If we could have rejected them, we would have. Pretending we don’t want these desires doesn’t keep them from drawing in more of what they want. Resisting gets us nowhere. We can keep fighting them but only to our own detriment. Instead, we want to get in alignment with these desires; only then can we begin to gain some control. This is a 180-degree shift: We try to go one direction and there’s an organizing force in our lives that moves us in precisely the opposite way. Eros is a subtle guide, a sense that can operate in the dark. The point is to be in a conversation with our desire—and it speaks to us less in words and more in the actions we keep doing that we can’t control.
Desire’s truest communication is in these places, and the most true way to respond to them is to try to get behind them in such a way that we ultimately create less tumescence from the struggle. When we finally do get behind our desires in their most expressed form, then the desires act effortlessly.
From this place, an alignment occurs that’s greater than its component parts—the way the final tick of the final sprocket in the machine locks into place and suddenly the lights go on. We see this in sitting meditation
when we are on the spot. We are looking for this in our lives: the seamless flow between heaven and earth, their unity and merging. It is this on the spot-ness we seek.
