I’m enrolled in at an intensive course at Sri Bhagavan’s Oneness University located in Varadaiahpalem, a village in Chittoor district in the state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India.
The teachings here in India are simple, but only relevant when experienced with divine grace which is transmitted through a process called darshan to each participant 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All told, I’m in a $15,000 three week course designed for business executives with limited time off work and who want awakening, quickly.
Today, we learned the root of all suffering. Suffering is the effort to change. Even worse than that, double suffering, we are told, is the effort to not change. Once you are awakened, all suffering stops. In fact, it never really existed except in your mind.
Awakening is the brain’s ability to stay with the “What Is.” The “What Is” is whatever is front of you, right now. It is the conditions, emotions, thoughts, situations, relationships and experiences that are happening in the moment. The mind is constantly seeking to jump here and there, out of the “What Is.” Instead of staying with the “What Is,” the mind becomes obsessed with the “What Should Be.”
When you can stay with the “What Is,” you will become like you were, when you were a child. Suppose there is a five year child who loves books. She loves the fact that when she reads books about faraway places, she feels like she is traveling there without actually leaving her room.
After a few years, she realizes that she is lonely reading all these books and that she doesn’t really know any of the characters in the books which she is reading. She longs to meet them. That is her first jump from the “What Is” to the “What Should Be.”
Suppose she gets her wish. She goes to a university and meets the authors who wrote the books. She even meets the people whom the characters in the books that she read were based on. However, this is not satisfying to her after a while.
She longs to be an author herself. So again, here is the “What Should Be.” Suppose that she gets this wish. Then, after that, she wants to have a family. Again, another “What Should Be.” And so on and so on.
Every time she gets her wish, there is always another “What Should Be.” The world labels this type of self-wishing-fulfillment as progress. In reality, however, by getting her wishes fulfilled, she has less and less of an ability to stay with the “What Is.” She has only cultivated within her an obsession with the “What Should Be.”
That is why in India they say that desire fulfillment is a cause of root suffering; and that “no desire” is freedom from that suffering. In reality, it has nothing to do with desire and more to do with the brain’s ability to stay with the “What Is.” That is what awakening is. 
