If the cause of suffering is unfulfilled desire, the solution to the problem must be to stop desiring.

There are two ways of stopping desire: one either gets out of sight of the objects of desire (seclusion) or one tries to beat desire (asceticism).

However, neither of these two approaches really work as the Buddha found out for himself during his pre-enlightment spiritual seeking.

On the one hand, some basic desires such as food and sex are not extinguishable as long as one is still human. On the other hand, the desire to stop desiring is still a desire, just a more subtle form of it. 

Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as you look around you. So far so good.

But the truth is funnier than that, it is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having that you call ordinary everyday consciousness – pretending you’re not it – that experience is exactly the same thing as ‘IT’!

There’s no difference at all, and when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That’s the great discovery.

In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos.

Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn’t be brighter.

Only they’re hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don’t blow your eyes out.

See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light.

You evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood.

Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It’s your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air.

You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything, you see.

But in the mythology that we sold ourselves on during the end of the 19th century, when people discovered how big the universe was, and that we live on a little planet in a solar system on the edge of the galaxy, which is a minor galaxy, everybody thought, ‘Uugh, we’re really unimportant after all.

God isn’t there and doesn’t love us, and nature doesn’t give a damn.’

And we put ourselves down. But actually, it’s this funny little microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that’s way out somewhere, who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe out of what otherwise would be mere quanta. There’s jazz going on.

But you see, this little ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism, on this little planet, is what the whole show is growing there, and so realizing it’s own presence.

Well, now here’s the problem: if this is the state of affairs which is so, and if the consciousness state you’re in at this moment is the same thing as what we might call the Divine State – if you do anything to make it different, it shows you don’t understand that it’s so.

So the moment you start practicing yoga, or praying, or meditating, or indulging in some sort of spiritual cultivation, you are getting in your own way.

The Buddha said, ‘We suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won’t suffer.’

But he didn’t say that as the last word; he said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that to someone, they’re going to come back after a while and say, ‘Yes, but I’m now desiring not to desire.’

And so the Buddha will answer, ‘Well at last you’re beginning to understand the point.’ Because you can’t give up desire; why would you try to do that? It’s already desire.

So in the same way you say, You ought to be unselfish, or to give up you ego. Let go; relax. Why do you want to do that? Just because it’s another way of beating the game, isn’t it?

The moment, you see, you hypothesize that you are different from the universe, you want to get one-up on it.

But if you try to get one-up on the universe, and you’re in competition with it, that means you don’t understand you are it.

You think there’s a real difference between Self and other.

But Self, what you call yourself, and what you call Other are mutually necessary to each other like back and front.

They’re really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as Self and Other, but it’s all one.

So if you try to make the north pole get the mastery of it, or the south pole get the mastery over the north pole, you show you don’t know what’s going on.