Open to Desire Mark Epstein

 Oneness implies the existence of twoness or threeness, but this experience says otherwise. It points instead to the presence of that which underlies the world of duality, to a union that is already present, not one that has to be achieved. It gives us a sense of completion, not by making a new whole but by exposing a mirage. It undercuts our notions of self and other, subject and object, and observer and observed. While it does not contradict the conventional experience, it puts it in perspective as only relatively real. At its best, desire has the capacity to reveal the underlying nature of reality, to help us discover our natural state…The natural state is not something that can be turned into an object, nor can it be found when we are searching for it as an object; it can only be experienced through the medium of personal experience. The words and symbols that are used to evoke or describe it might be helpful as far as they go, but they come after the fact and they do not go very far. At their peak, they give a sense of the flavor of some hidden capacity of the self: the capacity to know without resorting to objectification. In its wisdom aspect, the natural state is said to be luminous and knowing; indefinable and indescribable; clear, unwavering, fertile and empty; ungraspable by language or conceptual thought.