Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Vedantic, and today's reflection is on a question I recently got from one of our gatherings here in Venice, where someone aptly said, isn't desiring desirelessness, just another desire? And right they were. It is actually talked about within the philosophy that the desire for liberation from desire, which talk about why you'd want to liberate yourself from desire in a second, but that that is the healthiest desire we can have. And ultimately is the desire underneath all of our other desires.
You want to be healthy when you're sick. You want that fast car. You want that big promotion. You want that financial milestone in your career.
These are all desiring liberation from some constraint we feel. You don't feel validated by your community. You feel boxed in by some definition of you that you don't agree with it. People are going to see how great I am.
It is called misguided mimukshatwa. And mimukshatwa is that yearning for liberation. These are all just misguided versions of seeking where peace exists. And that is through the cessation of desire.
Think about the last time you had ice cream. It wasn't the ice cream that you craved. It was the craving for that ice cream that you wanted to satisfy. Once you get it, so you have that first bite, that second bite, you can even see it in the ice cream line.
People kind of doing the ice cream dance excited for the ice cream they're about to get the more disciplined the people, the more excited the dance might be because, well, it's happening. They went through dinner just thinking about, we're going to get ice cream after this. The piece doesn't come from the taste hitting your taste buds. The piece comes from a cessation of this yearning of this desire, of this craving that you feel like you can't control the only way to cease it is to fulfill it.
In the moments that we are unable to fulfill it, that interrupt a desire is when we have stress, strain, anger, sadness. These are all desire interrupted. So if we're in a life and we feel like, man, there's just so much suffering within it. There's so much yearning, agitation, stress, sadness, or anger.
Or we're just in the wheel where it's like, man, this feels like Stéjà Vu. Something good happens, something bad happens, something good happens, something bad happens. That is the wheel of samsara of involvement. And we might tune our antenna to trying to transcend this suffering, transcend this agitation or anger or this fairs wheel of going up and down, up and down through life.
Not everyone has this yearning to transcend suffering. If you don't have that explicit yearning, then, well, maybe you think it's in that new MacBook. It's going to be in that car with a nice watch or once you find a spouse. And this video has no relevance to you.
So you click stop, stop watching it, and everything about it again. But for those of us that have seen enough of the world to recognize, even if it solves my problems, how do I solve suffering at large around me? I alleviate the suffering and the strain of the people we love. Well, we're told within Vedanta when you wake up, like the waker within a dream, when they wake up, everyone wakes up.
The dream ends. And all suffering is transcendent. Quite the promise. And somewhere along your path, something like this interests you, especially with a promise so grand like that, to end your and all suffering around you.
And then you have this conundrum. Suffering is caused by attachment and desire. And yet we're called by this philosophy to attach to not attachment and to desire, desirelessness. They're both saying the same thing.
It's described like making a fire with a log. You get the fire going by making sure everything's situated. You see the embers, you see the initial flames going, and you are guiding the fire along with this log in your hand. The desire to end desire is that log in your hand.
Then once you get that fire going, it's cultivated and it is raging. And the last thing we do is throw that last log into the fire itself. We sacrifice the selfish or unselfish desire to end suffering. What I love about this philosophy is that it has a full comprehensive understanding of what it means to be human, of our wiring to attach to things to people to ideas, our wiring to desire.
And it says, utilize that. I jack that wiring to attach to desire something higher. Don't go from zero to 100 miles an hour. You can gradually attach to something higher and higher and higher.
But ultimately, the highest desire is even sacrificed along the way. You throw that log into the fire after you've used it to cultivate the fire you throw it into. That is desirelessness. And that is the Vedantic Path to Liberation.
We'll see you next time on the Daily Vedantic. Thanks for listening to the Daily Vedantic. This reflection is part of a free repeating two-year course in Ifite at Vedanta. Rooted in the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads, arguably the oldest philosophical texts on Earth, you can begin with episode one, which gives the 15-minute overview of the whole philosophy of Vedanta, or you can join the journey with any episode at any point.
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One of the things you might notice is after seven or eight days in a row, this doesn't feel like a discipline. This feels like a visit with a best friend to dive into the timeless with daily reflection. Within a few days, it becomes one of your favorite parts of the day. You can also find out more including news about in-person events in Los Angeles and beyond at the DailyVedantic on Instagram or through our weekly newsletter at thedailyvedantic.com.
Additionally, check out the links in our show notes for more resources like the books that are mentioned most frequently in the episodes, including Vedanta Treatis, perhaps the simplest and most straightforward read on this philosophy I've ever come across. Until next time, and from the entire team that works on the DailyVedantic project. Thanks for listening.