David Richo - The Five Longings: What Weve Always Wanted--and Already Have

For my friends

Near and dear, far and wide,

Here and dear, gone and dear

I scarcely know where to begin

but love is always a safe place.

Emily Dickinson

People sometimes ask me how the idea for a new book takes shape in my mind. All my books begin the same way: I find myself struck with wonder by a topic. It is always something I am fascinated with, puzzled by, drawn to, that I start pondering deeply. My enthusiasmand my writing skillsincrease in proportion to my awe of and excitement for the topic. So my initial wonderment generally turns out to have been nothing less than grace, what I can call inspiration. In that sense, I have not really begun any book: Ive only followed a muse who ushered me into it.

The origin of this book, too, happened in response to something that was always a mystery for me: our unending endless longings and why we long at all.

All my books have taught me a lot about myself. In working on these pages I have certainly learned how to identify my own longingsand to understand my interruptions of them. I am hoping that happens for you too.

I write as a spiritual practice, so I do not rush but proceed with words and feelings contemplatively. What I have written here is my way of passing on to you the results of my labor, a labor of love indeed. This book, like the others, is meant to be read slowly and meditatively, as it was written.

In the chapters that follow, I include some specific self-help practices for working with longings. In my other books, the practices have usually appeared in separate sections. This time they flowed so effortlessly from my musings that I decided to make them part of the text. I am hoping that you, like me, might thereby begin to use them to integrate insight and practice in a seamless way.

Come with me into the mysterious domain of human longing. It will sometimes seem like a Garden of Eden, sometimes like a Slough of Despond. But it will always feel like home, since every longing any of us has ever felt has contributed to making us the incomparably mysterious beings that we are.

I dont have the topic of longing totally down, as I do the times tables. The subject of longing is too vast for finality. I am still working on it in my own life, with no expectation of an end in sight. I am not a know-it-all as I present you with this book, only a guess-this-much. So I wont be leading our challenging expedition, only shyly accompanying you. We are both pilgrims, together on the long Camino of lifelong longings. We find ourselves now on a path walked for centuries by many ancestors, who gladly join us on this journey of and into wonder. Our destination is the luminous sanctuary of the More we have always sought and already are.

I have found the GrailThe quest for the Grail is basically nothing else than the quest for the SelfIt is yourself that you are longing for in everything.

D OM H ENRI L E S AUX , ABHISHIKTANANDA

D AVID R ICHO

San Francisco, 2017

I have immortal longings in me.

S HAKESPEARE , Antony and Cleopatra

W e all sometimes feel there is something missing in our life. We long for whatever might make up for the lack, yet rarely with satisfactory results. How long have we longed for that which keeps evading our grasp, the fruit far out of reach, the ship that has vanished over the horizon, the lips that decline our kiss? The impossible-to-hold-on-to is precisely what arouses our deepest longings. What hoax makes us ache for what we are unable to obtain and not equipped to keep? What is it in us that makes us spread our narrow Hands to gather Paradise, as Emily Dickinson says? Why are there existential hungers in us that dont go away, even at banquets? These are the questions we will carefully address in the pages that follow.

The fact that we have longings for the lasting in a world that is always changing is not illogical. It is a clue to the presence of something transcendent in us, that which is and seeks whats more than meets the eye in the world around us, that believes there is more to something than what it appears to be, that there is more to us than we think we are, more to our experience than we have noticed yet. The words more than do not indicate multiplicity. This is not more as in four is more than two. This is more as in two to the thousandth power. By the word