"In many spiritual traditions, desire is considered negative because it is seen as an ego desire, which is a desire based on our animalistic impulses, our need to survive. Generally, it is recommended that you not feel desires, that you push them aside or just witness them, and continue staying focused on the practice rather than attend to the content. This is suggested so you don't get distracted by feelings, thoughts, and memories that can bring a lot of inner conflict. As you see, there is a great deal of difficulty in just allowing the feeling itself. But the trust is that once we allow the feeling, we can understand it and allow to fulfill its destiny. We have to learn how to do this in a way that optimizes our spiritual realization."
"Even so, we need to understand that not all desire is the same. For most individuals desire and grasping onto the object of desire are the same thing. Desire that is related to attachment is suffering, and keeps us dissociated from our nature; this type of desire has mostly to do with the self and its object of desire, not with the desiring itself. But as we have seen, desire can function as an avenue to our nature - if we use the desiring energy that is usually directed outward, thereby creating attachment, to go inward. It takes a determination a love for the truth to stay with that energy and follow it back to its origin, thereby liberating the energy of desire to serve freedom instead of keeping us bound in suffering."
"And that is what we are trying to do here-- harness that energy, feel it fully. Even the smallest desire has a trickle of that energy, so experiencing that wanting and following it inward, feeling the energy of it, can release our mind from the content of the desire. Just staying with the energy will naturally open up into a deeper level of our existence, and this is the naturalness of the process."
"So if we want to be ourselves completely - to know our nature at its depth and be fully in the world - this requires being alive and being in touch with that energy. And that brings the erotic into love. In other words, to be able to experience divine eros, we need the purity of love, the ground of lovingness and goodness, the experience of the presence of love, plus the scintillating, erupting explosive quality that has an energy to it. Such energetic dynamic love can be very, very fine - like very gentle bubbles or a gentle vibration - or it can be explosive. This love has an erotic quality to it, and we can feel it draw us toward the divine, toward the truth, toward our inner nature. We can have the experience of desiring to penetrate the mystery, to know the spirit."
"A deep understanding of reality can follow from such a realization of desire. We can see that dualism arises when we are separated from our nature, for it is then that we experience the desire to fill ourselves. We believe there is something external that we need to have, and we deeply believe that we don't have that something. However, with the energy of desire, when we feel it as the blissful wanting of another - but with a sense of sufficiency, not from lack -we don't feel the same kind of otherness we do when we have a dualistic perspective. We feel that the other is arising from the same ground as we are. There is a sharing of a blissful communion, and that communion is a recognition that both of you are one reality."
"We can also feel a loving desire toward our essential nature as the Beloved. Then we are in a dance with that nature, an ebb and a flow with it, and we are not separate - nor are we one. There is enough differentiation for us to feel the excitement of moving toward Beloved again. We feel that we are, in a sense, ourselves in union. It is nice to appear as two, but it doesn't mean that there are two. So the appearance of two is what allows the love to have that vigorous feeling of wanting another and the enjoyment of wanting. There is a fullness to that desire, and you know that within each other, you are the same. A dualistic or a monistic view alone keeps us from the recognition that our nature is a continuous unity within which we can view and appreciate one another as manifestations of reality, recognizing that the Beloved is what you are in union with."
From "The Power of Divine Eros"
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