What is this longing desire I sometimes feel? Where does it come from and what is it yearning for?
When I was a young girl, I remember deciding I would become a nun. The notion of living a cloistered life of prayer and inner contemplation spoke to something in me.
Later, at Sherborne House with Mr. Bennett, there was an exercise where he would instruct us to, “look at how I am, and how I wish to be.” It was in that looking that I felt my first definable sense of remorse. After that, the feeling of longing desire became recognizable, as did experiences of objective remorse.
Something Unobtainable
There has been this sense with my longing desire of something unobtainable, of far beyond me as I am. I’ve always figured that the object of desire has to do with ultimate transformation. This is something I continue to work towards and understand. In my mind, I link this to the moment of death. Which I see as the climax of my search. My moment of Truth.
In the meantime, back here in the physical world of “me” as I am, I slog away with my inner work. Those occasions of grace, of seeing and feeling something beyond my ken, feed me and keep me going. Like Mother Mary, I love the “interior hidden life of grace.”
Desire as Life-Line
It’s occurring to me now to look at longing desire differently. Maybe what I’m longing for isn’t so unobtainable. Maybe this desire is a lifeline that pulls me forward in my search towards an aim that is a steppingstone to the next way station, not an end in itself.
Desire is also Wish. Gurdjieff puts a lot of import into that word and that feeling. “I Wish to Be.” And what am I wishing to be? Well, this includes a connection with that which is higher in myself. In the Fourth Way we speak of Higher Being Bodies. Again, something I have always had a vague idea about and which seem far beyond me.
Yet, as I continue with my work, I do have glimpses of something growing in me that is not part of my ordinary self. Rare, but there. Occasional sightings, to be tucked away and left undisturbed. Yet depositing a sense of Hope along the way.
These days, I have a growing belief that I am not alone, internally I mean. My longing desire still fills me and awakens my feeling center, which is important. But the sense that what it longs for is so far away there is little hope of realization, is dissipating. Instead, my “self as I am” is developing a relationship with the “self I wish to be.” There’s a partnership that was never there before. A longing desire that comes from Wish and is pulling “me” forward to meld a new “I Am.”