Desire has gotten a bad rap amongst various religious and spiritual traditions, but I believe it’s all based on misunderstanding and limited perception. What if desire is the language our soul speaks to our hearts to guide us towards our own best fulfillment? Anything we see or experience here, first began as a desire. All life begins with desire… the desire to be born, to express, to experience, to explore, to grow, to learn, to develop, to whatever. Desire is how the multiverses come into being.
I was taught some things about the nature and purpose of desire a few years back. I was facilitating a deep inner attunement session for Sylvia, a client who was stuck in unfulfilled longing. For what I can’t remember now, but one of the Big Four for sure – love, money, health or career. As the process unfolded, my attention was drawn to the inner motion of her unfulfilled desire. I could feel how the energy was projecting outward into time and space, outward into the future and someplace not here. The more I registered this inner action and movement of awareness, the more I saw how our desires always seem to project outward. Gradually, I became aware of the nudge of guidance suggesting we try making a U-turn on Sylvia’s desire. Instead of being carried along with the movement of projection, we were to turn and face back into that motion and track it back to the source from whence it came. This proved to be a very perceptually demanding and challenging exercise, but well worth it.
What a revelation! I discovered that Sylvia’s deep heart-felt desire emerged from her inner Being, and was actually an emanation of intent from her inner Being. When the intent and purposes of her Being impinged upon her conscious awareness, she experienced it as a desire. I discovered that our inner Beings continually emanate, or we could say radiate, a current or stream of intent and purpose outward into our physically-focused personal human life. I experience this current or stream something like a broad energetic wave. Think of the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream or the jet streams in the upper atmosphere. This current of intent is full of purposeful creative energy and is meant to guide and direct us toward the greatest expression and fulfillment of our abilities, purposes and potentials.
The more I was able to guide and bolster Sylvia’s inner perception to directly experience this emanation of intent, the more confidence, authority and inner knowing she experienced. It is incredibly empowering to come into direct experience of the source of your heartfelt desires. Since then, I have been prompted to use this perceptual exercise with most every client. Even so, it is always perceptually demanding and requires strong muscles of inner attunement.
The Taoists say the only non-reducible source of being is non-being. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of non-being. How could it even exist, or not-exist? Try thinking of it like this. The ultimate Divinity, All That Is, ever-expands. It’s unlimited subjective reality is filled with all potentiality, an infinite number of Divine thoughts and creations ever-arising and desiring expression. The desire arose/arises in All That Is to give It’s own interior thoughts and creations the possibility of their own creation and expression. But how? In the only way All That Is could/can do it, through an exteriorized reality. All That Is, had to/has to create beingness out of non-being. In a flash of unimaginable creativity, happening in each and every Now moment, All That Is desires the multiverses into being. The so-called Big Bang is the flash when non-being is born into beingness, when all those desires and all that potentiality projects itself outward into exteriorized reality.
I invite you to experiment with this perceptual exercise when you want to create a desire into being. Close your eyes and come into deep meditative attunement with your desire. Begin to register the way it projects outward into the future and some other there. Once you get a good sense of that, propose the suggestion of a perceptual U-turn. Turn back and face into the desire and follow it back to its source. Firm up your perceptual muscles and hold your attention steady. Don’t look for any specific images or feelings. The closer you get to the source, the more concentrated the energy and it won’t fit into your preconceived ideas and images. I find staying close to the motion of emanation, or movement of awareness, is helpful. If you want the experience of being facilitated in this exercise, shoot me an email to mikhaila at mikhailastettler.com
Go forth and create your desires!!