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Plant the seed of desire in your mind
and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself every-thing needed for
its fulfillment.
Robert Collier
 Desire is a magnetism like attraction toward something, the
possession of which is expected to create a personal benefit such as a material
gain, or a pleasurable sensation or feeling. It is the energetic bond between a
material object and an element within one of our designs. The material object
can be a physical object, a person, or a circumstance such as a job for which we
have applied. The energy that sustains desire is the same energy that sustains
attachment. This energy surrounds all designs and draws complimentary designs
together as in desire, and holds the two together as an attachment.
 | The dynamic of desire is composed of three parts.
 | The object of desire. We believe that this object will satisfy a need. |
| The magnetism like force that attracts us to the object of desire. The
force's effect is similar to that of a magnet in the experiment in which we
place a magnet under a piece of paper and observe iron filings arrange
themselves into a pattern on the paper. Like that magnetic force, the force of
desire, too, has an effect on matter. It arranges our thoughts into its pattern
such that we think about the object, and we visualize it. It then aligns the
physical conditions of our life such that the desired object is attracted to us
and manifests itself in our life. The force arises when there is an common
resonance between the energy of the object and the desire within us. This is
similar to the resonance between the two tines of a tuning fork. We experience
this resonance as a stimulation that we seek to satisfy by interacting with the
object of desire. The same dynamic occurs in every type of desire. |
| Our subjective experience of desire. Fundamentally, desire is simply an
awareness of the magnetism like attraction, like when we are aware of a noise.
We personalize this impersonal attraction by implanting design elements such as
emotion as in romantic love, that is felt as craving and hoping, and images in
our fantasies regarding the object, and thoughts in our schemes to acquire the
object, and in our plans for using the object once it is acquired. What we
commonly call desire is usually the emotion that is in the design. If this
emotional component is particularly strong in the design, we experience it as
passion that is simply a state of intense emotion.
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| Desire can arise from many sources. Desire is simply the attraction between two material objects including the
material that constitutes the mind. We can find many ways in which this dynamic
occurs.
| The physical body. When we are hungry, we desire food, and as there is
also an emotional body and a mental body, these bodies feel a sensation that is
analogous to the physical body's hunger. |
| Ego. Our ego is not a bad thing. It is merely the part of us that is
responsible for creating our human life. Its desires are to actualize the
design aspects of that human life such as a secure and comfortable home or a
physical environment that facilitates health for the body. The ego contains
a design of human life. The elements of that design resonate with external
elements and we feel desire for material things that are needed for the
construction of a human life. |
| Design elements. We are constantly interacting with designs. They
provide the underlying structure and force of life. Every design encounter
leaves a residue from each of the thoughts, images, energy tones, and
actions that we committed during the encounter. If our thoughts were guided
by intuition which accurately perceives all dynamics in a situation, our
actions were appropriate, and so the elements discharged in the course of
the interaction. The elements remain merely as memories. If our thoughts
were not guided by intuition but instead by a default such as logic, or past
experience, our actions did not relate with the situation as it really is,
and so the elements remain in our design with their charge. This unresolved
charge is one of the energies that powers our desire and our attachment. In
a future occasion when we encounter the same design, these unresolved design
elements resonate with the physical objects that represent the design, and
we are compulsively drawn to and desire the objects. We find ourselves
repeatedly in the same type of relationships because our design regarding
the relationship design has remained the same, and so it re-creates the same
type of relationship in which the unresolved elements were created, so that
those elements can discharge their lingering charge. The patterns of our
life will not change until we change our thoughts regarding the situations.
Indeed, we would be altering our design, because we would be installing new
thoughts and images and energy tones and actions into this design which is
continually recreating our physical circumstances through the force of
desire. These patterns are nothing more than the contents of our designs. |
| The true self. In backtracking through the dynamics of desire, to
find its source, we come to the true self, the eternal, transcendental part
of us. From the perspective of our true self, through intuition we are able
to transcend the ego and identify our true desires, our hearts desire.
Desire is an agent of our spiritual drive toward wisdom, love, and
completion and therefore has a beneficial purpose in our life. |
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Techniques for managing our desires.
| We can accept the existence of desire. It is part of life. It is part
of our nature. It is part of the dynamics of this world but we can have more
than this fatalistic view. We can see desire as a stimulating adventure by
which our true self explores itself and eventually realizes its oneness with
the objects of desire. |
| We can become more aware of our desires. As we develop our cognizance
of our intuition as a source of inner guidance. Intuition considers all of
our needs including those that are expressed by desires. |
| We can change the contents of our designs. Desire draws us to design
situations. The nature of these situations is determined by the specific
elements of the design. We have a desire for friendships, but the quality of
those friendships will be determined by the elements in our friendship
design. We can take responsibility for the contents of the design through
design-work. We insert new thoughts, through affirmations, and new images,
through directed imagination, and new actions, through modeling. If our
designs contain productive elements, our desires are not troublesome but
instead they are useful sources of energy and guidance that carry us toward fulfillment
in every area of our life. During our striving to obtain objects
of desire, and during the time in which we possess the objects, we can
enhance our design elements to facilitate the interaction with the objects. |
| We can stop denying the existence of desires that feel embarrassing
or offensive, perhaps because they violate our moral code. This
acknowledgment does not mean that we have to act out the desires in the form
in which we perceive them. It simply means that we are willing to look at
them with the intent of finding a constructive way to express and recognize
them without feeling guilty about them. |
| We can enjoy what we have. If our desires are so powerful and
persistent that our lives seem to be nothing but the meaningless acquisition
of objects that we do not have time to enjoy, we are probably out of balance.
Our desires cannot be satisfied by mere ownership or by superficial
interaction with objects. If we spend quality time with what we already have,
we can explore more of its facets and dimensions, and we often discover that
some of our desires can be satiated with these current belongings. We can
enhance our enjoyment by setting aside some time to indulge the natural
emotional qualities of acceptance and enjoyment and warmth and gratitude and
appreciation toward the objects that we own. The troublesome kind of
materialism is in the acquisition of symbolic wealth such as big numbers in a
bank account, or an extravagant home merely to impress people or perhaps to
compensate for thoughts of inadequacy in our ego. It is okay to have any
amount of material goods as long as we realize it is not what we own that is
important but rather our relationship to it, a relationship that is founded on
vitality and purpose in our life at this moment. |
| We can transcend our desires. We still need to attend to the call of
desire, recognizing it as the call to life in material form, but we become
better managers of desire if we distance ourselves from it, at least for a
period of time, in some type of contemplative state. When we do this it helps us
in several ways:
| We perceive desire as an impersonal magnetic force that is not ours
but rather it is ours to enjoy. Both the desires and the objects of desire
are only temporary visitors in our life. They are important, they bring
gifts of vitality and information and fulfillment, so we interact with them
attentively and lovingly during their cycle with us. When the cycle is
completed we release the objects without attachment. |
| We can observe the steps in the process of desire.
Those steps include:
 | Our awareness of the desire. |
| The arising of associated thoughts and images and energy tones and
physiological activity such as the increase in heart rate as we become
stimulated by the desire. |
| Our instinctive discernment of the quality of the desire such as its
intensity, worthiness, or moral value. |
| The engagement of the analytical function of the mind to set up the
conditions by which we attract the object of desire. |
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The starting point of all achievement
is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just
as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.
Napoleon Hill
Next topic: Faith |
