Creative Guidance-IASbaba, Inspirational & Educative Articles
Desire is a Ghost:
You can only accommodate one thing on your plate at a time: You can either have peace or you can have your desires. Once this becomes clear: I cannot accommodate both. This is life. When I’m desiring, I’m just desire. I am no being, I am no mind, I am just a desire.
Desire has no existential root. A desire is a ghost. It has no home, it is trying to find something, and it is just floating around. That’s what a desire is. So when you are desiring, you’re not you. You’re just a ghost. How can you find peace and certainty when you’re a ghost?
The very definition of ghost is that you are not there; you’re not a being. I’m a human being, I’m not a ghost, because I have some basis in existence, in reality; I have a body, I have a mind. You are a ghost because you don’t have anything real. You are just a desire floating around.
Fundamentally, you have to come to the conclusion that peace is very physical, it’s a real thing. Once you understand that it’s a real thing, then you have to make a choice: What do I want this moment? I’m not even saying that you have to only be desiring for peace. But at this point in time your desires have taken over you so completely that you’re not even able to accommodate peace, even for a few minutes in a day.
If you tell your mind, for ten minutes just stop desiring and be peaceful, your mind goes crazy because it has identified itself with its desires. Once that identification breaks, once you realize that desiring is happening to you, you are acknowledging it and you don’t have to become that desire. You can have control over it.
You can choose. So that’s what gaining control is. To say, For the next ten minutes I want peace, which means I cannot have any desires. So just sit and drop your desires and try to find that peace. It’ll take a few days, it might take a few months, it might take a few years, it doesn’t matter.
Eventually, you will get to a point where those ten minutes will be yours and yours alone. That is what we are searching for. We’re searching for that one minute where we have full control over our lives, which means we have full control over our thought process.
“This article is a part of the creative endeavor of Nirvana Foundation and IASBABA.”
