Message #16377

[zap]

It seems contradictory because you can think that as long as you have a human body, you will have human desires. It's a little tricky, like a Catch-22. It is the body which produces desires for food, sleep, and rest or just the desire to get on the computer. If one eliminates the desire for other things, these basic bodily desires seem to be the bare minimum and all a person has left. At this point, has he transcended his humanity or fallen to the lowest level of it - an apathetic state? So what I am saying is that these types of statements can be confusing.

A person can pretend to not have desires, but does that really do much good? Like Krishna says in the Gita, "What avails mere suppression?" It is easy for us to fall into a pretension of being desireless (because we are building a spiritual persona for ourselves), when really the desires have only been repressed. It seems that we can make progress this way, only by torturing ourselves to the point of realizing that desire can't really be defeated. Desire has to be fulfilled. Fulfilled desire is just another way of saying desirelessness. They are not two different things. The words make you think they are direct opposites but they in fact mean the same thing. This is the paradox of language.

God, we are told, is the true fulfillment of them. But in just being told, we are still not satisfied. So it has to become our own realization.

I may tell you about the satisfaction of a million dollars. You may quote me endlessly on that. You may live through me, and enjoy hearing about it. But it will never be like having those million dollars yourself.

As long as what we really - really really really - want is something besides God, the mind will pursue that consciously or unconsciously.