September 2026 Newsletter
When Desire Becomes Soul Recognition
By Board Member Dr Scott Zarcinas
For years I believed desire was telling me what I lacked.
If I longed for freedom, I assumed I wasn't free. If I longed for peace, I assumed peace was missing. If I longed for belonging, I assumed I didn't belong.
Desire seemed to point towards something beyond me, something I needed to find, achieve, receive, or become before the longing could finally be satisfied.
That interpretation shaped how I saw my life. Every desire became another piece of evidence that something essential was absent, and the strength of the desire seemed to confirm the size of the absence.
The more I wanted freedom, the more imprisoned I must be. The more I wanted peace, the further from peace I must have wandered.
Recently, however, I began wondering whether I had been reading desire backwards.
I have learned that desire can also be understood as recognition. The longing for freedom may arise because something within us already recognises freedom as belonging to our true nature, the nature of Being.
In other words, the longing for peace may be the soul recognising its own native orientation. Even the desire to belong could be a deeper recognition of our connection to Source and our oneness with life.
Seen from this perspective, desire can reveal something about us that was previously hidden.
The common approach is to experience desire through the circumstances onto which it has become attached. We want the relationship, the money, the opportunity, the recognition, the healing, the security, and our attention naturally moves towards the object of desire. We imagine how life will feel when circumstances change and we begin to organise ourselves around getting to that ‘place’ or achieving that goal.
Yet beneath many of these desires lies a deeper feeling we are seeking. We want the circumstance because of what we believe it will allow us to experience: freedom, peace, joy, security, acceptance, abundance, love (what I call ‘your natural state of being’).
This is where desire can work for you, not against you. If freedom belongs to the nature of Being, the desire for freedom becomes more than a wish for different circumstances.
Desire becomes a recognition of what is, a remembrance of our natural state of being.
Something within us recognises freedom even while our present experience seems to contradict it. The desire itself may therefore be pointing beyond the circumstance towards something we have forgotten about who we are.
Desire, then, becomes a knock at the door. For much of my life, I heard that knock and immediately looked outside. I assumed the answer must lie somewhere in the world of circumstances. Freedom would arrive when the problem was resolved. Peace would arrive when uncertainty disappeared. Abundance would arrive when there was enough.
Each desire sent me searching for the condition or circumstance that would finally permit me to experience the feeling I wanted.
The difficulty with living this way is that freedom is continually postponed, pushed to some time and some place in the future. Life becomes organised around the belief that our inner state will eventually be granted by an outer condition. Even when circumstances improve, another condition soon appears and the waiting begins again.
Life becomes conditional. Freedom becomes conditional. Peace becomes conditional. Joy becomes conditional. Abundance becomes conditional.
Recognising desire as an invitation to look inward, however, changes our orientation.
The knock can turn our attention towards Being, ‘the Kingdom of God within’. Instead of immediately asking what circumstance needs to change, we can recognise the quality of Being that the desire has brought to our awareness.
For instance, the longing for peace tells us that we know peace. The longing for freedom tells us that freedom is recognisable to us.
Desire contains within itself an awareness of what it seeks, and this is where I have begun to understand ‘abiding’ differently as well.
Abiding, in this sense, or what I call ‘Rest’, is the willingness to remain with that recognition without immediately turning it into another task. When the desire for freedom is recognised as an inherent quality of my soul, I can rest in the feeling of freedom. Likewise, when peace is recognised, I can rest in peace.
The mind may continue presenting its evidence of lack, but the soul has already recognised its true orientation, and something remarkable happens when we begin living from that orientation.
We no longer ask circumstance to manufacture our state of being before we give ourselves permission to live. Our choices begin to arise from freedom, peace, joy, or abundance rather than being organised around their apparent absence. Desire still moves us, but its movement is now inward.
Desire becomes an expression of Being seeking form through our lives.
Maybe this is why desire can feel so persistent. Even in my own experience, the desire for freedom lasted for decades. What I have learned is that the knock continued because I kept looking outside the wrong door. I had searched the outside world for what my soul was already recognising within Being.
The next question, then, asks what we do when desire knocks?
We can either interpret it as evidence of absence of what we desire, and continue the search for it externally, or we can recognise within the longing something closer to home, something that has been calling our attention back to our natural state all along.
Freedom then ceases to be the prize waiting at the end of the journey and becomes the ground from which our journey is lived.
A Reminder for the Soul Talks’ Meditation sessions which are held on a Tuesday evening from 7.30pm to 8.30pm. The sessions are held at the office - 196a Hutt St.
September 1st – Lyn Rose
September 8th – Joy Nugent
September 15th – Lyn Rose
September 22nd – Tim James
September 29th – Joy Nugent
The sessions are FREE for members with a small charge of $20 for non-members. To book a spot email: admin@soultalks.com.au
Peter Miller from PM Websites is assisting Soul Talks with facilitating a YouTube channel for sharing our videos and podcasts.
Memberships and Donations are appreciated to further this work of relieving death anxiety and promoting Soul-Centered Care.