Desire keeps the mind completely involved in the outer world of sensory experience and then the inner world is lost. When a desire is thwarted we become angry. This combination of desire and anger, attachment and aversion, overshadow the true Self, the unchanging pure consciousness. We lose the remembrance, the experience that we are consciousness and we become the author of activity, meaning we forget our unchanging Self and become the changing desires and angers. We become our body, thoughts and feelings and forget we are pure awareness. The motionless is overshadowed by motion. The changeless is overshadowed by change. We forget we are awareness.
Our natural state is to experience ourselves being the witness of activity. But when that witness is subsumed by desire and anger and we live in a land of unfulfilled desires with our true Self covered over, we create a life that feels awash with dissatisfaction. We forget who we really are. The bliss of the Self is overshadowed by the dissatisfaction of desire, by attachment to outcomes and by anger.
When we remember who we really are (the stillness of pure consciousness) in conjunction with activity, then desire is not overshadowing the true Self and activity is supported by Nature. When we remain in the experience of being the witness, of experiencing the pure consciousness of Self, there is no attachment and no aversion to outcomes and so there is no anger.
Desire arises from pure consciousness and then covers it over. We become bound by activity. The only permanent way out of dissatisfaction is to immerse ourselves in pure consciousness to the point where pure consciousness remains stable in our experience and then activity can exist along-side the experience of pure consciousness. Then there are no veils covering our true Self. Then we do not lose our remembrance of who we are. Then we do not become subsumed by attachment and aversion and anger. Then we witness activity and desires become the impulse of awareness supporting the evolution of life.
This cannot be done simply by thinking or intellectually knowing this. This can only be done by infusing the actual experience of pure consciousness into our mind, by expanding awareness. If the Self, pure awareness, is being subsumed or overshadowed by activity and desire, then the experience of awareness itself needs to become more predominant and not be allowed to be covered over by activity. This is why the repeated experience of pure consciousness is so important in creating a fulfilled, satisfied and blissful life. This is the importance of spiritual practices, especially meditation and grace, to infuse this state of enlightenment, of remembrance, of presence, into our actual moment to moment experience. When we live in the experience that we are consciousness, then activity and desire exist to support life.
Blessings,