Desire...is life itself

What greater urge do you need than of laughter and tears? That is why I have been talking about tears and laughter, and not the explanations of them. If you do not know how to suffer, if you have never cried, how can you understand, and what greater urge is there than desire?

What are you doing all the time with your desire? Your highest aim is to kill it, but you cannot kill desire. What you perceive, you desire; but if your perception is small, your desires are small. If your vision is large, your desires are large. If you are in chaos, it is not the fault of desire, it is the fault of your perception.

ow, when you ask yourself what you are seeking, what you really desire to understand is how life works as a whole, what truth is as a whole. You wish to find the universal within all the mass of particulars. You want to understand life in all its various shades of expression and the way in which you, as an individual, can express that life, and how you can assimilate the happiness which is the fruit of life.

And you will notice that every individual, whether advanced or not, wishes to understand life in his own particular way, to narrow it down to suit himself. The philosopher will intellectualize life and have many systems and explanations of things and will seek life along that particular line. The poet will seek the understanding of life in the balance and beauty of words; and so forth.

Everyone, in brief, wants to interpret life according to his own desires, or in terms of the particular system or religion to which he belongs. Now, if you wish to understand truth in its totality, you cannot come to it along any of these particular lines, because life is all inclusive; it lies beyond all philosophies, beyond the garland of words, beyond ugliness and beauty, beyond poverty and riches; and yet, because it is beyond these, it is in them all.

So, if you would realise with serious intent, you must grasp at this fullness, this totality, and must free yourself from all the special fantasies of desire. Life, as an inner principle, is the completeness of thought and love; and the way to this completeness is from the personal to the impersonal. There must ever, therefore, be a conflict between emotion and mind until they become poised in self-existent happiness in the liberated life. All desires — whether

they be of the poet or the philosopher, or of the thoughtless seeker after pleasure — are, at bottom, the desire for this self-existent, enduring happiness.

That is what your own life — separate as it is, caught in reactions, urged about by fear — is really seeking. For life, this is its ultimate potentiality, which it is ever craving to bring into actualisation.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti