Everyone has needs and feelings. An enlightened person too has needs and feelings. So don’t think that if you eliminate needs and feelings you will be enlightened. You, in fact, would be deluded.
Desire is necessary to help us grasp life in order to experience it more fully. The purpose of desire is to take us to the need, but usually our desire is a longing for things to be other than what they are. When desire is not used as an indicator to reveal and fulfill need, it will cause suffering, because we are using it for something other than what its purpose is.
Desires are of two types: cravings and aversions, both of which lead to suffering. It is through these opposite attachments that we lose ourselves and lose the reality we are experiencing. We thus end up with inauthentic and superficial living. The suffering that results is to get us to live more deeply and to become more authentic.
Living authentically means, in this application, to attend to what arises within us in a welcoming way, seeing that what arises is the need we have. To attend to the need is not the means to enlightenment. Attending to the need is enlightenment. Denial, shame, escapism, manipulation in relation to what arises is anti-enlightenment.
The path to enlightenment involves the complete acceptance that suffering (dukkha) in the form of being born, working, handling relationships, growing old, and so on is an essential part of what makes us human. Desiring to escape from this reality, rather than embracing it as part of our journey inhibits our learning and blocks our expansion of consciousness.
There is a solution to the suffering we experience, which is to let go of desire and to practice detachment so that compassion may flow and the Divine Presence be contacted.
All Soul Perspectives are authored by Andrew Schneider.
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Although much of the above article makes sense to me, it is my opinion that letting go of desire and practicing detachment is not being true to yourself. How does letting go of desire allow compassion to flow? If our desires are realistic, how can they end up hurting us? Can't anything in life have the potential to hurt us?
Be true to yourself . . . be realistic . . . never let go of desire. Desire is part of what makes us alive!
