Desire Means A Great Longing To Expand
Talk: Osho

The energy called desire has been condemned for centuries. Almost all the so called saints have been against it, because desire is life and they were all life-negative. Desire is the very source of all that you see, and they were against all that is visible.

Desire without any object, desire without being goal-oriented,
unmotivated desire, pure desire, is godliness. Desire is not to be
destroyed; it is to be purified. Desire is not to be dropped; it is to be transformed.

Your very being is desire; to be against it is to be against yourself and against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and
the birds and the sun and the moon. To be against it is against all
creativity. Desire is creativity.
   

The Eastern scriptures are perfectly right when they say that God
created the world because a great desire arose in Him – a desire to create, to manifest, a desire to make many from one, to expand.

But these are only metaphors; God is not separate from desire. Desire means a longing, a great longing, to expand, to become as huge as the sky.
   

What the man who wants to have more and more money really wants is not money but expansion, because money can help you expand. You can have a bigger house, you can have a bigger garden – your territory will be bigger, your freedom will be bigger.
   

The man who is after money may not know why he is after the money. Go deeper into his unconscious, help him to meditate, and he will be surprised
to find that the desire for money is not really the desire for money, it is the desire to expand.
   

The same is the case with all other desires. People want more power, more fame, longer life, better health, but what are they desiring in these different things? The same, exactly the same: they want to be more. They don’t want to remain confined; they don’t want to be limited.

It hurts to feel that you are definable, because if you are definable then you are just an object, a commodity. But all these objects of desire, sooner or later, disappoint.

Money becomes possible one day, and yet expansion has not happened; you may have a little more freedom of choice, but that does not satisfy. The desire was for the infinite, and money cannot purchase the infinite.
   

If you watch carefully, money, power, prestige – nothing satisfies. On the contrary, they make you more discontented. Why? That’s because when you were poor there was hope that one day the money was going to happen and then you would relax and enjoy. Now that has happened, and there seems to be no sign of any relaxation. You are even tenser than you were before, you
are even more anxiety-ridden than you were before.
   

Desire in itself is not wrong. Money, power and prestige are wrong
objects of desire. You can have a sword and you can kill somebody – that does not make the sword faulty. You can also save somebody with the sword.
   

Desire has to be purified and transformed, because it is your energy –you don’t have any other energy. The mediocre way to transform desire is to
change the object. Don’t go after money, start going after God…
   

There is no seed of desire because desire is the seed of all. Desire is the ultimate seed of everything. To transform your energies, be creative.

Slowly, you will see transformation happening of its own accord.

Excerpted from The Book of Wisdom. Courtesy: Osho International
Foundation. www.osho.com