Gautam Buddha

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JOYFULLY

JOYFULLY

He who wishes to awake consumes his desires joyfully.
Gautam Buddha. The Dhammapada.

What does Buddha mean by ″desire″? Desire means your whole mind. Desire means not to be here now. Desire means moving somewhere in the future which is not yet. Desire means a thousand and one ways of escaping from the present. Desire is equivalent to mind. In Buddha′s terminology, desire is mind.

And desire is time too. When I say desire is time too, I don′t mean the clock time, I mean the psychological time. How do you create future in your mind? - by desiring. You want to do something tomorrow - you have created the tomorrow; otherwise the tomorrow is nowhere yet, it has not come.

The man who lives in the future, lives a counterfeit life. He does not really live, he only pretends to live. He hopes to live, he desires to live, but he never lives. And the tomorrow never comes, it is always today. And whatsoever comes is always now and here, and he does not know how to live now-here; he knows only how to escape from now-here. The way to escape is called ″desire,″ tanha - that is Buddha′s word for what is an escape from the present, from the real into the unreal.

The man who desires is an escapist.