As a descentist, I know that my waking life is an illness that interrupts my true and healthful state I assume in sleep. I know that my peaceful state persists within my illness as my core desire for peace. But the illness accumulates upon my desire for peace as the constellation of inner and outer environments.
The constellation starts as the beating of my heart, my breathing, my need to eat, drink, and relieve myself. It is the rise and fall of the sun, and the seasonal changes I experience outside of me. It is the patterns of thought within my head, and the feelings within my heart. It is my longing for companionship, the memories of my past, and the aspirations for a successful future.
The totality of my waking experience is the constellation. Every thought, sensation, compulsion, and object I see or imagine is the malignant growth preventing Me from seeing and understanding who and where I am.
My desire seeks its source; that which gives rise to it. The growth works by attacking and disrupting my desire. The growth convinces me that what I seek — what I desire — is out here, in this place I manifest when I awaken, when actually, what I seek is not out here. It is the opposite of out here; it is when I asleepen that my desire seeks. My desire seeks its source, and its source is peace.
Life is an illness that works by disrupting my only true sense: my sense of desire. It crushes my unified desire for peace, fracturing it into a million smaller needs and desires which proliferate around the periphery of my existence. I forget my true desire for peace, and instead wander around seeking the relief of my middle desires.
To remember my true desire, I first must believe that I can have what I want. Everything that I have ever wanted and will ever want, can be fully satisfied. The desire I feel does not exist without its counterpart satisfaction.
Then I must look hard at my life spent pursuing desires that have only ever delivered temporary relief. Nothing I have ever done out here, nothing I have ever achieved, no matter how much I wanted it when I desired to pursue it, ever fully satisfied the deep yearning I have. I must accept that the steps I have been taking to get what I want have not solved the problem I face.
Deep inside of me, at the core of my being, is a yearning for something total and complete. If I get this thing I want, I will want nothing else. I must believe that. And then I can begin the process of destroying the cancerous growth that keeps me from it. When I see something I want out here, I remind myself: this will not give me what I truly seek. It may lead to relief, but it will not give me everything I want.
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