What Desire Is Really All About – The Little Prince Series

At the core of the story of The Little Prince is a journey that is intended to lead to total trust of our essential being.

The ability to trust ourselves without needing anyone else to tell us how to live our life or what decisions we should take is something we evolve.

To be self-directed is only a potential when we begin life. This potential has to be developed in the evolutionary school of hard knocks. We usually learn by going down all sorts of dead-end streets before we find the path that’s true to our inner being.

It’s so easy in life to become caught up in emotional entanglements, driven by neediness, instead of coming from a centered, settled, peaceful state. That’s when we make a mess of things and put ourselves, and perhaps others, in a lot of pain.

Yet even the mess we make can become our teacher. There is thankfully never anything irrevocable about our diversions into what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body and the havoc it can wreak in our lives.

As the story of The Little Prince progresses, we shall see how both the airman and the little fellow he is shortly to meet from an asteroid both go on a journey that equips them to discern their real desires from their fleeting whims.

The author of a letter written to the Hebrew people some 1900 years or so ago refers to those who are “mature.” What does maturity look like? They are individuals whose “faculties have been trained by exercise to distinguish good from evil.”

Yesterday we talked about aloneness and how it impacts our sexuality. At the heart of this issue is desire.

People generally think of desire as wanting something we don’t have. Certainly it can seem that this is what desire is about if we feel needy. But neediness is actually an illusion.

There is no neediness in any of us other than the fact we have learned to believe there is and therefore feel there is.

Desire, rather than being driven by neediness, is a fullness at our center that’s seeking to express itself. It is, as a friend of mine puts it, “Love trying to happen.”

At our core we are one with the infinite Source that knows no lack. When we perceive lack in our life, it’s because we are in our head and our emotions instead of coming from our center. Thinking and emoting, we experience neediness.

All of our desire is love trying to happen. But until we awaken to our center, it’s going to feel as if we are empty and hence we go down paths that are unfruitful.

Once we awaken to our essence, there can never be neediness in our life. All of our desire then becomes a means of channeling our fullness into the various dimensions of life in which we wish to express ourselves.

When we come from fullness, we approach sexuality quite differently. We bring our fullness to a situation, rather than hollowness. Our longing and yearning have no emptiness to them but are our fullness reaching out unconditionally to love.

Once in touch with our fullness, there’s never any fear of being alone. Fulfilled within ourselves, we don’t need someone to fill up some aspect of our life and we don’t crave or grasp. The whole tenor of our relationships changes. Why we do what we do changes.

Realizing that no one can ever “be there” for us as was the case in the womb and the cradle, we allow our own precious being to “be here.”

It’s out of the full claiming of our uniqueness, expressed through our completeness in ourselves, that we reach out on the physical plane to mutually enjoy life in ways that are upbuilding, healthy, and tend toward wholeness.

Cherishing our aloneness is something that may seem impossible if we aren’t aware of our essential being. I went through years of feeling desperately lonely when I didn’t have someone in my life. But once connect with your center and all that changes.

This doesn’t lessen our desire to be with others or to be with a special person should that opportunity avail itself. It doesn’t lessen our enjoyment of our sexuality. On the contrary, it’s what makes these things meaningful. The presence of another or others in our life in various capacities provides greater opportunity for the expression of our fullness, enhancing our enjoyment of life.

None of us learns this overnight. We blunder our way down many pathways before we finally come to ourselves. As the statement to the Hebrews says, discernment is something that comes with practice. We slowly learn to hear our true voice, know our deepest desires.

Laws don’t keep people from unwise choices. Rules and regulations have never kept people from foolish decisions, especially where sexuality is concerned. Look at how, in fundamentalist Islamic social settings, couples engage in affairs even though they know they risk being stoned to death.

Only when we are following our heart are we are solid. Only when our actions flow from our center can we be trusted.

We can be trusted because we have learned to trust ourselves.