The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8

The Origin of Desire

From where does desire come? Buddha said that it came from Ignorance. It is almost that. Desire is something in the being which imagines that it requires an object other than itself for its satisfaction. This is sheer ignorance, proved by the fact that in 99 cases out of a hundred when one has the thing desired, one no more cares for it.

At its very origin, I think, it was an obscure need for growth or increase. In the lowest forms of life we find love transformed into an instinctive and irresistible need for enlarging, swelling, absorbing, adding to it another body. This need to take in is desire. So perhaps if you go back far enough into the last depths of inconscience, you will see that the ultimate source of desire is love: it is love in its most dark and inconscient form. It is, as I said, a need for accretion, an attraction for an outside object in order to embrace it, swallow it, make it part of itself and so grow bigger. Now, suppose you have before you something beautiful, harmonious, pleasing: if you have the true consciousness, you enjoy and are happy to the full, by simply looking at the thing, by having an inner contact in consciousness with the beauty and harmony that is there. And there the matter ends. You have the joy and that is all. Such a movement is very common in the artist. He sees a beautiful

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person, he has the joy of observing the grace of the form, the harmony of the movements and all that. But it does not go beyond. He is perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied when he has seen something beautiful.

An ordinary consciousness, on the contrary, I mean, very ordinary, flat as ordinary things are, when it sees something beautiful, whether it is a material object or a person, it immediately jumps at it, shouting, "I must-have it!" It is pitiable, isn't it? And even then with such a consciousness you cannot enjoy beauty, for the anguish of desire will pursue you. You lose true enjoyment but do not get anything in return. There is no happiness in desiring something. It only puts you in an unhappy state. Buddha also said that there was a greater joy in overcoming a desire than in satisfying it. Everybody can make this experiment and have the experience. It is-quite interesting to do so.

When you give up a desire, there occurs at the moment an inner communion with your psychic being and that is why one gets a greater joy in rejecting a desire than in fulfilling it. Besides, when you do satisfy your desire always there is a bitter after-taste somewhere. There is no desire which when satisfied does not leave this bitterness in you, as when you have taken too sweet a thing, the mouth becomes full of a bitter taste. The nature of desire is like that. You must try to throw it away, but sincerely. You must not pretend doing it and keep the thing in a corner. In that case it will surely bring misery to you.

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