Q&A: Can I Still Realise Truth While Pursuing Pleasures and Wants?

Yes, if you also honestly investigate the truth — the underlying reality — of your pleasures, wants, and their pursuit. Just as you explore the underlying reality of any arising in awareness — your thoughts or feelings, for example — you can similarly examine the truth of your desires. Your desires, large or small, arise in awareness just like your thoughts — without needing your permission.

You can either follow them without question, try to ignore them, or be curious about them. By approaching them with curiosity about their nature, you neither deny nor blindly follow them. When you neglect this curious openness, your wanting turns into compulsion that entraps your attention in a cycle of wanting and keeps you ‘asleep’ to unrecognised truth.

Imagine you’re dreaming that you’re Mary (or John, or whatever your current identity may be) living in a world. You’re not aware it’s a dream. You believe in certain identities for yourself, and you have desires, and not just desires in a relaxed way, but in a way that makes chasing them a necessity; you feel you must fulfil them because not having what you want means you’re not okay, you’re suffering.

Then you are offered a choice: (1) You can keep focusing on chasing everything you ever wanted, or (2) You can focus on finding out the truth about your wanting, about yourself, and the nature of reality.

Going with the first option might let you fulfil your desires, but you’ll likely stay caught in the dream, too preoccupied to wonder about your most basic assumptions and to ask questions about them that can lead you to the truth about their nature. There is also no promise that fulfilling your must-have-to-be-okay wants will end the aching need for more.

Choosing the second option may lead, with grace, to uncovering the truth — that you, your desires and your world are a ‘dream.’ You wake up to reality as both the dream and the dreamer. You become lucidly aware that as the dream itself you don’t have an identity separate from wholeness, and that Mary is just a character in the dream, neither more nor less you than anything else in the dream.

Mary’s desires may remain but the necessity of satisfying them to feel okay is gone. She still experiences desire, and is open to fulfilment or its absence, with both outcomes being okay. Wanting itself becomes no different from the scent of a rose; it is an arising, fulfilling in itself without referring elsewhere.

When she has what she wants, she truly, intimately and deeply enjoys her intimacy with it. Mary sees that she is both her desire and the source of its fulfilment. When what she has is gone, she lovingly lets it go. Nothing has been taken away from her, and nothing can be given to her. Mary has been unbelieved as separate from all of what is, and is now unattached to herself as a person who must have something to be okay. There is, really, no Mary anymore, only wholeness.

Any ‘part’ of the dream is as much the dream as any other part. Any arising can be an invitation to recognition, including desires, as long as truth is your pursuit. Likewise, any part of the dream can be a distraction to recognition if there is attachment or aversion involved. Curiosity addresses both.

Stay curious.