Remember What To Forget – Don’t Forget What To Remember!

Remember What To Forget – Don’t Forget What To Remember! June 25, 2007

Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Articles , trackback

The other day at the local café, I listened in on a conversation that took place between two friends who were arguing back and forth about the meaning of life. One of them said with much animation that it’s scary to think our desires for ‘this’ and ‘that’ never seem to end. I immediately pricked up my ears. Whether she knew it or not, this woman had hit the nail right on the head. Desire is a big problem. Some would say it is the biggest problem of all and that without understanding its nature, the meaning of life will remain elusive.

Many people view the purpose of life as an opportunity to satisfy desire without realising that the pursuit of happiness through the satisfaction of desire can only bring a strange mixture of success and failure, pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy. Why? The short answer is because the opposite is implied in everything without exception. You can’t have one without the other. Death follows birth in the same way that night follows day.

Not only that, but desire breeds attachment and keeps Soul well and truly tethered to this labyrinth unable to rise above it in order to reach a level of contentment that does not rely on externals for satisfaction. We know from this that desire carries problems. The greatest thinkers of the world, past and present, are people who have already said this in many different ways – many times over. You don’t need a degree in philosophy to understand where they are coming from.

What they realised is that we become attached to our desires because we believe they define our purpose for living. We also believe that without them we somehow lose that relationship to purpose. So we cling to our desires in the hope that by satisfying them we will find happiness.

Desire, the constant craving for satisfaction of the senses, creates suffering. There is never an end to the craving for the simple reason that desire can never be completely satisfied. That’s only one of the problems with it, however. Any kind of craving is a form of suffering. More importantly, the craving keeps us focused on worldly pursuits that make it impossible to place our attention on the simple things and the freedom that comes with experiencing authentic living.

To be liberated from spending life after life in the world of craving requires a decent amount of inner discipline. The ancient sages wrote their classics in an attempt to show us how to understand this. To catch a glimpse of the truth is the first step to freedom.

The satisfaction of desire is not the prize it is made out to be. We have no choice but to remember this whenever the urge to chase after ‘this’ or ‘that’ entices us to forget! In other words, we have to remember what to forget and not forget what to remember. The freedom of Soul can only be discovered through the inner search and this search begins when a reliance on the satisfaction of desire ends.

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