In virtually all true spiritual traditions, it is taught that Less is More. That if one truly wishes to walk the Spiritual Path that they should not be bound by material objects or the desire for acquiring material objects. Yet, think how few of the world’s population follow this method.
 
Certainly, in modern life, we are all taught to acquire. There is the old saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” But, all anyone has to do is to chart their own life and think about what acquiring and the desire to acquire has done to their existence to realize that this is not true.
 
From the persecutive of desire, think about what, “Desire,” has caused you to do. Think about the unhappiness you have brought into your own life by wanting something you do not have. You feel unfulfilled and who knows what lengths you have gone to get what you want. Most probably, you have not only hurt your own evolutionary existence, but you have damaged the life of other people in the pursuit of you gaining whatever it is you desired.
 
Certainly, one of the most profound truths, spoken by The Buddha, was, “The cause of suffering is desire.”
 
On a very material level, think about how much money people spend to buy what they desire or to travel towards obtaining that desire. Not only does this spending set a whole long list of karma into motion, but in some cases, it destroys the individual. Think how many people go bankrupt due to their spending in the chasing of their desire.
 
Then, there is the having. You got what you wanted but what does it cost you to keep it. For me, one of the things that comes to mind whenever I see a very old and junky car driving down the street is, once upon a time, that was a totally new, and completed desired automobile, that someone had worked to own. But now, it has fallen into disrepair and it is barely moving down the road. Once beautiful. Now it is simply a rolling rust bucket. What happened to the desire for that car?
 
Think about your own life. Think about the things you desire. Go back to a time when you really wanted something or someone. Think about how that desire all-consumed you. If you did get it, what did it do for you? Did it answer all of the dreams you hoped for? Or, did it cause you to continue down a road where all you did, for the rest of the time it was a part of your life, was struggled to keep it up, or happy, or maintained, or…  
 
The predicaments of desire, and the obtaining and the owning and the maintaining of a desire, are obvious. Yet, most people never contemplate any of this as they experience and live within the pursuit of their desire. All they are focused on is getting what they want and/or the keeping what they have.
 
On the personal level, stop right now, and truly take a look at what desire has done to your life. Pick out one or more specific desires, that you had, that truly lead you down a dark road. Not only a dark road and what it did to your life, but the dark road it may have instigated onto the life of someone else. In retrospect, was it worth it?
 
You may scream that it wasn’t. You may wish you never had anything to do with the wanting or the getting of that desire. Or, you may say that it was totally worth. I don’t know? But, in those cases, where you are intellectual honest enough with yourself to call out your own folly, did that desire truly equally all that you hoped it would?
 
From a philosophic perspective, sure, we can say that, “Everything is perfect,” that, “Everything happens for reason.” But, in truth, isn’t that kind of stuff just all Mind Fuck, Mumbo-Jumbo? Just look at a time when your heart was broken by that person you were totally in love with? How did that desire work out? Or, that time something was stolen from you that you really liked or loved. How did that make you feel?  
 
Life is simply, really. If you take the time to step back and move away from your Lower Mind and began to contemplate your life on a deeper level, you can understand that, yes, you can be a desire-er, yes, you can be a want-er, yes, you can be an acquire-er, yes, you can even be a hoard-er, but, at the root of all your desire(s) is you telling yourself that the SOMETHING out there, that you want to get, will somehow make your life better. But, it is very easy to see, simply by viewing your own life up until this point in time, that is not always the case.
 
Nobody can be totally free from desire, so don’t beat yourself up about it. But, you can keep it in perspective.

Take a moment right now and look at what you are desiring. Just for this exercise, let it go. Let your life be full with all you already currently possess. Let your life be whole without the need for anything else. How free did you just become?