Glorious are those liberated from the desire to be liberated

na mokṣe graho me ’sti dāmodareha

I seek not any liberation, O Dāmodar dear,
In your love, the supreme heaven is right here.
No wish do I have for freedom from pain,
Living with you and for you–that’s the greatest gain.

(Damodarashtakam — Verse 7, Line 4)

My dear Lord, how single-pointed and undistracted is the desire of your saintly devotees!
Even the desire for liberation—revered as life’s highest aspiration—pales before their longing for you.
Their example reveals how absorption in you is incomparably fulfilling, enriching, and even intoxicating.

O master of past, present, and future, I have grown up in an age that believes neither in heaven nor in liberation.
Having rarely seen anyone striving for liberation, I sometimes fail to grasp how extraordinary it is to renounce even that aspiration.
Those who seek liberation long to be free from pain—they recognize its reality, its inevitability, its unspoken yet unbearable severity.
Wisely, they seek freedom from the material existence that subjects all to such pain.

O reservoir of all joy, how immense—indeed immeasurable—must be the joy of remembering and loving you,
that it renders insignificant both the pain of existence and the relief of liberation.
I implore you for even a glimpse of that joy of complete absorption.
May its memory inspire me to turn away from both the desire for the world and the desire for liberation from it—
so that the one desire that drives and defines me is the desire for you.