Here at planetlightworker.com we will focus on one of the 30 spiritual principles each month. We will examine the various principles as they show up in the lives of 21st Century planetary citizens. This month, the principle of Desire attracts my attention.

Whenever I open a book of Rumi’s poetry, the exact words I need jump off the page at me. This morning, I read this:

“All desires are the desire for God, obscured and veiled.”

The spiritual principle of Desire puzzles us, perhaps because the common use of the word and its spiritual definition differ so vastly. Ordinarily, we use the word desire as a verb to designate that we want something . . . something that we think will make us feel better, more complete, more whole, more happy. “I desire you.” However, in its spiritual sense, desire becomes a noun. Spiritual desire moves us, informs us, and guides us toward wholeness. Desire is a force which drives our lives. Desire plays a fundamental role in our purpose for being alive.

From The Invisible Garment we read:

Desire

This thought – that the energy you experience as desire actually represents your longing to remember that you are united with wholeness – radically changes everything, doesn’t it?

Imagine a thing that you want: an article of clothing, a house, a car, a job, a lover, or a pet. Make it a real, solid object. Let the thing talk to you. Let it tell you how much better your life will be if/when you own it. Let it convince you that you must “go after” it with an intention to posses it. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how things call to us? They seem to want us to own them as much as we “desire” to possess them.

Now, stop and shift your attention. Let this object of your desire transform into a metaphor of your longing to be whole. Let it become an enticement toward reuniting with God. Let it become a force field that magnetizes you toward peace, love, unparalleled happiness. Let its “object-ness” become an energy. That energy is Desire.

Do you see that this happens unconsciously every time you purchase anything? Literally, everything that you feel a need to own speaks to you of the interrelatedness of all beings, all objects, and all manifestation. Your attraction to it pulls you toward your memory that the realm of form is a great seamless weave from which we all emerge and in which we all “act as if” we were separated.

Each of these spiritual principles focuses itself somewhere in our physical body. If the principle of Desire appears in your personal weave, then you have a special relationship with your eyes.

Once a Native American teacher spoke to me of the light that pours out of our eyes – the spiritual light of the inner sun centered in the head of each person. He told me to spend the day “reversing” my vision. We learn in school that we see things because the sun or some artificial source of light bounces off a form and into our eyes, creating an image that our brains can interpret as a solid object. This teacher asked me to imagine that the opposite happens – that my eyes send out beams of light, which “grant beingness” to a form. In that sense, I literally create the form, because my eyes have given it the dignity of becoming visible.

While this idea may be a little radical for you, it isn’t for the quantum physicist. He or she would agree. The observed and the observer are intricately and exquisitely interdependent. Until something is observed, it simply resides in the realm of possibility. Does “residing in the realm of possibility” make an object less real? Well, to the observer, yes. Until you recognize a something (an object or an idea), it isn’t real to you, although its potential may be forever present all around you.

Now, this concept brings us back to wholeness. Until you experience wholeness, it resides in the “realm of possibility.” Desire’s job is to pull you, evoke you, seduce you to remember that you are already complete, already divine, already full . . . that you need nothing, lack nothing, and want for nothing.

The angels who initially introduced me to this information said something that haunts my contemporary, capitalistic, materialistic, objective mind:

The goal is to mature the Desire Principle in yourself so that your true desire is to become the fulfillment of life rather than to possess the fulfillment of life.

What does that mean, to “become” rather than “possess” the fulfillment of life? In a society that focuses on “doing,” the idea of “becoming or being” is alien. We are what we do . . . aren’t we? And what we DO, if we are “successful”, is grow up and get an education and get a good job and support ourselves and our families, so that they can grow up and be even more successful than we. Or if we choose not to have children and families, then we get a good job and buy good things and make our lives comfortable, and then we do things that help other people. Isn’t that the definition of a good life?

How does one become the fulfillment of life?

It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do: it’s the easiest thing you’ll ever do.
Becoming the fulfillment of life requires surrendering the belief that you know what life is. As long as you believe that you know what life is, or what you are supposed to DO, your willfulness will not allow life to flow through you unimpeded. Desire can’t take its proper position in your life if your belief system blocks it. You can’t see your own interconnectedness if your eyes won’t grant beingness to wholeness.

Let me share my own experience with Desire. As a young woman, an activist of the sixties, I passionately pursued my happiness. I ecstatically bounced from lover to lover, career to career, important political cause to important political cause. Out there somewhere I would find my beloved, my right livelihood, the cause I could forever support (the eternal sacred protest march!) I kept doing, marching, purchasing. I knew I would find it because I knew it was out there somewhere and I wouldn’t stop until I succeeded.

And then one day, it found me. Incapacitated by a viral infection in my brain, I sat on the precipice between life and death, watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, praying for my health to return so that I could get back to DO-ing my life. In that moment, the experience of the world reversed itself. I literally felt the shift in my body, in my perspective. The sun wasn’t setting. Rather, I was riding on a big beautiful rock that was turning away from the sun. I sensed the earth’s movement in every cell of my body. Suddenly, life began to live me! All these years I’d colluded with consensus reality – the illusion that the sun sets in the west – that it moves across the sky in a clockwise direction every day. Even though I’d cognitively known that the earth’s movement created that illusion, I’d still lived in it, unconsciously believing that what I saw was the sun’s movement. Suddenly, I was an extension of the earth herself, rotating in a counterclockwise direction, turning my back on the sun for a few hours. My eyes suddenly granted beingness to truth; my brain withdrew its addiction to the illusion.

All my life, I’d been chasing the illusion that my fulfillment – my job, my love, my cause – was “out there” somewhere. Suddenly, Desire took its proper place in my life. Desire pulled fulfillment out of the “realm of possibility” and into reality. I wasn’t to look for how to live my happiness; I was to let it live me. I wasn’t to collude with the collective belief that fulfillment is an external experience; I was to recognize my unity with the earth, with all life, with the galaxy itself and let fulfillment live me. I wasn’t to DO; I was to BE.

It’s hard. Yet, it’s so much easier than creating an illusion and using all your energy to keep it alive, in spite of all the facts!

* Whether or not Desire appears in you pattern, concentrate this month on feeling the earth move toward and away from the sun. In other words, allow the truth to be a deeper reality for you than the illusion this month.

* Also, watch your purchasing choices. What do you buy? Why? What do you believe it’s going to give you? Is it true, or is it just a part of your story?

© Connie Kaplan,, 2005