The "I" of desire...

Always there is the entrapment on this journey of ego's desirous state.  The "I" that I think I am is a bundle of desire.  It cannot be without desire.  It desires food, clothing, shelter, sex, things and more things.  No matter what state I shall find myself in, there will be the "need" of the body for what it perceives to be and what it desires to be its continuance.  Nothing I find here in this world is meaningful, because everything seems to be a reflected or projected state of desire, which is in and of itself without worth.  Why?  Because it is not real.


I can dress this form however I would like.  I feel certain that the "I" of desire can be whatever desire it wishes to be.  It can be poor or wealthy, sick or healthy, on top of the world or in the lowest hell.  There is no difference.  It is desire itself.  It is resistance itself.  It experiences flow or obstruction.  Again, there is no difference.  One is pleasant, the other is unpleasant and painful.  None of  it affects the actuality of existence.  In my truest state, I am not separate from pleasure or pain, from ups nor downs, from back or forth.  While this frame that I project does not want to experience pain, the truth is unaffected by all of it. 

The goal is to get free of the framework itself, to realize my ultimate autonomy from all the fluctuations of consciousness itself.  I know that it is simple... the most simple of simple things.  I can feel it sometimes.  It is already my nature, but to understand fully and consciously my nature is the burning earnestness of my seeking... how silly that it cannot be found through seeking.  How do I seek without seeking?  This seems to be the question that is raised this morning.  I constantly seek in the world.  I seek to add to "myself" various experiences, various attitudes... the gathering of trinkets to line my nest.  None of it ultimately means anything.

I had a thought this last year which has stuck with me, and it comes into my head every time I wish to do something other than this journey, which I feel is ultimately something that I am merely doing... without real effort on my part.  That thought is, "How can I know what is meaningful to me in this world without knowing who I am first?"  Meaning is derived from expression.  We give meaning to something.  It has no meaning other than that which we give it.  Meaning is intensely personal, and there is no real arbiter of universal meaning in all of experience.  Therefore, how can I know what is meaningful to me when I do not feel that I truly know what and who I am? 

I may guess at who I am.  I may believe that it is this or that or that I am One with all things or whatever I am trying to make my form be at a certain point.  But all of this is meaningless without the real seeing of my reality.  Without the actual, I am stabbing in the dark at what I hope will define me or bring me satisfaction.  What is actual?  What is true... really true?  What is being itself?

I am locked within a dream.  This I know to be true through my own relative experience.  I don't need anyone to convince me otherwise... nor does it really matter.  What matters is what lies beyond the dream.  What matters is the truth of what establishes and perpetuates the "me" that I perceive myself to be.  What matters is seeing through the desirous state, the identified state, the feeling that my body is me and I am my body, whether it be my body of knowledge, emotion, experience, memory, or other accumulated garbage.  What is consciousness itself, and what gives rise to it?  What am I?

Occasionally, I get sidetracked on this journey.  The temptation to abandon what seems to be a useless search for truth that ends up nowhere is constant.  I am not sure that this is not a valid point.  What good will it be if I do know the truth?  I only know that, for me, this aching longing to be REAL drives me onward.  To function from a real state, to live a life where I know what I am and who I am, to live only from that place of integrity as I truly am is such a burning, intense feeling that I always return to it.  I cannot seem to leave it alone, and believe me, I have tried. 

The thing that drives me on is that every time I examine truly and honestly what it is that I am and I rid myself of what I am not, there is greater joy in being itself.  The life of separateness, isolation, and loneliness that defines life apart is a lie at its innermost depths.  A life apart is no life at all; it is desolation itself.  There are no words to describe the misery that I had become accustomed to living life as a lie.  The suspicion alone that defined the life I used to lead was enough to drive anyone mad, except that I had no frame of reference to realize that it was madness itself. 

There is a place that I suspect, that I have had tastes of, that I feel at the deepest, innermost core of me where all is known and nothing is apart from.  There is a place where I have no questions.  There is a place of profound realization of all that is and is not me.  I can feel it at my most quiet... when all the world goes quiescent in me.  In being there is knowing.  Without the external me, the internal state of all can be felt.  What does it take to make this permanent, to make this actual, without further movements inward or outward? 

Whenever I desire, that is not the inner being-ness of my actual state.  Whenever I resist, that is not the inner state of knowing.  How do I live without either, but not in exclusion of either?  How do I encompass all, and know that no one thing is the true essence of me?  How do I break open this shell and actually see?