Choice and Desire

All that happens in our consciousness is driven by desire, so that we can only do something as much as we desire it. Desires are either connected as choices and separate as impulses. When separate they compete for control, causing imbalance, and when connected they cooperate toward freedom, causing balance. But the unconscious is so complex, that to some degree it contains every possible desire behind our actions, and some are but greater than others, and so many desires affect each other that we can never know how the result would be different if any one of them weren't there. As all there is to us is consciousness, the desire for consciousness is the only one that can connect all others.
As desires are our emotions, the best way to focus, as in meditation, is to let our emotion drive it, as it's what focuses all of our consciousness. Being desires, our emotions are there to fulfill a need, a need for a lack or excess to become balanced; and as long as it's not expressed, the need will keep increasing the emotion until it is expressed, and the earlier it's expressed, the more moderate. Emotion is the flow of our consciousness, and if we accept it, it will carry us, but if we resist it, we will drown.
We must first focus on the desires we have now, for until then we cannot fully focus on what to desire next. As long as something we desire to get done isn't, it'll just stay in our unconscious and keep us from fully focusing on something else, so that with every thing we get done we become better at everything else: when everything is done, there is an emptiness in us that can be filled with new things.

2 comments:

  1. 'desire behind our actions' reminds me of a funny Benjamin Franklin quote: "So convenient it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do." ;) I do not think imagining is the same as feeling, though. The mind is experiential and if you don't experience the color blue of blue skies or the color green of green trees, you cannot know what it *is* no matter how much knowledge you acquire *about* blue and green.

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    1. True, but when we do know what a sensation is like (like blue, or an emotion), and we imagine it, our brain processes it internally, even if there is no external cause. So through imagination, we can choose what we are conscious of.

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