By Steve Beckow, June 15, 2021
(Golden Age of Gaia)
I seem to be going in and out of desirelessness. That makes sense to me.
I’d expect full and permanent desirelessness to accompany Ascension. The fact that mine comes and goes proves it’s not Ascension.
But it’s a most interesting state and, as always, unless I write it down I’ll never remember this experience.
I know Michael wants me to remain “in the moment”:
Archangel Michael: An agreement that we have is that you have agreed [to live] and you are living very much in the moment.
One of the difficulties of humans is that they have a proclivity to either live in the past (and it can be recent past or ancient past) or to project themselves and live in the future.
It is a very curious malaise that most of the human race – yes, most of the human race – chooses not to live in the moment. So you are living in the moment. (1)
What greater assurance that you’ll be living in the moment than to be desireless, without a short-term memory?
I hear better. I’m aware of my surroundings. I’m aware of my body – my arms, my legs.
***
The Buddha was desireless. He’d already achieved Brahmajnana at the ashram he left. (2) He achieved Buddhahood in the forest. The Middle Way was in essence desirelessness.
He identified craving and aversion as two pitfalls (ignorance of our true essence was the third).
Indeed they’re two sides of the same coin. If I desire a chocolate milkshake, implicit in that is that I reject a strawberry milkshake. My desire for one implies – and sets up – an aversion for the other. Without desire, there’s no aversion, no preference as The Book of Nothing says.
The Great Way is effortless
for those who live in choiceless awareness.
To choose without preference
is to be clear.
Even the slightest personal preference
and your whole world becomes divided.
To perceive reality as it is
is to live with an open mind. (3)
I’d never understood this passage until now.
Without desire, and its attendant aversion, I remain in the middle. The string remains not too loose and not too tight.
***
My suffering begins the moment I create a desire. At that moment, I also feel longing for the object I desire. Unfulfilled longing. And so I feel depressed that I can’t have what I want. And so I tell myself that nobody loves me because I can’t have what I want. And on and on it goes. These are very infantile thoughts.
I observe that, with no desires, I end that suffering. And the proper object of desire is God anyways, is it not?
Am I not again at the crossroads of what I used to think of as the basic spiritual movement – turning from the world to God? What did Krishna say?
“I am all that a man may desire
Without transgressing
The law of his nature.” (4)
The desire for God, for love, for unity is the only desire that does not further implicate us in the karma of the world. The desire for God is the only desire that liberates us.
And even that has to be given up at the last to make way for God to realize God.
Footnotes
(1) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Aug. 5, 2020.
(2) That is, he had achieved God-Realization, seventh-chakra enlightenment, the last waystation before Ascension.
(3) Sosan, The Book of Nothing. A Song of Enlightenment. Trans. Philip Dunn and Peter Jourdan. Kansas City: Andres McNeel, 2002, 16.
(4) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 71.