There is an image offered us in the Katha Upanishad as an aid to understanding the nature of desire. We are told that God made a mistake: he fashioned human beings with our senses pointing outward. But a wise man corrected the mistake by focusing his attention inward, and there, he discovered his true self. 

To say that God made a mistake is to acknowledge that nature, uncorrected by wisdom, will lead us astray. Our attention will be drawn in the wrong direction, where objects appear like mirage water in the desert. We begin our trek toward the seeming oasis, but we never reach it. The closer we get, the more it recedes.

The wise man in the Upanishad recognizes that he is looking for satisfaction where it can never be found. He turns his attention away from the world. He stops chasing objects that appear to be the source of happiness and begins to wonder, “Who is this being who wants to be happy? Why do I feel unhappy to begin with?” We can do the same. 

When we initially turn inward, we first acknowledge that we are here, in this perplexing world, where nothing is as it seems. Now, it seems that we are a body. It seems that there are objects outside of our body – other people and things – that can give us pleasure or pain. We then set about pursuing the sources of pleasure and avoiding the sources of pain. There is no freedom in this, but mere reaction. And we want freedom for it is our nature. We can only have it when we stop reacting to the stimuli of external objects, like iron filings being pulled toward a magnet. 

In our body, our animal nature, we have no freedom. Hunger, lust, pain and pleasure are the events in the life of the body. And the mind? There is no mind, really, but only thoughts. The word “mind” signifies the notion of a knowing entity in which thoughts arise. But if any such entity exists, it must be separate from the thoughts. What is mind separated from thoughts?

When we speak of the mind, we are referring to a power, not an entity. This power pictures the world of objects according to the qualities of our senses and the coordinating faculty of our brain. The result is a thought, an image. We take these images to be real. That is, we believe that these images exist independently of the thought that is their only shape and substance. This is how objects are conceived. Once we have given birth to them, they become our world. Why is it not a happy world?

Because some of the images that appear in our awareness arouse what is called desire: we want to possess them. But if the image is in our awareness, we already possess it. What we usually mean by possession is some form of bodily union with an object: I want to sit in my house, drive in my car, count my money, have sex with my partner, etc. From among all the images that appear to us we select certain ones that we call “mine,” and others that we want to call “mine’ but which as yet elude our grasp. We believe that if we can collect all the objects we want for our own, we will be happy. But we are never happy so long as we are engaged in this collection of objects.

First, we can never have all the things we want for the simple reason that our capacity to form desires is endless. It is not as though there are, say, 52 things I need to complete myself and then I’m done. There are 52 million things, and that’s just the beginning. Desire is a bottomless barrel. We can never fill it, and most of us will die trying. 

Second, as the objects of desire are essentially thoughts, they have no abiding substance. What we take to be objects is existence seen through the filter of the senses and the qualities of the mind. We don’t see existence, which is unchanging; we see the thoughts, which are ever changing. And we attribute the reality of existence to the ephemeral thought, to the object. Trying to possess the object is like hugging the air: we end up with an armful of nothing.

Third, as thoughts are not separate from our awareness, we cannot own them: we are them. Perhaps, it is better to say that they are us, for we are not contained in a thought, but all thoughts are contained in us. What we really long for when we chase objects is our own self. We want to possess that which we already are. What we need to do to be happy is to know what we are. If we project our self into thought, into an object, we will want the object because all we ever want is our self. And our body, and every thought, is a projection of our self into an object. 

Maya is largely misunderstood to mean that we should deny the evidence of our senses; that the world we experience is not real. This is why many Westerners reject Vedanta as a mental construct it is impossible to believe in. But Maya is not the world we see. It is rather the world as we misunderstand it. As Goethe expressed it, it is not the senses that deceive, but the judgment. 

The world is a manifestation of God, or Ishwara – whichever you prefer. As we are part of that world, we are also a manifestation of God, or Ishwara. We are individuals, yet our individuality is dependent on God, in whom we live and move and have our being, as St. Paul expressed it. When we realize that we have no being independent of God, we will stop trying to be God. Original sin is often understood as the primal calamity that came about from an individual trying to be God.

We are one in the indivisible being, the supreme reality, but we act in this world as individuals with a particular destiny. We did not create the world. To say that we are the supreme reality is a dangerous statement because it is both true and false, depending upon the level from which we understand it. Being/awareness is ultimately indivisible, so in that sense we are God. But being/awareness expresses itself in the empirical world as individuals, so in another sense we are not God. The human ego, the limited self that identifies with the body and mind, does not determine the course of the world and the laws that limit it. This must be clearly understood. 

The love that we mistakenly pursue in objects is really the love we have projected into the world. We are trying to take back that which we have unknowingly given away. And we try to take it back by assuming the power of God and trying to arrange the world so that we can possess all those things to which we have attached our love. But the ego is not God, and when it tries to usurp God’s prerogatives, it makes itself unhappy and frustrated. Despite the many grand pronouncements one encounters in modern spiritual teachings, we do not create the world or our own reality. We live as individuals in the world and our reality is the embodiment of a myriad of factors the mind cannot comprehend or control. 

If we are to have any hope of happiness in the here and now, it must rest on something the contemporary world finds difficult to accept: humility. We have to acknowledge the limitations of the human instrument that is the vehicle for the limitless being/awareness in which it rests. It may have become a hackneyed expression, but it is nevertheless true that we must “Let go and let God.”

The mention of God is sure to arouse resistance in many. One appeal of Vedanta and Buddhism for many Westerners is that it seems to avoid the theism of Judaism and Christianity. But the fact is we are not self-created individuals, and it is as individuals that we are presently living in the world. A great deal of confusion arises from loose language about our nature as pure being/consciousness or brahman. For some people, these words become ideas that they use to deny the reality of ordinary experience. But we can only begin where we find ourselves. And we can only take one step at a time. To try to pole-vault our way to pure being/awareness, as though the body/mind need not be taken into consideration, is not possible. We can break our metaphysical necks trying to do it. 

The simplest approach is always the best. Taking a step back from abstract notions, no matter how lofty and appealing, and looking at who we are and where we are as individuals is the place where we must start. 

We know that we want love and we try to find it in objects and in other people (considered as objects). We also know this doesn’t work. The only way to find the love we long for is to realize that we are not the ego, but an expression of God or Ishwara, an expression of love. And this love, although expressed as our individuality, is ever rooted in the love that transcends it. When we turn to our source and realize that we are grounded in love, we will no longer try to wrest it from others. But the ego must bow to Ishwara if we are to know our true Self.

With humility comes love. With love comes the only happiness that is possible to us in this vale of tears. The world does not need to be fixed. It can never make us happy no matter how it may be arranged. When we stop trying to be God, the weight of the world will lift from our shoulders. Then, we can accept whatever comes our way. The world is no longer a problem to be solved. Our individuality is no longer something to be cast off or thought away. It, too, is a gift of love, for as long as it lasts. 

Edwin Faust