Following on from what I was saying on May 6, (1) I’m trying to find a way of explaining how all desires are subsumed into the one desire for God.

None of these metaphors does the job completely.

Imagine crude gold ore unloaded into a furnace. Imagine it’s a mixture of dirt and gold.  The refining furnace is so hot that it melts the metal and burns off the dross. What pours out the spigot is pure gold.

Our various desires for food, water, shelter, etc., are the unrefined ore. The desire for God is the pure gold that’s left after the dross, the illusory has burned away. Where the dross is burned away, as far as I know, is Sahaja Samadhi.

Another image. Our desires are like raindrops falling into the ocean. When the raindrop hits the ocean, it disappears. What the raindrop and the ocean have in common is that both are water. The raindrops are our various desires. The ocean, in which the raindrop disappears, is the desire for God.

Still another image. In the graphic above, the desire for God can be compared to the essential design; all the other fractals can be compared to replications of that essential design, down to the minutest levels.

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We have to avoid a difficulty that philosophers call reification, where – if I understand the matter correctly – we reduce a higher-level abstraction to a lower-level one and the lower-level description just doesn’t do the higher-level reality justice. It takes something alive and turns it into the equivalent of a dead photograph.

To reduce God to a “he” or “she” is an example of a reification that does not do God justice. It’s only a bow to our own level of comprehension.

Frankly I can’t say why all our desires, experienced from a higher-dimensional level, would manifest as the one desire for God. That sits in my “unsolved mysteries” drawer. However I’ve seen from my own experience that, when all the evanescent desires are dropped, the desire that remains is the desire for God.

I now understand why Sri Ramakrishna would say (from memory) I just want to eat the mango; I don’t want to know how to grow it.  All thoughts about how this refining process works go out the window when one feels the bliss of knowing that only the yearning for God is present and only it persists.

Like seagulls in a storm, we learn to surf the wind of our sole/soul desire – to know God. We breathe into the feeling of elation. This is the road to bliss.

Footnotes

(1) “Real Men Do Love: The Longing of the Lover for the Beloved,” May 6, 2017, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=287570