Your Heart's Desire

To grow spiritually, you don't need to give up your BMW, become celibate, or banish all your aspirations.

By Rod Stryker

Finally, moksha means spiritual liberation, or freedom. This is the desire that underlies all others, the desire to directly know your source. In order to achieve its unique destiny, the individual soul whispers to us all the time through the spontaneous pull of these four kinds of desires.

Desires Are Not Created Equal
If it's true that you need not necessarily give up the lease on your BMW, become celibate, and banish all your desires to grow spiritually, why do teachings throughout the yoga tradition insistently caution students to be so circumspect about desire? Because not all desires are created equal. Desires don't all stream straight from the soul, paving a direct path to enlightenment.

The problem with desires isn't that we have them; the problem is that it is so difficult to discern those that come from the soul and further your growth from those that are neutral or that enmesh you more and more in confusion, conflict, or pain. How do we know whether the source of a particular desire is soul or whether it is ego (the self-image we create to compensate for the spiritual ignorance of not knowing who we really are)?

How do we know whether the urge to eat that piece of chocolate cake, to start that new relationship, to stay home and not go to yoga class (maybe because of that piece of chocolate cake), or to move across the world is soul leading us toward spiritual evolution or ego distracting itself from the discomfort of its delusions?

This is a deep question, one that philosophers have tried to answer for thousands of years. On the one hand, it's easy to delude ourselves. This is one reason why a trustworthy teacher, guiding us into appropriate practices, has always been presumed essential to the path of yoga. After all, we all think we know what we want, but few of us know what we need.

On the other hand, the yoga tradition asserts that we should be careful about looking outside of ourselves for answers. We should always remember that yoga is not so much a set of philosophical answers; it is a means to achieve a certain quality of experience, from which flows timeless wisdom and divine love.

The Necessity of Practice
The highest reason for practicing yoga, as the Gita notes, is spiritual discrimination. In the classical context, yoga has nothing to do with physical fitness. Yoga is a means of purification, a way to separate awareness from the fluctuations of the body-mind, gradually allowing you to see your reactive tendencies and bring them under conscious control. As anyone who has practiced consistently for some time can tell you, eventually your clarity and ease spontaneously increase; your life naturally changes for the better; things, habits, and ideas that were less than constructive fall away from your life, often without effort. More and more, what we want becomes what the soul would have us pursue.

It's no wonder so much of the Gita is dedicated to meditation. Yoga practice is meant to lead us to meditation, where real knowing and truth reside. The last stage of meditation is samadhi, which has been described as the state "where all one's questions are answered." The deepest questions about how to live won't be resolved by intellect alone: It is only the silence of meditation, coupled with the longing to serve a higher purpose, that allows us to be continuously led by Spirit.

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