The Essential Question
By Eli Jaxon-Bear

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This desire for freedom cannot be contained, It cannot be moderated

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In any life, essential questions emerge that demand answers. The answers determine the course of your life for good or for ill.

Now I pose this essential question to you: What do you really want?

Surprisingly, most people have never asked themselves this question with any depth. Indeed, most people live their entire lives without really questioning what it is that they really and truly want. Most just make do with whatever shows up. Most are content to settle for some version, hopefully a little bit better, of what their parents had or wanted. Others may rebel and want something totally different from what their parents had, but with the same results. But all these choices exist in the realm of relative slavery. These are not true choices, but conditioned responses.

When we are acting out of conditioning, all of our choices are rooted in a ground of ignorance. Unless you know who you are, all of your choices remain the choices of a slave. Of course, slaves sometimes protest that they are in fact free and can do whatever they please. Except be still. Slaves do not have the power of silence. Silence is the key that removes all of the chains of slavery. All slaves are bound to the noise of arising phenomena. In using the term “slaves,” I am including the roles of both master and slave, since all roles in this world are roles of relative slavery. The apparent master is as enslaved as the apparent slave. Both are addicted to sensory experience and to the voices of their egoic mind talking in their head.

My teacher says that there is a river of thought waves, and all beings are being washed downstream by this river. Some rationalize that they are going with the flow, others zigzag and imagine that they are in control, while still others gather objects and people around them so they can float down the river together. The rarest of the rare are those who give rise to the desire for freedom. Freedom is the willingness to take a stand exactly where you are, in the middle of the mind stream.

This desire for freedom cannot be contained. It cannot be moderated. It cannot be tailored to the expectations of others. When those who are washing by in the stream cry out that you are lost, that you are falling behind as they rush ahead, great temptations surface that urge you to turn away from your true Self and swim back into the mainstream. But the desire for freedom is not a casual affair. It is the culmination of the spiritual path. It is the end of the search. It is the end of life as you knew it. So you do not waiver.

My teacher would look into the eyes of seekers who said that they thought that they wanted freedom and demand, “If your hair were on fire and you were rushing to the river, and you passed some friends who called out to you to sit and join them for a cup of coffee, would you stop? Would you even take time to answer? No, you would keep heading straight for the river! That is the desire for freedom. There is no time to sit and think.”

Examine yourself and see what is on your own personal list of what you want. For most people on the path, the list goes something like this: “Sure, I want to be free, but I also want to be successful. I want to have money. I want my parents to love me. I want to have great sex.” None of these desires is bad in and of itself. It is simply not the way to find true freedom and happiness. Ask yourself honestly: Has changing your circumstances, changing your partner, or having more ever led you to lasting peace and true fulfillment?

If you still believe that changing something in your life will make you happy, you aren’t yet ready to find true happiness and freedom. But perhaps someday, when you have exhausted all of your attempts to fulfill fantasies, you will finally be disillusioned enough with the world to look somewhere else. A faster, more direct way to freedom and happiness is to go through your list of preferences and desires right now and see that none of them are ultimately fulfilling as they all are desires of the slave. Then you’re ripe. Then you’re left with one single desire, the desire for freedom.

This desire turns into a blazing fire, because it is the only desire. It takes hold of you. This burning desire for freedom is like a funeral pyre. It burns all of the elements that made up your false identity as a slave.

Then everything is revealed. You fall into a realization of yourself that is beyond your wildest dreams. The depth and the duration of your experience in this vast realm of realization depends on the intensity of your desire. The more you surrender, the deeper it takes you, and the longer it lasts.

This, too, disappears, as all experiences come and go, but you are left with a certainty that is revealed through experience yet is beyond experience.

At some point, everything that you turned away from comes back to test you. If you don’t touch the temptations, they too burn in freedom’s fire, and your realization goes even deeper.

Again, I ask the question “What do you really want?” I repeat this question because you can accomplish nothing of real consequence until you answer this question on the deepest level. Once you answer this question, a radical reappraisal of your life may point you in a completely new direction.

Most people’s lives are dedicated to getting what they think they want. The problem is that most people don’t know what they really want. Most people live in the conditioned wants of family, and in the manufactured wants of society, with their subconscious fantasies projected onto the world. In this way, they spend their lives invested in false wants and desires.

Most people only know how to define what they want by what they already have and what they don’t have, by what they want to fix or get rid of, by what they want to keep or increase. All of this, including all relationships, belongs to the realm of objects, but ownership of these objects is only the projection of the egoic mind. This egoic mind, which tells a story to itself about who it is, feels separate, alone, and cut off. Caught in the habit of misidentification and suffering, it is desperate to defend its space.

People caught in the egoic trap constantly avoid what they really want. But as long as there is an experience of separation, there is a correspondingly deep and true longing for union. As long as there is fear and a sense of isolation, there is a deep and true longing to return home.

My counsel is to tell the truth about where you have turned away from the longing for union, so that you can find time for the deep and true call of your heart. Until you allow all the self-betrayals to be unveiled in the light, you subconsciously sabotage what you really want. By self-betrayal, I mean every place where you have sold out or settled for something less then the deepest truth of your heart.

Be willing to stay true to your deepest longing for truth, in the face of all the subconscious pulls that arise from the ocean of mind as thought waves trying to wash you back into the desires of the subconscious.

In the end, the desire for freedom transcends all other desires. It is the only true desire of a human life.

Having this desire in the past was very rare. But humanity is now entering a new stage. Either we will evolve quickly or we will destroy the Earth. The choice is up to us. Now is the time for ordinary people to wake up. There is no need to be a great saint. Simply because you are alive and intelligent enough to read this, you are ready for the next evolutionary leap: from the isolated selfishness that is destroying the world to the bliss of union, which holds the healing of the Earth. Perhaps the only hope for the planet lies in our willingness to end our personal suffering.

Until the desire for truth, freedom, and love arises in a life, everything is pointless. Life is all about “me” and “my” story of “reality.” Once the desire for freedom arises, it becomes the central axis, the ground of being that life revolves around. This is the beginning of the end. It signals the end of the search and the birth of realization.

Awakening is the end of wanting and the beginning of discovering.

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Eli Jaxon-Bear teaches through the Leela Foundation, a non-profit spiritual organization dedicated to world peace and freedom through universal self-realization. His website is www.leela.org. This article is based on Sudden Awakening Into Direct Realization, by Eli Jaxon-Bear, published by New World Library, www.newworldlibrary.com.

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