The Desire Cycle

When Achievement Leaves You Unfulfilled

Generally speaking, I think it’s best to focus attention on improving your life in concrete, material ways before concerning yourself with total spiritual transcendence. A lot of people would disagree vehemently with me here. But there are three reasons I feel the way I do.

1. It’s hard to make progress from a low-energy state (low-energy meaning destructive or unpleasant). When life sucks, it’s hard to make progress. By making life better, you energize yourself and speed up the rate at which you’ll progress.

2. Over-emphasis on the “transcendent” part of spirituality can sometimes be a defense mechanism. Someone who has nothing can say, “I don’t care that I have nothing because material abundance is unimportant,” and be telling the truth. But sometimes, their statement will feel a bit… ungrounded. It’s like a little kid losing a board game and saying, “I don’t care because I wasn’t trying to win anyway. I didn’t even want to play.” This isn’t to suggest that those without material abundance cannot reach states of spiritual transcendence — they can, and they do as often (if not more often) than the materially abundant. The ways in which material abundance can stunt spiritual growth is a topic for another day, though. Right now, I’m just making the following point: It tends to be much more meaningful when someone who has everything decides to let go of the material world than it is when someone who has nothing makes the same decision. The person who has it all and lets go is 100% genuine in doing so; the other person might be genuine, or they might be resisting their lack of material abundance, and it can be hard to tell.

3. If you rush your spiritual growth, you run the risk of conceptualizing “transcendence” — of treating it as an objective and identifiable state of mind. It doesn’t really work like that, though. What a spiritual master transcends is objectivity itself — it’s a transcendence of separation and all duality. As such, you can only experience transcendence. You can’t conceptualize it.

All this said, if you’ve been on a conscious creation journey for some period of time and enjoyed a bunch of successes, it’s worth putting a little thought into the patterns of your desires and how they come to arise. So today, that’s what we’re going to be doing.

Most people’s lives go something like this: Desire arises —> Desire is fulfilled —> New Desire Arises —> Desire is not fulfilled —> Desire is forgotten —> New Desire Arises (and on and on).

A successful conscious creator might lessen the instances where desires go unfulfilled, but still, new desires will continue to arise.

This begs the question: What good is the fulfillment of any individual desire if said fulfillment doesn’t lead to lasting fulfillment (i.e. if it doesn’t secure you lasting peace and happiness)? Even if you can fulfill every desire, what’s the value in that if you remain trapped in the desire cycle?

Before we proceed, I again want to note that if you are unable to fulfill any desires, this shouldn’t be your current concern — for all the reasons listed at the start of this essay, and because someone who is unable to fulfill their desires can never say for certain if the fulfillment of their desires will or won’t lead to lasting fulfillment. Don’t take anyone’s word for it when they tell you this is the case, mine included. Go find out for yourself if it’s really the case.

But let’s assume you do have the capacity to fulfill most or all of your desires yet are still trapped in the desire cycle. How can you escape this trap?

Two predominant methods come to mind.

First, you should investigate what it is you actually desire. What is the end goal of fulfilling all your various desires?

Always assume that nothing exists in a vacuum. Meaning, any desire that arises is not a desire for the desired object/experience in and of itself but a desire for some subtle feeling that the object/experience is meant to provide.

If you never investigate what links all your desires together (if you don’t figure out what feeling all your desires are ultimately meant to elicit), you’ll be forever at the mercy of the desire cycle. You’ll jump from desire to desire, fulfilling each and every one, but always chasing the dragon — always chasing the feeling but never securing it permanently.

The solution to this issue is pretty obvious. You need to figure out what you’re really looking for, then find out where it really resides. Spoiler alert: Everyone always desires the same thing, though we call it by different names depending on the context. That “one desire” is a desire for peace/love/happiness/bliss/unity/God.

So you need to ask yourself, “Can I actually find these feelings at the end of the desire rainbow?” Is happiness in any object? Is love in any experience? Is peace in things always happening exactly as I intend for them to happen, or is peace in my ability to remain at peace regardless of what happens?

Find your own answers to these questions, and you’ll have found your personalized route out of the desire cycle.

Now for the second method.

Consider momentarily that the suffering you feel when you’re unable to fulfill some desire isn’t the suffering of unfulfillment itself but the suffering of having a desire in the first place. Here’s what I mean: we often take for granted that if we want x, y, and z but don’t have x, y, or z, our issue lies in the “not having” part of the equation.

But what evidence is there that this is the case? Isn’t it just as likely that desires are inherently uncomfortable, and thus, our ability to fulfill desires is irrelevant to our actual issue — the presence of desires to begin with?

I want to tread lightly here. A lot of spiritual disciplines try to sledgehammer all desires away. In my opinion, though, it’s better to work with a scalpel. I don’t think “desire” is inherently bad. I think one can be incredibly spiritually fulfilled and still have desires.

What I would say, though, is that it’s important to have the correct perspective on your desires. In a spiritually high state, desires will take on a different texture. They won’t manifest as a feeling of lack or suffering. They become feelings of excitement and enjoyment instead. This only comes about when someone has taken steps to understand why desires (as they currently manifest) are inherently uncomfortable.

The desire cycle is inevitable so long as you don’t investigate the deeper nature of your desires. It’s difficult to provide outright answers for how to escape the cycle (beyond encouraging these different types of investigations) because fulfillment is so personal. Nobody can tell you what will or won’t lead to it. You have to use your best judgment and then work via trial and error. Start out by learning to manifest efficiently. Then, if you’re still unfulfilled, dive into what compels you to chase desires in the first place.

As always, good luck.