My deep driving desire

Probably everyone knows the famous passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, “You are what your deep, driving desire is. 
As your desire is, so is your will. 
As your will is, so is your deed. 
As you deed is, so is your destiny.” As I lay awake near sleep the other night this thought was in my head. Though really the thought was more like “how do I know what my deepest desire is?” you can do a search on the Upanishad quote and come up with a thousand different musing on its meanings, and I don’t mean to do that here, rather as I lay there looking at myself I couldn’t help but wonder if what I desire and what I want are really the same thing.

I was listening to a radio lab episode about a month ago when they tackled a similar problem. In the episode the hosts talked about an experiment in which people were given a simple set of numbers to memorize. The subject was then asked to walk down the hall into another room and recall that set of numbers to an observer. Unbeknownst to the test subject, there was an obstacle in the way. Someone, a research assistant probably was to intercept the subject in the hallway and disrupt the subject’s train of thinking. The research assistant would ask” Would you like a piece of cake?” and then offer the subject a piece of cake. More often than not, the list of numbers was forgotten. It turns out that desire and reason are in a constant struggle for attention, and desire usually wins.

I am what my deep, driving desire is. It is weird to think, but the last thought I had as I drifted off to sleep was. I am that desire. By that, of course, I mean, if you look around at my life, at the people and the stuff that I have surrounded myself with, whatever other choices I might have made in life, these things, these people are the by-product of the decisions that won. My life is a product of my deep, driving desire.

Now I have to tell you that usually when I read this quote I read it negatively. That is, I think that if I really willed myself I could have that good job. I could have fame and fortune and everything that goes with it. Or, more rightly I think that I could have that close intimate relationship with my higher power if only I got my mind right. Did you get that? The reason, I tell myself, that I am not a good person, or a righteous person, or a holy person, or whatever, it that I don’t want it enough, and that if I were better, I would.

Self loathing thoughts like these are the by-product of years of misunderstanding between the Christian God and myself. I can blame the church or the priests or my parents… but those songs are old and tired. No I have worked long and hard to try and get my mind around the idea that God is Love, an idea shared in both the Gospels and the Upanishads. And as I lay there thinking that I am what my deep, driving desire is, and I thought about all the things in my life that I have that I am thankful for, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t my desires that made me a bad person, my desire to have things that I didn’t have, it was my deep, driving desire that made me who I am today, that gave me a wonderful life, and that was a very comforting thought, one that I could fall asleep to.