We are children of Heaven, and creatures of earth; spiritual beings playing our roles in a material world, at once Heaven-free and earth-bound.
Everything in the physical realm is subject to the laws of physics. No law more characterises planet Earth, than gravity. Gravity tethers all matter to this place, dictates how it behaves, and forbids its escape.
Just as gravity holds all matter in its grasp, so desire binds humans to all that we desire – material possessions, wealth, influence, power, name and fame. The objects of desire are the equivalent of the Earth’s gravity, binding us to their sphere and forbidding our pleas for freedom. Like gravity, desire tethers us to a life of servitude, dictates how we behave, and forbids our escape.
For a rocket to defy gravity to break free from the earth’s atmosphere, requires a stupendous force of concentrated propulsion. Even so, for a human to break free from attachment to desires and desire-fulfilment, demands a stupendous concentrated force of spiritual aspiration.
This is no easy task. Gravity is indispensable to the functioning of life on earth. It cannot simply be bypassed. Gravity shapes and holds the world together, and with it, all life forms: mineral, plant, animal and human. So too, desire is essential in the maintenance of human life as we know it: without the desire to survive, to eat and reproduce, none of us would be here.
Yet we are our immortal soul, ever blissful, ever free. We know and we feel this. No matter how mighty the truth of desire-gravity, our soul’s imperative for liberation is mightier and mightiest.
Desire condemns us to our spiritual death. Aspiration is the only release from this sentence, the rocket to launch us once for all beyond desire-atmosphere into the liberation stratosphere.