You are what your deepest desire is.
You are what your deepest desire is.
As is your desire, so is your will.
As is your will, so are your actions.
From your actions, your destiny is born.
-- Loose interpretation. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5
If you genuinely wish to understand who you are, uncover what you desire. Explore that impulse that moves despite yourself, through the shadows of your dreams and gestures. That fire within you, that life — it may be the true compass of your soul, pointing toward that nameless something we call the Nothing, the Self, the Great Void from which all things arise.
Examine your life. Watch the shadows on the ground, cast in backlight by your soul. What do they reveal? What lies behind your choices, your failures, your surges and your lamentations? Is it a desire for possession? For freedom? For unity? For truth? Or perhaps for dissolution?
Is it a desire to be, or a desire to forget?
What you are is what you truly desire.
What calls to you unceasingly — in silence, in missteps,
What haunts or uplifts you — that, it seems, is your true name.
Learn to see that desire, and you may glimpse where you’re going.
Illuminate it, and you may discover who you are.
Paradoxically, as your journey deepens, the sages warn: you will face disillusionment. Before you, many negations. Your quest may be endless.
What you discover, day by day, may crumble like a sand mandala patiently built by birds that no longer exist.
Neti, neti, proclaim the Ancients — “Not this, not that.” You are not your body, not your thoughts, not even your desires. You are That which sees all these.
It is an abyssal contradiction: Your deepest desire may lead you to the abandonment of desire itself. It is a path toward the exhaustion of outward seeking. When purified, that desire no longer looks out the window of the senses, but turns inward, toward an inner diamond, as fragile as the trace your feet will leave on the soil of existence.
And yet. It is said that this path is the source of a deep stillness and vast joy. There are those who may have walked it. They left behind words and gestures, though they promised nothing and proved nothing.
This is not about hope or blind belief. For in truth, we may already be without eyes. The quest, it is said, is to recover sight beyond shadows, beyond appearances.
