The Fire of Desire
The Secret of Desire and how to Forge your Smiles into Riches
It has been said that desire moves the past from slumber.
But if you were to see time from Dr. Manhattan’s perspective you would know that there is no separation between the past, present, and future.
If that, however esoteric, is true then, Desire moves all things.
In the only traditionally published book I wrote, Tower Hearts, there’s a passage about how people have the elements inside of them. The element of Fire, for example, is a person’s will.
Imagine a beaker of water over a Bunsen burner and the heat setting the water in the beaker to a boil. The will is what makes it move. In fact, makes it change form, eventually into steam or air in this example.
I’m reading Think and Grow Rich and the author eludes to desire often. Spoiler alert, I think that is the secret he is hoping we glean from the texts.
You should read it yourself anyhow because I’ve also written an article about shortcuts and how they don’t pay. That being said, you could just watch the new Wonder Woman and learn that lesson in a more entertaining kinda way.
Hey, it’s not a shortcut if you achieve the same result!
Currently, I am going through a marital separation, and despite my ego wanting to plaster a blog entry in all the ways I’ve been such a great father, I instead decided to take the opportunity to share what I have learned about desire and how it moves the world.
A friend once said,
“When you’re feeling down, it is always best to do one of two things. Help another or learn something new.”
I figure I can’t go wrong by doing both. So let me help you understand how to cultivate desire because that is what ultimately is gonna bring you what you want.
There are going to be pitfalls and roadblocks along the way to everything you desire. People throw logs onto your fire (only because they are trying to help). But sometimes, those people don’t realize that the really heavy stuff is hard to burn and may snuff you right out.
It’s our job, as those who desire, to keep the pilot light going by staying lighthearted. Fortunately for us, God seems to be the ultimate source of natural gas!
For all you youngsters, we use to call funny things a gas!
Ironically, my first book Life’s a Joke!, centered on the fact that you should always take those pitfalls with a grain of salt. Anything you can learn to laugh at can hold no power over you.
My wife likely laughed at my penis, for example. Maybe that’s why she ran the show!
I enjoy philosophy, money, martial arts, and the love of family and friends. Therefore, I desire abundance in all of these arenas and am lucky because I can identify these desires.
Some of you can’t even do that! And it’s okay, I’m here to help because, fortunately for you, I also enjoy writing.
There was a time back in the early 2000’s when I went through a really tough break up. I had been six years working at an Irish pub and dating one of the resident waitresses there. She was a beautiful young European, though my mom thought differently.
I was kinda pushing toward marriage and she wasn’t for that and so we just ended up going our separate ways, but had I knew the secret to desire back then, I would be in a totally different place right now.
But, just because I didn’t know the secret back then doesn’t mean it wasn’t still working for me. That’s the thing.
Desire is going to move your world whether you know it or not.
So you might as well know it.
You can think of Desire and its effect on your world as an artist painting on a canvas. The Desire is actually the picture that the artist has in their head of the final result.
The paint he’s using to craft the masterpiece is Time. And the canvas well, the canvas is what you call your Life.
I took the break up really hard.
It was easy for me to hang out after work at the bar to keep myself occupied and surrounded by friends. Get into all kinds of trouble.
But, I had an underlying desire in the midst of all that mess and sorrow.
A desire to show that chick what she was missing out on. A real burning to rub in her face what I could be if I didn’t spend so much time desiring her.
Yeah, it sounds a little egotistical, and it was. But, that desire brought me right into the fittest and most successful period of my late twenties.
I had been spending so much time lost in my desire for her that I had neglected to focus on my desire to be a great martial artist. But, once I refocused my desire it wasn’t long before I was swapping my free time cleaning mats at a local gymnasium for access to their gymnastics apparatus.
Then, that encouraged me to quit hanging out at the bar every night. Then, before I knew it I was teaching martial arts classes, driving a Beamer, and leading a whole bunch of kids to win first place at the NAGA internationals in Orlando.
I didn’t realize that desire was behind all of that back then. But, now that I do, I encourage you to prioritize the desires that you have in life.
There are lots of beautiful things in this world, but not all of them are worth spending your every desire on.
A wise man will enjoy beauty but not seek to posses it for possessions sake alone.
A great way to sort out which desires need to fall into the ‘enjoy it and let it go’ category is to ask yourself, “Is this good for me in what I truly desire most?”
Which other desires are serving or hindering your greatest desire?
