Manifesting Your Desires?
The central insight of nondual understanding is that our true nature is not the limited, localized body-mind but the perceiving consciousness. This possibility, then, may lead one to ask: If consciousness is not limited, and I am this unlimited consciousness, why can't I manifest whatever I desire? Why are my wishes not instantly realized?
The answer is that the “I” that seeks to manifest is a temporary appearance within, and made of, the very reality it seeks to control. Manifestation does not occur because there is not a separate agency there through which such manifestation could occur. There is only consciousness experiencing itself through a particular body-mind.
The notion of a separate self—a bounded ego with individual desires, a personal will, and a need to manifest specific outcomes—is a manifestation within infinite being. This allegedly separate self is a conceptual construct, a temporary localization of consciousness.
When we ask, “Why can't I manifest what I want?” we are operating from within the very illusion we are trying to understand. The desire to manifest arises from a sense of lack, a feeling that something is missing from the current reality. This sense of lack is inseparable from the belief in being a limited, separate entity. The activity of the egoic mind, perceiving itself as incomplete, may seek to fill that void through external manifestation.
But consciousness, the fundamental reality of being, is like the space in which all things appear. It is like the screen for a movie. As such, it isn't striving to manifest anything or alter the course of events. Consciousness, the perceiving awareness, simply is.
The experience of life is consciousness appearing to itself as this universe. There is no second, material nature apart from consciousness. The world is not something other than consciousness; it is consciousness appearing to itself as form.
When the belief in being a separate entity with its own separate reality is understood to be illusory, the desires to manifest things for that allegedly separate being come to rest. The wanting ceases because the perception of fundamental lack vanishes.
What remains is the fullness of the present moment, the reality of consciousness.