I suspect we share something in common, dear reader. If you’re like me, you have a desire to “be spiritual.” I have plenty of other significant interests, but if you dangled me over a vat of piranhas, I’d be forced to admit that this one — along with family — is the most important. And I’m aware that achievement in the spiritual sense is a bit of a paradox, that arriving at that particular port takes a stranger kind of navigation. Yet I often find myself pursuing spirituality the way I’d go about landing a job or planning an elaborate trip: making a list and checking it twice, building a system and “working it.” The problem, as I’ve discovered, is that my desire for spirituality may be part of what prevents me from fully attaining it.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the inner world is the true arena of achievement, and it’s visible to no one but you. To arrive there, a few things have to happen in sequence. First, you have to accept that it’s even there — not a casual nod, but a full-bore conviction real enough to propel genuine discovery. Then you have to carve out consistent contemplative time to actually explore the territory. And finally, you have to reckon with the strange way that desire itself can sabotage the entire enterprise.
The real issue with desires is that they externalize you, taking you in exactly the wrong direction: away from internal discovery. This is obvious enough with material things. The more your attention is fixed on what’s outside you, the less of it is left for what’s within. But here’s the paradox: your desire for spiritual achievement is just as externalizing. Wanting to be a great sage is a surefire way of not becoming one, and it’s unlikely that any true mystic ever jotted down in his calendar, “become great mystic.”
So you may have noticed that this is a Catch-22. The fix for the magnetic pull away from our inner life would be to stop desiring things — but the desire to not-desire is itself a desire, and just as externalizing. It feels like a cul-de-sac. Naturally, the wisdom traditions all recognized this, struggled with it, and arrived at counterintuitive ways through. Taoism teaches wu wei — usually translated “effortless action,” or acting without forcing.
The idea is to be completely at peace with where you are in any given moment: no need to become anything else, wholly content with who and what you are. That attitude uproots external desire at the root. If you’ve already arrived, there’s nowhere you need to go. And yet — at the very same time — wu wei still moves, still acts, still expands. The trick is that the contentment and the striving live in different places. The contentment is in who you already are; the striving is only in what your hands are doing. You act not in order to become whole, but from a wholeness you already have.
So where does that leave those of us with our spiritual to-do lists? Not, I think, throwing away the list. The striving is real, and it’s ours to do. The shift is subtler than that: it’s learning to reach for the thing without making your peace a hostage to getting it. To build, to practice, to carve out the contemplative hours — and to do all of it from a quiet fullness rather than a gnawing lack. You stop chasing the inner life as if it were somewhere else, and start acting from the recognition that you’re already standing in it.
The paradox never really resolves. You don’t defeat desire, and you don’t stop wanting to grow. You just loosen the grip — want without being owned by the wanting, strive without being dragged out of yourself by the striving. And somewhere in that loosening, almost as a side effect, the inner world you were straining to reach quietly opens up. It was never far. The reaching was the only thing in the way.
See Michtav MeiEliyahu, vol. 1, pg. 43-44. I always understood properly focused spiritual desires as coming from a place of fullness, rather than emptiness and hunger.