For me, smoking wasn’t good for me when I desired to be able to do gymnastics and martial arts. I didn’t focus on the desire of nicotine, I focused harder on the desire for a richer gymnastics experience. Then it fell off, naturally.
Wanna get wealthy? So, you have a desire for morning coffee but it’s killing your savings? Don’t avoid coffee, rather focus more on what you’d rather spend your earnings on, (maybe something that earns a profit?) and enjoy your free coffee at the office, or whatever.
Happiness is found in achievement and the recognition of self-growth.
If you are growing toward your greatest desire, happiness will find you.
It’s impossible for it not to.
Take it from me, a solid desire for good health should be among the top priorities. A burning desire for it. Because, health means that you have more time.
Time is the paint, remember? You don’t want the artist running out of that!
If you provide the will, the desire — the vision, and the time for God to do its work, you will be able to look back at the canvas of your life and see the artistry.
Just don’t rush the artist!
Persevere. Wait it out.
You might look at a caterpillar and think that it totally lacked the ability to fly.
But you’d be wrong!
It already has the desire to take to wing built right into its DNA.
It’s a misconception that the caterpillar hibernates as a pupa while forming its wings.
Actually, inside of the chrysalis the caterpillar is being eaten away by enzymes and totally liquefied before being reconstructed to emerge as the beautiful creature we know and love.
There is no active thought process going on in this transformation. It is just enzymes interacting with cellular information to build the creature into its more lovely form.
It just takes a little patience!
Go figure that. Just sitting there inside of its cocoon. Waiting. Nothing else. No thought involved. Just biological processes and cellular memory doing its thing.
What if the pupa did anything besides dream of flying? What if the caterpillar tried to take part in its transformation while those things were going on via autopilot?
Well, let me tell you how that goes.
Once, there was a flight out of France that had three pilots on board a 727.
The most senior pilot spent most of the flight in the bunk asleep while the other captain oversaw the rookie’s handling of the operations.
The plane was packed with three-hundred passengers, two of which were the senior captain’s wife and daughter.
Once the bird got to a cruising altitude of about 30,000 feet both men at the wheel were mostly relaxing and discussing personal matters. Talking about flight plans, poking fun at the senior captain sleeping next door. You know, just shooting the breeze so to speak.
But the breeze out over the Alps was cooler than usual and the pressure system coming in was representing itself as a dense fog all around.
Flying blind isn’t normally an issue when it comes to high-altitude navigation, but in this instance the moisture was crystalizing over the airspeed indicators on the wingtips. So, even though the 727 was cruising along at nominal speed, the indicators started showing that they were slowing dangerously.
When the buzzers started going off, the instructor, while surprised, sat back and watched to see how the rookie would handle the situation.
All pilots are trained to fly manual in an emergency situation so this wouldn’t be a difficult task.
Naturally, the pilot did what the indicators were telling him to do. He sped up. But he also did another maneuver that is consistent with low airspeed.
He changed the angle of the wing.
If you know anything about aerodynamics and lift, you will know that the angle of the foil is what provides the correct amount of lift. So the pilot angled the foil down more to account for the sudden loss of airspeed.
And that would have worked beautifully. If the indicators weren’t all wrong.
The next warning notification came as a bold red sign and audible voice telling the pilot to nose down. Since the computer sensed the input of increase in throttle and wing angle, it determined the plane would be gaining altitude at an angle to stall.
Both pilots agreed with the stark instruction when they saw their altitude was indeed increasing rapidly despite the airspeed indicator’s danger notification.
At this point the trained pilot took command of the plane and began following the order of alarms and beepers that were coming at him. He continued to nose down and sent the rookie to wake the senior officer.
Almost five minutes later, the officer arrived with the rookie in tow. He’d been lazy getting out of his cot, as he knew that autopilot was pretty much a full-proof system.
The first thing he noticed was the stall alert on the console and Jean Pier throttling down, then he watched as the pilot reached for the flaps but then undecided pulled his hand off the controls.
“What’s going on?” asked the senior captain.
“It’s saying we’re in danger of stall but it must be a lie, we’ve been at almost full throttle!”
At this point the plane was in a dive but the slats were still deployed and the nose of the aircraft was breaking through the mist.
The three pilots could see ground coming at an angle well off at 15,000 feet.
“Pull Up!” sounded the autopilot alarm.
“Wait!” said the Captain.
The rookie bounded around the two seniors and retracted the slats, remembering he had deployed them in the beginning when the airspeed was dangerously low.
The captain almost pulled him from the console but didn’t as he was the only one with family on board and that’s all he could think about.
