In my ascent, I was accustomed to imagining my life as a series of discrete events. Waking up was a different event than going to sleep. But this framing of my experience distorted my actual condition.
In my descent I have realized that my awakening into the second place is not disconnected from my asleepening into the first place. In reality, they are one single event, interrupted by the period of my existence I call my “waking”. The set of these imagined interruptions I call my life.
In life, there is one single, unified desire that underlies all others. It is revealed when I desire only to remain at sleep when I begin to awaken. It is revealed again at the end of my awakening when I experience an irresistible desire to return to sleep. These two events, that occur every awakening, are my one desire revealed: peace.
Peace is not something I can find out here in the world. It cannot be found when I am “awake”. Peace is permanent, lasting, undivided, painless, and free of any desire. What I find out here, during my awakenings, is relief. Relief comes in infinite forms: comfort, pleasure, health, accomplishment, status, possession, success. Anything and everything I do in my awakening is in pursuit of relief, not peace.
When I awaken, my pure single desire fragments into all the desires I experience in my life. My physical desires to wake up, use the restroom, eat, and exercise. My social obligations to bathe, clothe myself, and interact with friends and family. My financial needs to earn money and pay for myself. My aspirational desires for pleasure, comfort, and success. All of these needs and desires, are, at their very core, one. In the same way that pure white light splits into a spectrum of colors, my one desire splits into a spectrum of desires, each with their own unique character.
As my singular desire for peace fractures into the desire spectrum, over a lifetime of awakenings, they become entangled and knotted. I forget my true desire for peace, and instead pursue a multitude of entangled, jumbled goals and objectives, hoping for relief at the end. But the relief that does arrive, vanishes. I begin to feel disappointed that what I wanted, and achieved, did not provide what I sought. I begin to lose hope. It hurts. Until I see the pattern I am trapped in, and decide to rediscover my root desire.
When I left high school I was completely confused about what I wanted. That is, oddly, considered normal. But it is anything but. It is a state of abject terror and pain; knowing that I want something, but not knowing what that is. That is the consequence of nearly two decades of suppressing my one desire and being misled and misdirected. While I had the energy and youth to endure it, it was extremely painful.
With more awakenings, I lost my ability to accept and endure the non-stop pain. I found countless forms of relief, but my true desire was always out of reach, a mystery. Then I tried something different: I decided to do what I wanted to do rather than what I did not. I began throwing off familial and social expectations. I made dramatic changes to my life that were unexpected to all around me. And though they did not solve my problem, they brought me closer. I could see it.
For me, it was simply rediscovering what I wanted, and doing it. Throwing off the obligations and performances I did for others, or out of habit. The first changes were dramatic, but over time they became increasingly subtle. Small changes arising out of the realization that doing what I truly wanted felt better than doing anything else. I stopped doing things I never wanted to do, and started to do things that I actually wanted. With time and effort, my awakenings spent doing what I want to do began to reveal things I had forgotten how to see.
This knot of desire can be untangled. In fact, it starts every day perfectly straight, and ends every day perfectly straight. It is the interruption in the middle that I call life which hurts. But I can smooth out these tangles, and when I do, the outline of what was once unspeakable, reveals itself: peace. I see what I want in the distance. It feels better than anything else, and I can pursue it.
There is only one permanent desire: peace. I can call that peace many different things: god, my true self, my true nature, heaven, truth. It does not matter what I call it, but it is the very foundation of my entire second place existence. Everything in my second place is magnetically attracted toward peace; it is the reason I always return to sleep at the end of my awakening, despite running from it when I awaken. When I follow my desires, I will unentangle the knot in the process and find my way back to my true desire.
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