They who know truth in truth, and untruth in untruth, arrive at truth, and follow true desires.
Translated by F. Max Muller
My dog Rosie, is obsessed with chasing balls. She loves it so much. It’s all she wants to do. Even though it is evidently her doggy true desire, she still is conflicted about it. When she trots up to me with her favourite red ball, a big part of the doggy mind just can’t bear to let it go. She wants nothing more than for a willing human participant to throw the ball. And yet she loves the ball so much, she can’t bring herself to drop it at my feet. She just wants to hold it in her mouth and chew it a little bit. She wants to have the ball and she wants to give it up and get it thrown. She wants them both and she can’t have them both. A doggy dilemma.
If my Labradoodle doesn’t really know what her true desires are, what chance do I have? What chance to any of us have? I honestly think one of the main challenges it the spiritual life, the main challenge in any life, is to work out what it is we actually want. Work out what our true desires are. Not what other people desire of us. Not what we think other people desire of us. Not what we been told we should desire by advertisers, social media influences and other associated trades. Not an ambivalent list of conflicting desires, most of which aren’t actual our true desires at all. But work out what our genuine true desires are. Only when we truly reflect and truly know can we take steps to realise them.
I’ve heard it said that we climb a ladder of our own ambition, a ladder of our desires. We strive to advance a rung at a time. Sometimes we slip down, but if we are strong then we can put our hands back on the rungs and pull ourselves up again. One day we will reach the top of our ladder. It will have been hard and we will have sacrificed many things. But what happens if we look out from the top of our ladder and realise that it has been propped up against the wrong wall all along? We have climbed the wrong ladder. We are not where we truly wanted to be. We didn’t know what our true desires were.
Take time. Reflect. What are your true desires?