Principle #3: Summon Pure Desire
This post is third in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life" on cultivating a life of joy, prosperity and abundance. The first two posts covered Principle #1: Live in the Now and Principle #2: Enter the Divine Mind.
Last week several readers commented on the description of this series - cultivating a life of a joy, prosperity, abundance - and wondered whether I was promoting a materialist viewpoint.
In my various travels, I've rarely met people for whom material possessions actually made them feel abundant. I've met billionaires who still look for parking spaces with money on the meter, and penniless mostly-naked sadhus filled with supreme delight by a scoop of rice in their begging bowls. Whether rich or poor, something other than money has evoked the experience of prosperity...or prevented it.
"The most important factor in the quality of life for a human being is how the person's mind is managed," writes Richard Thurman, a Tibetan scholar who travels frequently with the Dalai Lama. "Transforming our consciousness is the most important work we can ever do."
How we "manage our minds" is central to how we perceive reality and how we feel about the circumstances of our lives. Creating consciously is about moving beyond the pursuit of external pleasure into the natural abundance of the awakened mind.
Which brings us to Principle #3...tricky territory indeed...Desire.
How do we work with desire without getting lost in it?
The Buddha warned that desire is the primary cause of all human suffering. He said our continuous craving for comfort, pleasure and material possessions can never be fully satiated, so inevitably we end up in pain. John Cleese declared the modern version of this, "I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires." The Buddha would have approved.
But now we have a dilemma. While many traditions recognize desire a source of human torment, we also know that desire is an essential element for creation. Whether it's the sexual desire to conceive a child or the social desire to save the rainforest, how can we create without desire?
It's useful to return to a distinction made in last week's post: the distinction between the ego mind and the Divine Mind. Our egos are ripe with individual desires and attachments that ultimately cause us anguish, as the Buddha discovered so many centuries ago.
Alternately, the Divine Mind or universal consciousness is imbued with a different kind of desire -- pure, unpolluted, non-judgmental desire. This desire is the primordial desire of creation, from which the entire world manifests. It exists in the heart of the universal Self, beyond duality, beyond right and wrong, where creation is simply a playful movement of consciousness. By accessing this state, we can know and live the purest desire within the Self.
In Living Deeply (Schlitz, Vietan and Amorok), Yoruba chief and storyteller Luisah Teish shares how her African tradition describes this kind of experience:
The way we talk about it, we would speak of a person realigning their aurie, their earthly head, with ip'ori, their heavenly head. Ip'ori is that part of a person that is connected to spirit, that always has been and always will be. And ip'ori knows what your contract with creation was when you chose to take a body and come into this world.
Transformational teacher Angeles Arrien relays a similar concept held by the Inuit:
There's a lovely Inuit saying that there are really two plans to every day: there's my plan and there's the Mystery's plan. [The first] is an egoic plan. But there's a deeper plan that is much stronger than any egoic plan. This plan gets revealed in silence, with specific intention and attention. What often happens for people in silence and in nature, in prayer or affirmation, is that once they let go and really listen, something else emerges that wasn't on the agenda.
For me, after many years of meditation, I finally asked myself: From which of these states would I rather create a life? From aurie or ip'ori? From ego's agenda or Mystery's agenda? I could spend my whole life exerting my ego to what avail? Even if my ego were capable of making me the next Oprah (which is highly dubious), that would still be paltry compared to cosmic consciousness. What is this incarnation dedicated to after all...or any incarnation for that matter?
I committed to live the Mystery. While my execution is highly imperfect, the intention changed the course of things. And what I've discovered, dissolving into the desire in the heart of the Self, is a doorway into the cosmic bliss experience described by the mystics of the ages. This verse in the Siva Sutras expresses it beautifully: "Hrdaye citta samghattad drshya swapa darshanam." Loosely translated it says when the mind falls into the heart consciousness (Divine Mind), you simultaneously experience both the void and the arising of the entire manifest universe. Experiencing yourself as both emptiness and the entire universe, you become everything you could possibly desire.
As my teacher would say, "You are meant to fulfill desire - not in a human way, but in a divine way."
Exercise for Tapping Pure Desire - Last week we started exploring the yoga of sound. According to the yogis, various sounds carry unique energies that can awaken specific parts of the brain and subtle body. This exercise builds upon last weeks' practice of bringing awareness into the central energy meridian, called the sushumna, and using specific sounds to activate desired energies. Today, we'll be working with the sound "eeee", the seed sound in Sanskrit for the energy of pure desire and divine will.
Sit quietly and bring your attention to the spinal column. Visualize a luminous channel of light running up the spinal column, from the tailbone up to the crown of the head and out into infinite space. Now bring your attention to the heart center in the middle of the chest. As you focus on the heart center, softly tone the sound "eeeee" either out loud or inwardly. Repeat the sound as many times as you like, feeling it vibrate within the entire chest cavity. As you work with the sound, hold the intention to be guided toward the highest desires of your soul. After the mediation, write down any guidance or intuition you receive about desires that are meaningful for you to create.
