non-dual
Tag
Desire, Fear and Trust
Man has a wonderful mind full of thoughts and imagination. Rather, mind is imagination itself. We imagine a city and build it. We look at memories. We picture a particular kind of life and imagine that we are trying to pursue it according to our accumulated desires and dislikes, which are nothing but memories.
Put simply, we imagine we are life and that the world around us may threaten our efforts to maintain this particular desired version of life.
This way of picturing our relationship with the world will produce an infinite variation of desires. Once desires appear, fears that these desires will not come true also appear. When you look closely, all desires and all fears are fundamentally rooted in two basic longings: longing to exist and the longing to connect. You can also view these longings as fears: fear of loneliness and fear of death.
Seeking the Sage
Seeking Sage,
“So…he is a character in your novel?” she asks as we walk up towards his tiny house. A familiar anticipatory silence unfurls itself softly along the mountain path.
“He is the inspiration,” I say quietly and think about the enormous and old Himalayan cedar that shades his slate roof. I often imagine when he is no more, he will exist as this majestic tree and I will continue to visit, to rest my back against the sturdy and immortal trunk, inhale its fragrance and close my eyes.
Have we misunderstood what happiness is?
We are looking for something that we can add to our lives. Something that can give us the feeling of being safe, of being valuable, loved, and peaceful, and everyone has a, perhaps subconscious, idea of how it will feel or look when the goal is reached or fulfilled. When everything falls in to place.
What it is we think we should achieve depends on what we define ourselves as, and what we define ourselves as defines our idea of success.