desire free

Lose desire

Lose love

Lose everything

And start…where?

Where do I start? 

What is love without desire? 

How can I find peace

Without love?

How can I find peace if there’s no desire for it? 

What a life it is

In a desert year after year

What is it going to be

Where am I going to end

In a dune

Curving like

A hip of a Bangladeshi

Who smiles in fear

(2007)

 

If you experience enlightenment and you see dualism disappear and life synchronizes with nature, when love and hate no longer exist, when you are guided by nothing other than universal cues, then life afterward has no goals.  There is no reason to search for meanings to anything because desire brings no satisfaction, there is no joy in getting what you want because there will always be something else and that too, will fall short.  Suffering, death, desire, while they continue to rear violence, resistance rages on. 

We sympathize with suffering, our empathy drives a wedge into our souls.  Expectations bring desire and desire brings suffering.  Pain and death bring suffering and to that end we live, albeit understand such torment ends inevitably when we die with it.

Meanwhile, who pursues truth, none who are so busy in life pursuing the things that make them happy, for who doesn’t wish to be happy?Pursuing fun is a goal, and yet to live alone and pursue fun is a selfish exercise for it isn’t shared. 

Never has there been a goal I have followed other than to understand who I am and why I live alone.  I have known no life with which to pursue, no objective, no aim. The goals that eluded me, the dreams that I never attained, though murky and vague, I think of nothing more day after day than the journey in an altered state of consciousness which concluded with the entrance into the spirit world and the introduction of a 2700 year old Caucasoid shaman who remains, albeit ever so quietly, next to me today.  And what to make of it?  How much of what was said and done was an exploitation of an imagination, of a soul searching for love, how much can be trusted and dismissed.  Coincidences, illusions, hallucinations, spiritual entities, revelations, delusions, too much to ignore, too much to not have an affect which will never disappear. 

 What does it mean if dramatic religious epiphanies can be produced by ingesting entheogens?  Are all mystical experiences and all visions of the kingdom of God nothing more than the malfunctioning of our neural chemistry caused by a botanical or chemical agent? Or are the advocates of entheogens correct that the kingdom of God is already within us but awaiting to be brought forth from the recesses of our mental nature?  And how philosophically reliable are the insights gained from drug-induced ecstasies?

Robert C. Fuller.  Stairways to heaven: drugs in American religious history. Westview Press, 2000. p 15.