The Choices We Make

Occasionally, I read something and I just sit there thinking, that is absolutely the way it is.  It does not always happen when I am reading spiritual literature, but that is one predictable place for that experience.  Often I am taken by surprise.  I wanted to learn something, but I had not been looking for profundity!  And then, boom, it comes.  Thanks to God.

It happened recently when I read a little paragraph by a writer about whom I know little.  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is a twentieth century Hindu.  He was born in Mumbai (Bombay) just before the turn of the twentieth century and died in 1981.  He lived what appears to be a relatively normal life before becoming famously a spiritual teacher and guru.  I want to share the paragraph I read and offer a few comments.  In passing I want to acknowledge how spiritual wisdom comes from many resources.  Somehow this seems appropriate in a wonderfully diverse world.

The guru’s words begin by addressing our desire to be happy.  Certainly, all my students sit up and pay attention on this one!  He says, “All you want to be is happy.”  Students would concur and I join them; I want to be happy, too.  And now we expect the “but.”  We all know what “but” adds to a sentence.  We might say, “of course, he’s a good player, but…”  We know the real truth is coming!

The Hindu saint tells us, “All your desires, whatever they may be, are of longing for happiness.”  I really like how he brings into focus the issue of desires.  Desires are behind all of our wants.  Desires initiate and focus our will.  To desire happiness is, at the same time, declared that you do not desire sadness.  Often our desires come with sufficient energy to begin the process of going after what we want.  A desire which has no energy to try to get what we want seems futile.

I am intrigued that the guru says all of our desires are longing for happiness.  He focuses this a little more when he acknowledges, “Basically, you wish yourself well…”  I do believe this is true.  Unless we are mentally sick, we do wish ourselves well.  I know I certainly do.  I realize I may not always get what I desire, but it is ok to desire it.  I do desire to be well.  

I absolutely agree with the author when he claims, “Desire by itself is not wrong.”  We have to recognize that I might actually desire things that are something short of really good things.  But desire itself is not wrong.  And I like even more how the Hindu saint develops this notion in a philosophical fashion.  He says that this basic desire “is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience.”  In this I believe it is clear he is hooking desire to the basic energy that makes us go.  This is the energy which gets us out of bed, breathes and at a much higher level provides the brain power to learn and grow.  Without this energy we die---literally, dead people don’t have any energy anymore.  They have expired.

It makes sense to see desire issuing forth in urges.  All we have to do is watch little kids.  There we see desire in pure form.  They seem driven to learn and experience.  Maybe this is a good way to understand all the questions, like why.  It is almost as if they can’t help themselves.  Kids tend to be little packages of curiosity.  It makes us wonder what begins to happen to them when we start education.  Perhaps too often, we blunt and warp their native desire to learn.  We funnel and focus it in ways that simply are not helpful.  It is worth pondering.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj comes to the heart of the issue when he observes about desire, “It is the choices you make that are wrong.”  This is crucial.  He is telling us we can definitely use desire in the wrong ways.  This seems obvious.  This is what Christians, Jews and Muslims likely mean when they talk about sin.  Sin is nothing more than our desire used wrongly because of a bad choice.  He expands this to suggest this is why our desire for happiness gets frustrated.  It gets frustrated because of bad choices.  We think we can use sex or power to get happiness.  While this may seem temporarily true, in the long run, as he tells us, we deceive ourselves.  It is like traveling in the wrong direction expecting we will get where we want to go.

He comes to his key spiritual teaching in the last line I will quote.  “Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.”  The source for our lasting happiness is to discover and develop the real self.  Of course, that might require a book to understand what our true self is.  For many of us, it likely means what we call soul.  As a Quaker, I think about the light within or the center, as we like to describe it.  It is deeper than all the superficial stuff we often spend too much time attending.

I do my own version of this in the personal and group stuff I do, which I call soul work.  Soul work is not simply going to church or praying, although both can be beneficial.  Soul work is realizing that every one of us has desire and that desire is the energy that becomes our will.  We make choices---and they make all the differences.  

The Choices we make do matter.  It is a matter of being happy and, then, a matter of life and death.