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Be, See, Free, We (3 of 10) The Desireless Door of Liberation

So, the topic for today is the second door of liberation: the wishless, having no desire, desirelessness^[1]. Sometimes it is called aimless. I like the word "wishless." This is a very profound and important part of human life. You could probably call us "human desire beings," because desire is such a huge part of human life. It is built-in, and maybe it's fair to say it's inherent to human life. Without desire, nothing would happen. We would just sit and do nothing. We'd be a rock or something. Sometimes, having really no desires is the definition of someone who is depressed.

To want to eat when you're hungry is a desire. To want to pee when your bladder is full is a desire. There are all kinds of desires operating all the time. Some desires get us in big trouble. Some desires are unhealthy and harmful to others, while some are harmful to ourselves. Some desires come with such pressure, constriction, demand, and addiction that just having the desire is really painful.

I discovered this many years ago when I was young. I noticed that I used to love going into bookstores when such things were easily available, and I noticed that I would be exhausted after I left. Looking into it a little more, I discovered it was because I hardly ever bought anything. I didn't have any money, but I'd go down the bookstore shelves thinking, "I want that, I want that, I want that." I just wanted everything, and it was the incessant desire that was exhausting. It was a kind of reaching forward, holding on to, and looking for the next thing. The movement of desire was a kind of stress.

Releasing the Charge of Desire

When we sit in meditation, we begin discovering the stress of desires. Not all desires are stressful, but we can start noticing that some of the tension we carry, some of the stress we have, some of the pressure and exhaustion, is partly born from the ways in which we relate to desire. It comes from the ways we participate in them, pick them up, lean into them, or hold on to them.

Part of the movement toward becoming calm or settled in meditation is a movement of releasing the pressure around desires: the holding them, the needing them, and the authority or command that they sometimes carry. It's not an anti-desire meditation, but it is a freedom from all that extra weight, all that extra participation we have with our desires.

As I said, there are two very general categories of desires: desires that arise with no charge or pressure at all, and desires that arise with charge and pressure. Even healthy desires can arise with a lot of pressure, tension, and burden. They can come with self-centeredness, measuring ourselves, expecting things of ourselves, and extra beliefs and opinions that we hold onto about what we want to have or negative desires about what we do not want to have. Simply justifying a desire because it is appropriate and healthy sometimes causes people to overlook how unnecessarily they participate in that desire.

Meditation is not necessarily anti-desire; it is a freedom from all that extra cost. It is freedom from the ways we go into debt because of our desire, the ways in which we are burdened by it, and the ways in which we lose our freedom.

The Leaning Forward

In meditation, we begin tuning into that stress, tension, and charge—the leaning forward that happens with desire. I saw this first many years ago during my first retreats in Thailand. We had to walk from the meditation hall down a hill in the jungle, down a dirt road^[2] to some other place where we would have lunch. It was the main meal of the day; there was no food in the evening and only a very light breakfast. I was young and quite hungry.

I started noticing that coming out of meditation, I was pretty grounded and centered in myself. But then, as I walked down that road to where the food was, I could feel that somehow my center of gravity—the center of where my attention was—was ahead of myself. I was leaning forward, wanting the lunch, planning it, and thinking about it. I was almost outside of my body. Then I would pull back and get myself grounded again. Soon, the desires and thoughts around the food would come up again, I'd be leaning forward, and I would have to come back. There was a seesaw going on, and it was quite fascinating to see.

Acting With Freedom

As we learn not to charge desires with so much energy, the desires themselves can start abating. We start feeling a place of contentment and peace. This is something we can have a desire for, but it's not a desire with a charge. It is simply an acknowledgment: "This is good. This is coming home." It is a place of harmony and non-resistance, a place of non-fixation. This is a place where what is healthy within me can flow and move through me.

This movement toward releasing the charge of desires and the attachment to them as a movement toward health can make it a lot easier to let go. As we have deeper ease and contentment, we also have more wisdom about whether we should act on a desire or not. We can act on the desire, sometimes with lots of energy, but without the charge, contraction, or tension that we had before.

In some ways, for appropriate desires like compassion, care, and other wholesome intentions, it can actually be easier to act on a desire when there's freedom in relationship to it. If you have real, healthy freedom within, you'll see and feel when your relationship to a desire is unhealthy—when greed, hatred, and delusion^[3] are part of it, or when there is some kind of attachment to it.

This movement toward learning to be free of our desires—where there still might be desires, but we are free of needing them or being compelled to act on them—creates a very still, quiet mind that allows something deeper and deeper to release.

The Door of Liberation

The analogy I use for this is to imagine a big bowl. When I took my young kids to science museums, they sometimes had these very big, six-foot bowls. You'd stand up on a little bench to look into it, and the kids would drop marbles in. There was a hole at the bottom of the bowl. The marbles would spin, go around, knock into each other a little bit, and move in all kinds of fun ways. It was fun to watch them.

Every once in a while, the marbles would cross down to the bottom, but they had so much momentum that they would cross over and not fall in the hole. They would keep spinning until the momentum lessened enough, and they started staying more and more near the bottom of the bowl. At some point, they'd be slow enough that when they came to the hole, they would drop through—kind of like a golf ball falling into the cup on a putting green.

When an immense amount of desire and wanting is not operating so much, the mind gets quieter and quieter. There is less and less momentum, bringing us to a place where it's almost like we're simply able to breathe and be present. Everything is functioning in a healthy way, but it is clear there is a peace and coolness of the mind and heart where there is no inclination or movement of desire whatsoever. No charge whatsoever. When the momentum of desires comes to a standstill, we fall into that little cup where something can rest in a deep, deep way.

But it's not really a cup like in golf. It is hard to talk about, but if you fall into this cup, the cup has no bottom, no sides, and no top. There is nothing in there. There is no limitation. There is nothing that holds it. This beautiful state where desires are let go of, and nothing is holding anything, is a profound experience of liberation and freedom.

This door of the wishless is one of the doors to this experience of deep release. Everyone will go through the door of desirelessness. This is one of the movements as meditation gets stronger, deeper, and more healthy. We feel the beautiful health of being so settled and peaceful that this is one of the doors that can open, and we let go deeply.

A Stepping Stone to Freedom

But even way short of this being a door to complete liberation, learning how to shift and change our desires is incredibly valuable. Letting go of unhealthy desires and learning how to be with challenges without desire—without needing things to be different—is a stepping stone to greater freedom. Not that we have to have a policy of blindly accepting difficulties and discomforts, but learning the ability—perhaps in meditation—to be with discomfort and have no desire in relationship to it can be a very profound movement toward spiritual health.

To study this is to understand desire and its different qualities. Over the next 24 hours, you might look at the desires you have. Talk to friends about the desires you have, to see if you can tease apart the simplicity of a desire versus the charge that is added to it. Maybe you can separate those and let go of the charge, and then decide whether the desire is appropriate to have or not.

Thank you. Tomorrow, we will do the third door of liberation. Thank you.