From lecture 45, THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS DESIRES:

It is often forgotten that the human personality has many, many facets and, therefore, one seldom understands what is really meant by “knowing oneself.” Certainly you know a bit about yourself — your conscious aims and reactions, your tastes and idiosyncrasies, and so on. But there are so many other facets you completely ignore, my dear ones. Just think of yourself and of the many people you know in your present life circumstances, as well as in the past. Think how different you are and how differently you act with certain people, with your family, or friends. In each situation there is a different “you.” Try to imagine how it would be if you acted toward person “A” as you act toward “B.” You can go through the whole alphabet and you will find that there are that many facets of you. And that is only on a superficial level, for many other facets never manifest in your surface personality. How then can you know more deeply who you are?

The first and most important step is to find out your desires, my friends. And when I speak of desires, I do not mean the important aims and goals in your life or the big issues. No, I mean that any small — and apparently insignificant — reaction on your part contains a desire of one sort or another. Think of any unimportant incident on any day when you feel disharmonious, angry, irritated, or, for that matter, joyful and optimistic. In each of these reactions lies a desire. If you wish to find out who you are, you must first ascertain the desires in each of your daily reactions. That is not as difficult as you may think, neither is it as easy. It calls for a certain technique, a training. First you must learn to conduct your daily review, which I have often suggested. The next step, instead of merely acknowledging, “I felt angry or hopeful or unhappy or joyous on such and such an occasion,” is to ask yourself why you felt these reactions, no matter how obvious the reason may be as far as other people and outer circumstances are concerned.

Ask yourself, what might be the desire behind your reaction. Ask yourself, “What do I really want in connection with this situation that makes me angry or fearful now? I am angry because I want something different. What is it that I want?” Or, “I am joyful because a desire of mine has apparently been fulfilled. What was this desire? And if I feel hopeful, is it because the chances seem greater now that some desire of mine will be fulfilled? What is this desire, in clear-cut, simple words?”

Try to make a habit of such self-questioning, my friends. Take all your reactions, every day, and examine them from this point of view. What is the desire? That will help you a great deal, my dear ones, to understand yourself much better. It will also help you understand why you became as are now and why you have these desires. But that is the next step, which at this point is premature. One thing at a time. Learn first to establish a concise, articulate awareness of your desires. Then we will examine the reason for their existence.

Your unconscious desires often deviate from your conscious ones. I think you all understand by now that this is one of the main reasons for your conflicts and frustrations. You often create similar conflicts and unfulfillments, while ignoring their full significance. The fact is that your conscious desires and aims that guide your actions are in accord with the goals of your higher self, but simultaneously lower and selfish aims are also present in your motivation. These lower aims find justification in the higher aims, which serve very well to hide their existence. It is very important to find this fact out, my dear friends. Although your actions are worthy and good as such, although the high and noble motives truly exist in you, they lose their splendor if you cannot see the lower motives coexisting with the higher ones in the very same goal. Even long before you can purify yourself to such an extent that these selfish, proud, vain, and fearful motives cease to exist in you, the fact that you simply recognize their existence purifies you to a considerable degree and therefore also purifies your right action.

You are often puzzled because you find out that you want something pure and good, and yet it brings you disharmony. The reason is that you ignore the different motives existing within in relation to the noble desire. The conscious noble motive convinces you that there is nothing wrong with your aim, and yet there is in fact something wrong, namely, that you do not know the other part that coexists in the same desire-current. You are used to an “exclusive” attitude; you think the truth of one motive excludes the truth of another, often quite contrary in nature. It will take much self-realization for you to truly understand that one motive does not exclude another. Purification does not mean merely that you change desires. It means that you separate the good motives from the wrong ones, at first by simply observing them. Do not ever try to force your feelings. It cannot be done. I cannot emphasize this point often enough. But try to become capable of saying, “Here my desire is this or that. The conscious desire is good. But I recognize that this or that selfish motive also plays a role. I will continue to perform the good act, but I will not deceive myself that I am utterly free of selfishness, vanity, or whatever other trend may be involved. I can only pray and hope that these unruly currents will weaken with time. I cannot help feeling that way now, but I hope to become free of them.”

By doing this work you will understand not only your problems and conflicts, but also your images and how they were formed. To find the images, you have to work from two sides: (1) examine your childhood and your reactions at the time and (2) examine the desires in your present reactions to daily occurrences. They will form one whole picture. When you search for your desires now, you will understand why some are stronger than others. Some are broken by countercurrents, whereas others flow rigidly in one direction, consisting of several layers of your personality and both good and bad motives. Then you will understand why you felt it necessary to hide the existence of the bad motives from your consciousness.

I would also like to discuss another possibility confronting you when you attempt to find yourself by finding your desires. Although consciously and outwardly your life may appear well directed, within you are in turmoil. You may find that you do not really know what you want. This is puzzling and often upsetting. There is so much confusion in your soul due to the suppression of conflicting or unwanted desires that everything is entangled, and it will take a bit of doing on your part to untie the knots. At first, it may be most frightening to find out that you actually do not know what you want. And because of that, you will try first to escape into subterfuge-desires.

To see your subterfuge-desires, you must pick out the various strings of your inner knot one by one, pull them apart, and then trace their directions. Each of the little strings in the knot represents a little desire. Each has a different motive behind it. Unconsciously, you have believed you could not afford to become aware of all the different motives, because, knowing that you are an intelligent and highly developed person in many respects. How could you admit that you have several completely contradictory desires, that cancel each other out? Yet the child in you desires two impossibilities, and often more. By hiding this conflict, you thought that you would rid yourself of it. In reality, however, in this hidden nucleus lies the very nature of your disharmonies and disappointments.

The only way out is to have the courage and patience to take each string and ask yourself what you desire in each and every one of your daily reactions. To begin with, simply register the desires. Refrain from judgments and evaluations such as, “But this is silly, this is impossible, this is unworthy of me,” and the like. Such an approach will only make it more difficult for you to untie the knot, and perhaps render the task impossible. Know that your hidden emotions have nothing to do with your outer common sense! Know that the part in you that could not mature because you kept it suppressed wants just that: the fulfillment of two or more contradictory desires. The child in you wants an impossibility because of its persistent desire to cover up the nucleus of conflicting desires by reasonable surface desires, while the conflicts ferment underneath. And since your desires, feelings, and thoughts are potent magnetic fields, they attract circumstances that correspond to the inner conflicts. And you never know that your conflicting desires are responsible for your outer miseries and unfulfillments. The latter are a logical result, an inevitable projection of the former.

Perhaps you desire fulfillment of a certain kind. Yet at the same time you desire the advantages of the opposite desire. The motives in the latter, conflicting desire may not be flattering for you, therefore you repress it and keep it under lock and key. The more unconscious an emotion or desire is, the more effect it has in your life. Consequently you get exactly that which you consciously do not desire, but which you want unconsciously. Only you want it without strings attached, without the disadvantages. And then you do not understand!

So in finding yourself, you must consider not only that you need to separate the good motives from the bad ones in a particular aim, but also that you may not know what you really desire. Only after you have found the reasons for all your conflicting currents and understand your hitherto unconscious confusion, will you be able to have one clear desire, going steadfastly in one direction. You will then become mature enough in your soul to realize that the price must be paid. That is the way. It is not easy, but it is certainly feasible for everyone who goes at it in good faith and with perseverance.