Embracing the Beloved by Stephen Levine

Author:Stephen Levine [Levine, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75490-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

A CONTEMPLATION

AS YOU READ this book, put it down for a moment and close your eyes. Just sit for a moment with the mind. Don’t use some technique for watching the breath or use a mantra or a visualization technique. Just simply sit. Just sit, and watch the mind. Notice that soon there arises a thought or feeling of something wanted. Perhaps you want to get back to the book. Or you want an object of desire to arise so you can watch it. Or you want the chair to be more comfortable. Or you want something to eat. Or you want the noise outside to diminish. Or you want the noise inside to diminish. Or you want this meditation to end. Or you want your knee not to be so sore. Or you want to be enlightened. Or you want to be better than you are. Or you want to know God. Or you want to stop drinking. Or you want to be more loved. Or you want all this wanting to end. In rondo after rondo of spiraling desire.

Just watch wanting. Nothing to do about it. Simply allow a noninterfering, nondesirous awareness to receive this energy as it presents itself. Noting its imagery and assertions, watch its process unfolding. Watch the chain of events that leads from a flickering thought, a momentary liking or disliking, to a momentous activity (which encourages more of the same in the future). Watch desire play itself out in consciousness.

Now take five minutes, eyes closed, watching the flow of consciousness, and count the number of desires that arise uninvited. Count the moments of wanting things to be otherwise, wanting something to come closer or move farther away, wanting more of this or less of that. Wanting not to want, wanting to be able to do this meditation. Wanting to be perfect.

What is desire?

How is something as fragile as a thought, a bubble floating in space, capable of creating a new life or ruining an old one?

How can mindfulness of lesser desires lead to the heartfulness of the Great Desire? How do we begin relating to instead of from desire?

How in a world of incessant change, constant impermanence, can any desire satisfy for long? And how does the Great Desire stir all the smaller desires into the stew of liberation, into the fire which is water? How does it float Narcissus on the ocean of compassion?

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