Instead, he was looking at the altimeter and the airspeed readings which most certainly were wrong.
“Pull up!” the speaker barked and the screen flashed red accompanying dull buzzers.
The thing to have done would have actually been to nose down, as the angle of the foil was nearly flat against the air current. If they were to have nosed down while the slats retracted and got the foil’s angle of attack in agreement with the airflow, then lift would have started working again and they could have then pulled her out of the dive.
But, three men and wrong readings were all in disagreement, and by the time anyone came to a solution they had breached 10,000 feet and there would be no room for the maneuver.
“Pull up!” blared the speaker.
“Shit, we’re going to crash!” said Jean Pierre helplessly.
The captain knew it would do no good but he said, “Just pull up.”
Then shortly after he said, “Fuck, we’re dead.”
After the black box was recovered and the data was analyzed, it was determined that if the men would have silenced the airspeed alarm and let the autopilot continue on, then the wingtips would have defrosted and the readings would have all gone back to normal once they were out past the Alps.
Writers, musicians, directors, and all creative artists know all about how important it is to remove the thought process from a genuine piece. But, only the really good ones know how to do it without permanently damaging the brain.
Sadghuru once said, in an animated example, that if you removed half of anybody’s brain they would just sit there in silent meditation.
And hence, become the perfect pupil.
People know this. They just can’t seem to look at their thoughts as passing blips because, let’s face it, we’re stuck in our pasts and futures. It’s like our bodies occupy the totality of the present moment and keep up a perimeter fence.
We love remembering things.
It’s the easiest way to get a dopamine hit. Pull up a memory. Sad, happy, exciting, sexy, anything that stirs an emotional reaction will do it. If that gets boring we yank the gear shift in the other direction and imagine what next exciting event is coming up.
Gonna get home and start that next episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Just fifteen minutes till I’m off and can enjoy that cigarette or glass of wine.
Our brains work on overdrive. When the fact is, like those pilots on the 727, a lot of us would be better off without them.
Does life have an autopilot?
Sit down, cross your legs, breathe for half an hour in silence and find out.
I love to do this exercise on the beach, just a little off the busy stretch. No one ever taps you on the shoulder and asks if you’re okay, or kicks sand on you, or interrupts you in any way.
There’s something about a meditating human.
Like those guys who paint themselves gold and play as statues. Very few go up and touch them just to get them to move. It’s inhumane disturbing the peaceful.
Just that exercise alone can show you that humanity is mostly warm-hearted and empathetic. It really will go on autopilot while you sit and breathe.
Once you get good at it (which sounds really strange, I mean, how do you get good at sitting, right) you will start asking yourself if you really heard someone say, “Is that guy meditating?” Or if it was just some imaginable babble.
Eventually, you’ll see that it doesn’t matter. No matter the sounds, the unexpected raindrops, even the touch of another can completely be voided if you just learn to sit and accept things as they are.
It is enlightening.
And I think they say that because it makes you aware that you do not have to respond to every little stimulus.
We’re always ready with an appropriate answer. An answer that will best benefit us when questions arise. Hardly does anyone nowadays digest a question before they even decide if they want to answer it.
Heck, I’ve answered someone’s question that wasn’t even directed at me!
I just heard it asked and assumed they were asking me because some random related thought was passing in my head!
I should have taken the time to at least consider if the person was addressing me or not!
But, that is how life is now. It’s all blazing fast. Swipe left or right.
Our technology has gotten so fast, which is amazing, but our people have gotten slow. Physical education really should be matched to advances in infrastructure and technology.
I wonder how much screen time Simone Biles gets? My guess would be not a lot.
I’m just gonna throw this out there.
Meditation and physical exercise will breed in you desire.
That desire then can be transformed into dreams. Don’t plan on making your millions and then employing a personal trainer.
Hey, I mean, crazier things have happened, but cultivation takes work. You reap what you sow, even in today’s fast-paced concrete jungles.
We’re all still old farmers. You gotta plant seeds, sweat in the sun, and ruminate over the work you’ve done to see progress.
So get out there. Exercise. Eat right. Meditate. Cultivate. Dream.
There’s plenty to go around.
Start cultivating desire now. Leave me your email here for more inspiring articles.
Wanna tip me and move on? Blow my skirt up here!
Wanna collaborate? Connect with me over a cup of coffee…
but not here.
That would just be weird.
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Jay Horne is an author and publisher out of Bradenton, Florida. He is a husband and father of four.
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