Chapter 33,
Desire Not Preference.
To drop desire,
To drop illusion,
Not to suppress desire because then you'd become lifeless,
You'd be without energy.
That would be terrible.
Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy and the more energy we have the better.
That's marvelous,
That's wonderful.
So don't suppress that now.
Understand it,
Understand it.
Don't seek to fulfill the desire so much as to understand the desire and don't just renounce the objects of your desire,
Understand them.
See them in their true light.
See them for what they are really worth because if you just suppress your desire and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire you're likely to be tied to it whereas if you look at it and see it for what it is really worth,
If you understand how you are preparing the ground for misery and disappointment and depression your desire will then be transformed into what I called a preference.
You've got a baby boy.
Oh I'm quite happy because that was my second choice.
Now when you go through life with plenty of preferences but you don't let your happiness depend on any one of them then you're awake.
You're moving towards wakefulness.
Wakefulness,
Happiness,
Call it what you wish,
Is the state of non illusion where you see things not as you are but as they are in as much as this is possible to the human being.
To drop illusions,
To see things,
To see reality.
Every time you are unhappy you have added something to reality.
It is that addition that makes you unhappy.
I'll repeat that.
You have added something.
There is a negative reaction in you.
You provide the reaction.
You have added something and if you examine what you have added there's always an illusion there.
There's a demand,
An expectation,
A craving,
Always.
Examples of illusions,
They are bound but as you begin to move ahead along this path you will discover them for yourself.
For instance the illusion,
The error of thinking,
That by changing the exterior world you change.
You do not change if you merely change your exterior world.
If you get yourself a new job or a new spouse or a new home or a new guru or a new spirituality that doesn't change you.
It's like imagining that you change your handwriting by changing your pen or that you change your capacity to think by changing your hat.
That doesn't change you really and most people spend all of their energy attempting to rearrange the exterior world to suit their tastes and sometimes they succeed you know for about five minutes and they get a little respite and they are tense even during that respite because life is always flowing.
Life is always changing and if you want to live you must have no permanent abode.
You must have nowhere to rest your head.
You have to flow with it.
As the great Confucius says,
The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change but we're looking back are we not and clinging to things in the past and clinging to things in the present.
When you set your hand to the plow you may not look back.
You want to enjoy a melody,
You want to enjoy a symphony,
Don't hold on to a few bars of the music now,
Don't hold on to a couple of notes let them pass,
Let them flow.
Whole enjoyment of a symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to pass.
Whereas if a particular bar were to take your fancy and you would shout to the orchestra to keep playing it again and again and again that wouldn't be a symphony anymore.
You familiar with those tales of Nasruddin?
There's one tale of Nasruddin,
The old Mullah.
He's a kind of a legendary figure.
The Greeks,
The Turks,
The Persians,
They all claim him for themselves.
So there he was he would give his mystical teachings in the form of stories,
Generally funny stories and the butt of the story was generally old Nasruddin himself.
So Nasruddin was one day strumming a guitar or he was playing one note and after a while a crowd collected around him,
This was in the marketplace,
And one of the men there in the crowd said,
That's a nice note you're playing Mullah but why don't you vary it a bit like the other musicians?
Nasruddin says,
Those fools they're searching for the right note I found it.
