Desire and manifestation: This is clearly one of the most popular topics in the self-help and happiness literature today. The prevailing idea is that we will be really happy when all of our current desires are manifested — when we become and have everything we want.

When we consider what various traditions and teachers have said about desire, we find contradictory opinions. Some traditions claim that desires are the ultimate cause of all unhappiness, and that we should work to extinguish all our desires and simply be. Other approaches claim that the fulfillment of our desires is the way to happiness, and they teach us practices and techniques to make our dreams come true.

Many people find themselves somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, they do have desires, and they want worldly things and conditions. On the other hand, they feel that such wanting is somehow materialistic and unspiritual, and so they feel vaguely uneasy about wholeheartedly pursuing their desires.

Desires can be a wonderful part of our lives and allow us to deeply experience and fulfill our creative nature. But for desires to play such a positive role in our lives, without at the same time bringing disappointment and despair, we must take care about how we understand desire and how we understand ourselves. The positive or negative effect that desires have on our lives is ultimately only a reflection of our own level of self-awareness.

Fear-based or Happiness-based Desires?

Desires are thoughts of conditions or circumstances that you would like to come to pass in your life — those conditions and circumstances that would best symbolize well-being for you. But it often seems that not all of our desires are manifested. We don’t always get what we want. Sometimes, we seem to get exactly what we don’t want. And sometimes when we get exactly what we have been wishing for, it doesn’t make us happy at all.

It is important to distinguish between a fear-based desire and a happiness-based desire. These two kinds of desires arise out of two different kinds of self-definition and self-awareness.

Something or Someone "Out There" Will Make Me Happy

A fear-based desire is based on a belief in lack. You believe that you lack what you need to be happy and fulfilled, and that something external is necessary for your happiness. You believe that getting or achieving this thing will “make” you happy. And conversely, you believe that getting or having certain other things will make you unhappy.

Need- or fear-based desires include all of our desperate cravings, such as the desperate cravings for fame or money or power or pleasure. The key word here is “desperate,” since fame and money and power and pleasure are not problems in themselves, nor is there anything inherently wrong with our desires for such things.

A need- or fear-based desire creates unhappiness in your life. It is an implicit affirmation that you are unhappy and lacking now. When you believe that you are needy and lacking now, that belief is making you feel unhappy in the present. It is also laying the foundation for future unhappy experiences, since your belief in your neediness will be creatively expressed as further experiences of lack.

Furthermore, to believe that something outside your mind is necessary for your happiness is necessarily a fearful state of mind. After all, you might not get it, or you might get its opposite. And you know that even if you do get it, you may (or even definitely will) eventually lose it. These fearful thoughts that are implicit in a need- or fear-based desire will be creatively translated by mind into the experience of some degree of un-well-being in your life. As we said earlier, your belief that your happiness is dependent on external circumstances is the cause of your experience of unhappiness.

I Joyfully Await the Manifestation of my Desires, Or Something Even Better

The alternative to a fear-based desire is a happiness-based desire. The starting point for a happiness-based desire is the belief that you are already complete now. You start in and from that place in your own mind of perfect happiness. You know you are a joyful co-creator of joyful experiences.

In your creative exuberance, you allow your creative desires to rise up from within, and you joyfully hold them in your awareness in the absolute belief that the loving source of all life will creatively translate them into experience. After all, there is only the infinite creative potential for well-being, the ?ow toward ever-expanding goodness. This is the only truth, the only cause, the only power. In complete faith, you joyfully anticipate and await the manifestation of your desires, either in the particular form that you have envisioned, or in an even better form that you cannot yet imagine.

Win or Lose -- It's How You Play the Game

And yet — and this is of the utmost importance — there is nothing at stake for you in whether or not your desires are manifested, because you know that you already have and are everything you need for perfect happiness. This is the delicate balance of a happiness-based desire — a balance of joyfully wanting something with all your heart, and at the same time a sense of perfect equanimity. Both the desire itself and its manifestation are expressions of your happiness, rather than attempts to somehow get or achieve happiness. They are the exuberant creative expressions of your overflowing abundance, rather than a desperate grasping for something you think you lack.

Your mind naturally and spontaneously generates desires in its own playful creativity. Source, in its infinite loving benevolence, naturally and spontaneously provides the creative energy that manifests these desires as experiences. The creative potential of source is the fulfilling of the forms of creative mind, and the desires of creative mind are the informing and realizing of the creative potential of source. Your experience is the result of this co-creative partnership of the pure positive energy of source in conjunction with the thoughts and desires of your creative mind.

©2010 by William R. Yoder. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Published by Alight Publications. http://thehappymindbook.com/

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The Happy Mind: Seven Principles to Clear Your Head and Lift Your Heart
by William R. Yoder.

The Happy Mind offers an alternative way of thinking based on seven simple principles. This new way of thinking enables you to undo the limits and distortions of your current way of thinking, and thus allows your mind to experience deep and lasting happiness.

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About the Author

William Yoder has doctorates in both philosophy and chiropractic. He has taught Eastern and Western philosophy and religion at major universities. His studies personal study with the Option Institute, and with such teachers as Ram Dass, Michael Hatncr, Gail Straub and David Gershon, Wallace Black Elk, David Spangler, Brant Secunda, and Thich Nhat Hanh. He and his wife have taught workshops in both the private and the corporate sectors on the topics of health and healing, human potential, self-actualization, and spirituality. Visit his website at http://thehappymindbook.com/