By Guy Finley
Ask yourself: how many times have I won the object of my desire, only to find out that it wasn’t enough? How familiar do the following statements seem to you?
“This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened… but what if…”
“I love you… but…”
“This moment is almost perfect… all it needs is…”
The prize won, whatever its name, doesn’t end the feeling we have of needing something else to make us feel whole and complete. So we enter another race, cross another finish line, and wait for the imagined peace or power we imagine as waiting for us there. But even if we get what we want, too soon we hear another starting gun go off, and off we go again!
Left to its own devices, desire cannot change the fact that whatever it wants (or doesn’t want) is powerless to end its feeling of being incomplete. Whatever pleasure it wins (or pain it manages to escape) is always and only as momentary as being on a Ferris wheel, where being up means you’re on the way down; it’s inherent in the ride itself. Think how much this simple analogy explains about our lives.
Have you ever been somewhere and found yourself wanting to be someplace else? Or have you thought about yourself and then wished you could be someone else? We cannot desire to be someplace else without wishing we weren’t in the place that we are; we can’t wish to be someone else without wanting to no longer be who we are. As strange as it seems, we want and we don’t want at the same time.
It’s almost as if something has to be not quite right before we feel as if all is the way it’s “supposed” to be! This ever-present seed of dissatisfaction, the presence of a proverbial snake in the garden, seems unavoidable. And it is — until we realize desire itself can never lead us to the wholeness that it seeks. It can’t. After all, how can something set against itself ever find happiness?
Happiness and wholeness are not found on “the other side of the hill.” The power to be inwardly content comes from learning how to stand on top of the hill, where all that we see – on both sides, at once — belongs to us.
So instead of agreeing to let desire lead you nowhere, bring it into the light of your own higher awareness. Your conscious agreement with this new order of awareness is the same as seeing the whole of yourself. All that was once hidden from your eyes now stands revealed — including the parts of you that want and that don’t want at the same time. Standing there in this unifying light, there’s no longer any need to look for a wholeness to come… you are it.
