Drive, Desire, and Bliss - 06.03.10

Student Question: I have a question about the concept of drives. It seems that there is fear and desire and the drive comes from that. But the question that came up when I was meditating was, how do we distinguish what is a drive? It seems like drives create suffering, and that whatever we’re driven to do, we have an attachment to and that’s why there’s suffering.

“The drive comes out of the illusion that one is a separate entity,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Once there is the illusion of an ego, that ego—because it is lost, and it doesn’t know who it is, and it is filled with a terror of its own lack—it is driven to try to fill that lack.” And thus all drives start from the need for security, and all drives build, and are variations, on the security drive. “But the drive is a relatively primitive stage, so beyond the drive is desire per se. When you truly desire something in a conscious way, you are not driven to get it; you know that you can live without it. You want it, but you don’t need it. . . . And then beyond desire, when you get to real love for example, Divine Love, that’s much more subtle. And now you’re not being driven any longer; it’s an opening; it’s a giving. . . . And ultimately—at the highest level of subtlety—even that subject/object differentiation is no longer made. There’s a realization of the Godself in everyone in everything in every moment, and there is no longer any being to be driven.” It’s not a taking at any longer.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.