Chapter 19 Desire & Desirelessness

Death is more important than life. Life is superficial and trivial; death is profound. Through death, you enter into true life; through life, you merely arrive at death, nothing more. Any life we speak of, any life we refer to, is simply a journey towards death. If you understand that your life is merely a journey and nothing more, then you will have little interest in life and more interest in death. Once someone has a greater interest in death, they can delve into the depths of life; otherwise, they remain on the surface. But we have no interest in death at all; in fact, we avoid the fact, we constantly avoid the fact. Death exists; we are dying every moment. Death is not a distant thing; it is here and now: we are dying. But even as we die, we continue to care about life. This attachment to life, this excessive concern for life, is an escape, a fear. Death is there, growing deep within our hearts.

Shift your focus, turn your attention to this. If you become concerned about death, life will truly reveal itself to you for the first time, because in the moment you can face death with composure, you gain immortality; knowing the moment of death, you also know eternal life.

Death is a door to what we call life, that superficial, trivial life. There is a door. If you can pass through this door, you reach another kind of life—a deeper, eternal, deathless, immortal life. Therefore, to escape that so-called life that is nothing but death, one must pass through the door of death; only then can one attain that truly existing, active, deathless life.

However, one should pass through this door very consciously. We have died many, many times, but each time someone dies, they become unconscious. You are so afraid of death that when death comes to you, you become unconscious. You pass through this door in a state of unconsciousness, and then you are born again, the whole meaningless life begins again, and you still don't care about death.

A person who cares more about death than life begins to consciously pass through this door. This is what meditation means: consciously passing through the door of death. To die consciously is meditation. But you cannot wait for death, you don't have to wait for death, because death is always there: it is a door that exists within you. It is not something that will happen in the future, nor is it something external that you must obtain; it is simply a door within you.

Once you accept the fact of death and begin to feel it, experience it, and be aware of it, you begin to relax through the inner door. The door opens, and through this door of death, you can glimpse eternal life. Only through death can one glimpse eternal life; there is no other way. So, in reality, all that is known as meditation is simply a conscious death; simply a deep, inward, and submerged state; simply a departure from the surface and a journey into the depths.

Desire is energy

The paradox of existence, the dialectic of existence, operates like this: if you are willing to die, this willingness keeps you from dying; but if you are unwilling to die, this unwillingness, this excessive attachment and desire for life, kills you. No matter what attitude we take, we always arrive at its opposite. This is the profound dialectic of existence. What is expected will never come, what is hoped for will never be fulfilled, what is desired will never be satisfied. The more you desire it, the more you lose it. This is true at every level; the law is the same. If you demand too much of anything, it is precisely this demand that will cause you to lose it. If you love life too much, you become closed off, you become like a dead man, even while you are alive. Therefore, a person full of longing for life is a dead man; he is already dead, merely a corpse. The more he feels like a corpse, the more he longs to be alive, but he does not understand dialectics. That longing is poisonous. A person who has no longing for life—like the Buddha, who has no desire for life—lives passionately; he blossoms perfectly and completely.

- Complete desire leads to apathy

From what I understand, the struggle with desire is a disease; giving up the struggle is freedom. That is true death: when you simply give up. If you can simply lie down, without struggling to live, without any trace of struggle, that death can become enlightenment. If you simply lie down and accept, without inner movement, without desire, without wanting to find help, without wanting to find the way, if you simply lie down and accept, that acceptance will become a great thing.

But that's what happens. A person who becomes disillusioned with life begins to desire death. It becomes a desire again. He's not desiring death; he's desiring something outside of his life. So even someone full of longing for life can commit suicide, but this suicide isn't without desire; it's truly just a desire for something else. This is a very interesting point, one of many ultimate goals to pursue. If you turn to the opposite, then you're back in the cycle, back in a vicious cycle, and you'll never escape it. But this keeps happening.

A person abandons life to go into the forest, seeking the sacred, liberation, or something else, but now, desire is back. He has only changed the object of his desire, not the desire itself. Now, the object is not wealth, but God; the object is not this world, but that world, but the object remains, the desire is still the same, the longing is still the same—the tension and pain are still the same. With a new object, the whole process repeats itself completely. You can change the object of your desire life after life, but you will always remain the same, because that desire is the same.

So when I say "desirelessness," I mean the absence of desire: not the invalidity of the object, but the invalidity of desire itself. It's not about realizing the world is meaningless, because then you'll desire another world; it's not about life being useless, so now you must desire death, annihilation, cessation, and nirvana. No, I mean the invalidity of desire itself. The desire disappears. It's not that the object is replaced or substituted, but that desire ceases to exist. It is this absence that becomes eternal life.

- Not suppression, but transcendence

If you can sense the fact that this desire is useless and meaningless, then you will not create another object to desire. Thus, the desire ceases. Become aware of it, and it stops. Then there will be a state of non-existence, and this non-existence is peaceful because there is no desire there.

With desire in your heart, you cannot be at peace; desire is the real noise. Even if you have no thoughts—if you have a controlled mind and you can stop thinking—a deeper desire will continue because you stopped the thought only to achieve something. A subtle, delicate noise is still there. Somewhere inside, someone will look and ask: Has what was desired been achieved? "Thoughts have stopped, where is the divine attainment? Where is God? Where is enlightenment?" But if you can become aware of desire itself, then it becomes useless.

The mind's whole trick is this: you're always aware that something has become useless, so you change the object, and in this change, desire continues to grip your consciousness. It always happens like this: when one house becomes useless, another house becomes attractive; when one man becomes unattractive and unpleasant, another man becomes attractive. This continues indefinitely. Once you become aware that what you desire is no longer useful, the mind will immediately find other objects.

When this happens, that void is lost. When something becomes useless, ineffective, and unattractive, stay in that void and be aware: has the object become useless, or has the desire itself become useless? If you can feel the utter uselessness of the desire, suddenly something within you falls away, and suddenly you transcend to a new level of consciousness. It is nothingness, absence, negation; no new cycle begins.

In that instant, you are freed from the cycle of reincarnation, from this mortal world. But you cannot make liberation from reincarnation an object of your desire. Do you feel the difference? You cannot make desirelessness an object.

Was the Buddha's desire for enlightenment not a desire? Yes, it was a desire; the Buddha had this desire. When the Buddha said, "I will not leave this place, I will not leave unless I attain enlightenment," it was a desire. With this desire, a vicious cycle began, even for the Buddha.