Last week several readers commented on the description of this series - cultivating a life of a joy, prosperity, abundance - and wondered whether I was promoting a materialist viewpoint.
In my various travels, I've rarely met people for whom material possessions actually made them feel abundant. I've met billionaires who still look for parking spaces with money on the meter, and penniless mostly-naked sadhus filled with supreme delight by a scoop of rice in their begging bowls. Whether rich or poor, something other than money has evoked the experience of prosperity...or prevented it.
"The most important factor in the quality of life for a human being is how the person's mind is managed," writes Richard Thurman, a Tibetan scholar who travels frequently with the Dalai Lama. "Transforming our consciousness is the most important work we can ever do."
How we "manage our minds" is central to how we perceive reality and how we feel about the circumstances of our lives. Creating consciously is about moving beyond the pursuit of external pleasure into the natural abundance of the awakened mind.
Which brings us to Principle #3...tricky territory indeed...Desire.
How do we work with desire without getting lost in it?
The Buddha warned that desire is the primary cause of all human suffering. He said our continuous craving for comfort, pleasure and material possessions can never be fully satiated, so inevitably we end up in pain. John Cleese declared the modern version of this, "I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires." The Buddha would have approved.
But now we have a dilemma. While many traditions recognize desire a source of human torment, we also know that desire is an essential element for creation. Whether it's the sexual desire to conceive a child or the social desire to save the rainforest, how can we create without desire?
It's useful to return to a distinction made in last week's post: the distinction between the ego mind and the Divine Mind. Our egos are ripe with individual desires and attachments that ultimately cause us anguish, as the Buddha discovered so many centuries ago.
Alternately, the Divine Mind or universal consciousness is imbued with a different kind of desire -- pure, unpolluted, non-judgmental desire. This desire is the primordial desire of creation, from which the entire world manifests. It exists in the heart of the universal Self, beyond duality, beyond right and wrong, where creation is simply a playful movement of consciousness. By accessing this state, we can know and live the purest desire within the Self.
In Living Deeply (Schlitz, Vietan and Amorok), Yoruba chief and storyteller Luisah Teish shares how her African tradition describes this kind of experience:
The way we talk about it, we would speak of a person realigning their aurie, their earthly head, with ip'ori, their heavenly head. Ip'ori is that part of a person that is connected to spirit, that always has been and always will be. And ip'ori knows what your contract with creation was when you chose to take a body and come into this world.
Transformational teacher Angeles Arrien relays a similar concept held by the Inuit:
There's a lovely Inuit saying that there are really two plans to every day: there's my plan and there's the Mystery's plan. [The first] is an egoic plan. But there's a deeper plan that is much stronger than any egoic plan. This plan gets revealed in silence, with specific intention and attention. What often happens for people in silence and in nature, in prayer or affirmation, is that once they let go and really listen, something else emerges that wasn't on the agenda.
For me, after many years of meditation, I finally asked myself: From which of these states would I rather create a life? From aurie or ip'ori? From ego's agenda or Mystery's agenda? I could spend my whole life exerting my ego to what avail? Even if my ego were capable of making me the next Oprah (which is highly dubious), that would still be paltry compared to cosmic consciousness. What is this incarnation dedicated to after all...or any incarnation for that matter?
I committed to live the Mystery. While my execution is highly imperfect, the intention changed the course of things. And what I've discovered, dissolving into the desire in the heart of the Self, is a doorway into the cosmic bliss experience described by the mystics of the ages. This verse in the Siva Sutras expresses it beautifully: "Hrdaye citta samghattad drshya swapa darshanam." Loosely translated it says when the mind falls into the heart consciousness (Divine Mind), you simultaneously experience both the void and the arising of the entire manifest universe. Experiencing yourself as both emptiness and the entire universe, you become everything you could possibly desire.
As my teacher would say, "You are meant to fulfill desire - not in a human way, but in a divine way."
Exercise for Tapping Pure Desire - Last week we started exploring the yoga of sound. According to the yogis, various sounds carry unique energies that can awaken specific parts of the brain and subtle body. This exercise builds upon last weeks' practice of bringing awareness into the central energy meridian, called the sushumna, and using specific sounds to activate desired energies. Today, we'll be working with the sound "eeee", the seed sound in Sanskrit for the energy of pure desire and divine will.
Sit quietly and bring your attention to the spinal column. Visualize a luminous channel of light running up the spinal column, from the tailbone up to the crown of the head and out into infinite space. Now bring your attention to the heart center in the middle of the chest. As you focus on the heart center, softly tone the sound "eeeee" either out loud or inwardly. Repeat the sound as many times as you like, feeling it vibrate within the entire chest cavity. As you work with the sound, hold the intention to be guided toward the highest desires of your soul. After the mediation, write down any guidance or intuition you receive about desires that are meaningful for you to create.
posted by Stacey Lawson at
8:59 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home