Advaita Post #21-12
From the book Satsang, What about yourself?
From a conversation on Schiermonnikoog, June 10, 2005
There is just one desire
Visitor: Is it a choice to go for liberation? Who makes this choice?
Douwe: The choice lies at a much more fundamental level than that of personal choice.
V: But the choice of whether to go to Schiermonnikoog or not, whether to go to satsangs or not … isn’t that a personal decision?
D: No, it’s something much more fundamental. It’s not the ‘I’ of ordinary rational choices. It happens on a much deeper level. You only notice the consequences when they affect your life. But when you inquire into it you will indeed gain a direct insight (into it). Then you will immediately see what’s truly important to you. Then you are situated on the level of self-being as insight. Then you recognize your deeper motivation. When you return to yourself, you see with increasing clarity what is real and what is unreal for you. Then you see the desires for this and that, and with a further withdrawal into yourself you discover even more fundamental desires until finally, that for which you have always truly longed. So rational judgments and choices are very different. It’s really about the much deeper situation which you recognize when you give it more attention. When you recognize this, then I say: “Take the consequences, too!”
V: But still, I have the feeling that as a person I made the decision to come to Schiermonnikoog.
It appears to be a personal choice: “I’ve decided to go to Schiermonnikoog”. Look back at this decision and see everything that preceded it. You don’t speak from one moment to the next, free from everything: I can stay at home, but I am going to Schiermonnikoog. Take a look at what has already accrued around it, what lies underneath. That’s always the case, isn’t it? Even people who emphasize rational choice over and over are only fractionally guided by reason.
Here it’s about gaining a perspective on the entire context and of the initial deep structuring of things that only later become clear on a personal level. Often people want one thing rationally, while on the feeling level they want something completely different. Yes, they will get into trouble. [And] It stays that way, until there’s an integration again, or the rational element is broken through by an illness or something like that. When the deeper feeling aspects are given more space, people feel much better. That happens when you return to yourself. The more that happens, the more clearly you see what’s good for you and what’s bad, what a real desire is and a fake one. That continues to go quite deeply, because self-being has many layers. With insight you see that the feelings and desires are manipulated, artificial, limited.
When they go a little deeper, immediately you think that it is an authentic desire. Well, then you are going to follow that, but in reaching the object of that desire your longing turns out not to be fully fulfilled. That’s how the attachment to limited things continues, until you come to see that there is only one desire, for that unity. Then the specific objects of desire disappear and things in life happen by themselves, including the so-called personal decisions, such as “I’m going to Schiermonnikoog”. When you retreat even further, all separations and desires disappear, because [then] everything has been achieved.
thegroundlessopenness 