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The Betrayal of Desires in the Quest for Liberation

“For you must only be liberated by going away from all desire to reach a no-desire land — a land of freedom.”

After you are born, you celebrate your birthdays. You say to the world I am celebrating my birth, and I am happy today because I was born in this world. You feel exceptional on the day of your birth. You wish this day to come again and again, your family wishes for it, and your love once, too. Then the next day would be the same old day, nothing special; you missed that day and said I wish I would receive this kind of treatment, the feeling of being in this world not only on my birthday but every day of the year.

So what you do to make your day special is by being memorable. Your mind says until you become special, you won’t feel the same as your birthday. To become special, you need something to achieve, to have some power, to have money or the kind of wealth that attracts others so that you would be treated special again by your family, society and the whole outside world. You desire a thing, hoping for it to be fulfilled. But in this pursuit of external happiness, you unknowingly invite suffering. If your desire is fulfilled, you might feel happy for some time, sense a special moment, and try to hold onto those fleeting emotions of contentment. But that moment is lost or turned into a new desire as time passes, leaving you in a perpetual cycle of seeking and never truly finding happiness.

You often lose that moment because you wish to be unique, which means better or different from the usual. Something you feel is better than the previous but needs to be fulfilled. So, eventually, your desire is never fulfilled. Sometimes, you fulfil your desire as you thought of it, but ending a desire is the start of a new one. The cycle of being fulfilled your desire never finishes. Whatever you want to fulfil, you won’t be able to accomplish. If you wish to become cruel, you won’t be one. If you want to be at peace, you won’t be at one. If you want to be a sage, you won’t be one. Whatever is going to happen never happens according to your desires. Your desire lets you away from the things you wish for; Desire is the obstacle. Whoever you are, consent to it. Don’t move away from the reality. Don’t go to the future; accept the present. 

There isn’t anything in feeling special on your birthday or otherwise. You seek happiness, but you receive suffering. What is it that a human is missing in the show of life? Humans fail to acknowledge the basis of their birth is not to seek happiness, which is the state of being. You never miss happiness, even momentarily, but we forget to look at the right place. Your inherent desires let you be misguided to seek it externally when you will find it internally. It means, for example, a beggar begs for food to feed the stomach. But he never fills his belly by just wanting it or feeling special. It is a basic necessity of a body. If you get to eat the food, your body will satisfied.

Similarly, you seek happiness, but human elementary fulfilment is happiness, which isn’t findable outside the human being. It is already sitting deep inside you. Only a curtain of desire by the ego-sense lets you find it in the outside world. This realisation empowers you, as it means that you have the power to find true happiness within yourself, independent of external circumstances or possessions. 

You can free yourself from futile desires by realising that you won’t need anything special from the world. Your desire must disappear from your thoughts and mind, and then you realise there is no way of life toward the world you live in but the way to yourself. For that, you don’t need to be a great thinker, have a knowledge of spirituality or gain wisdom from holy scripture. That again fuels the ego to desire to become a sage. It once more tries to become special because desire is desire! It makes no difference whether the object of desire is material or spiritual. Every desire is a confinement of you. But when you relax in your ordinaries, you can be yourself and be liberated. You realise that what you are trying to achieve, to become special, is already within you and will never be taken away; you are on the right path – on the path of no desire, on the path of heaven.

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