Every child recognises the push and pull of desire in its simplest form: I want the thing I do not possess. But my desire is not only connected to the object of my desire. It is also woven into the thought that I do not want to desire. I want this desire to end. I want the longing to be over. It’s not the thing I want, whatever it may be, so much as to put an end to wanting it. I want it to be mine, I want to be one with it, I want this feeling of wanting to dissolve into my unity with the thing, so that there will be no more wanting, no more longing, no more desire, no more separation.
Yet like the poetry of surrender, the rules of wanting place upon us a cloak of assumptions and reason that darkens our gaze instead of increasing it. We think that we want the thing, the thing that will quench our desire, extinguish the fire it places in our heart.
Just as we can consider surrender without an object, surrender without a thing to surrender to, the spiritual movement of surrender, we can think a desire that has no object.
When we desire, when we want, we want something, some thing. And yet what opens itself to us, through that wanting, in the corner of the eye of our desire, secretly, stealthily and not easily, is the thought of wanting without an object, desiring while not desiring anything. Its the strange and paradoxical thought of another kind of desire, a desire that desires only desire, a desire that only seeks to be, to remain, to demeure. I desire.
What does this strange desire desire? Nothing, everything.
What does it feel like to desire, but to not desire anything? Insatiable, unquenchable.
To desire without an object, to desire without end, is too long for everything, by longing for nothing, too long for nothing by longing for everything. Infinite greed for nothing, a longing to simply be.
It’s a desire so profound and yet so detached that it escapes reason, or perhaps challenges reason, by teasing it, playing with it, seducing it from beyond itself.
Transcendental desire happens in the secret lover’s bower of the universe, where the lover’s desires are desires for the entire world, where the lover’s jealousy is attached to wanting, loving, the infinity of the cosmos, in other words loving what is everything, nothing.
It is a kind of loving eroticism that sees sensuality not in the material objects of desire that perhaps might, one after another, or together or apart, satisfy our finite desires, but rather a sensual beauty emanating from the mystery of the all-ness of creation.
Thus, alone the plain and modest experience of thinking the thought of ‘I desire’ without desiring a thing is the experience of this splendour. It’s the same splendour experienced by the infant child who is indifferent to the mundane object held before it, a coloured piece of wood or a formless doll, but is endlessly fascinated—and desirous—of the pleasure–game whereby the object is hidden and revealed to the joy of the child, hidden and revealed, over and over, to the point where the character of the object, its colour or form, entirely loses importance and only the residual joy in desire itself remains.
This desire, this greed, is the transcendental desire of the Divine.