptance we feel for the ego or for desire comes from the ego, and that will keep us tied to it. By accepting our desires rather than rejecting them, we drop into essence where we can experience the real force that is driving and shaping our life.
Essence is fine with desire. When we are aligned with essence, we allow desire to be there, but we don’t give it any power. We allow it because it is part of life—part of the grand design. To be free from desire, all that is really necessary is to stop giving it the power to shape your life. To be free from the suffering caused by desire, all you have to see is that desire creates suffering rather than happiness. How funny that we give desire the power to shape our lives. We really believe our desires—until we don’t. We are not used to examining them or our other thoughts, but once we do, the game changes. Then, it is possible to discover what else is here and what has always been here.
Copyright © 2007 Gina Lake
Excerpted from Anatomy of Desire: How to Be Happy Even When You Don’t Get What You Want by Gina Lake.
Gina Lake has a Masters degree in Counseling Psychology and over twenty years experience supporting people in their spiritual growth. She is also the author of several other books on spirituality, including: Living Your Destiny, Radical Happiness, Return to Essence, and Choosing Love. Gina is available for astrological and channeled phone consultations that support spiritual awakening. For more information or to order her books or to read excerpts or to download Radiance: Experiencing Divine Presence for free, visitwww.radicalhappiness.com. She and her husband, Nirmala, live in Sedona, AZ where they offer satsang and spiritual retreats.