Recognise your true desires

FEAR and desire are the fundamental energies that drive our lives. We act either out of a desire to achieve something, or out of a fear of not wanting to experience something. Attraction and repulsion are not merely forces of molecules, but also essential to human behaviour.

One of the major driving forces in human life is desire. If you look into your life, you can see most of the time we are driven by either desire or fear. We have so many desires and many times we feel we don’t have the energy to fulfil them. According to the Jain tradition, the Divine sends us with enough energy and capacity to fulfil all our desires. But most of us don’t feel this way. Why?

There is a difference between our true desires and ‘borrowed’ desires. Our true desires are called our ‘needs’. Borrowed desires are called our ‘wants’. We have enough energy to fulfil our true desires or needs. What are our true desires?

During the Life Bliss Program Level 2 (Nithyananda Spurana Program), we have a session where people are asked to make a list of their desires, their needs and wants. Then they meditate on these desires. At the end of the meditation, I ask them to recollect from memory their list of desires.

What they can recollect is usually a fraction of what they have written! It is as if they started with a large tree full of leaves, meaning their desires, and during this meditation the tree sheds almost all its leaves, as if the leaves were dried and dead. What it retains glows like golden leaves.

If you can understand which desire is innate and which is borrowed, spiritual growth happens automatically. Whatever is left in the people’s memories, those desires glow like gold. These desires are their true desires. They are the ones that carry the energy for their fulfilment!

If the process is done with awareness, these desires are always selfless desires. They may benefit the individual, no doubt, but they always benefit humanity. Only such selfless desires carry the energy of the universe with them for fulfilment.

When our desires are our own true desires, when they reflect our real needs, when they express themselves in our inner energy, we don’t feel any desperation about trying to achieve them. The realisation comes that, as a matter of natural course of events, these desires will be fulfilled. We are not driven and we are not troubled by them. We accept that they will happen.

Be Blissful!

Be fully aware and get rid of addictions

ADDICTION to anything is an unconscious or mechanical process. It is not just addiction to drinks or tobacco. It is addiction to even religion. People, who pray unconsciously and mechanically, following a routine, will find it very hard if they miss even one day’s prayer. For them, it is an addiction and so it causes anxiety when missed.

If we analyse the habit of drinking, we will understand how self-contradictory we are in this habit. Let me try to explain. We drink to feel joyful, but we end up becoming miserable. We drink so that we can be called sociable, so that society will accept us, but we end up becoming argumentative! We drink so that we will look sophisticated, but we end up looking insufferable. We drink so that we can sleep, forgetting all our worries, but we wake up feeling more exhausted than ever! We drink to experience ecstasy and end up feeling depressed! We drink to feel confident, but end up becoming afraid of ourselves. We drink to maintain the conversation, but end up becoming incoherent. We drink to see our problems dissolve, but end up seeing them multiply!

This is the truth and you know it better than I do! Now tell me honestly, is it really worth drinking?
Every time you drink, drink with complete awareness. Every time you drink, drink consciously, slowly, watching every movement of yours, tasting every drop of the drink, and watching the reaction of your body to it.

I assure you, if you do this every time you decide to drink, very soon, you do not have to drop the habit, the habit will leave you forever. Understand, I am not giving you the licence to drink. I am only saying, if you are struggling to drop the addiction, start your next drink with total awareness of every moment of drinking, and the habit will leave you forever.

The key is to understand the difference between doing things with awareness and doing things mechanically and out of fear. Doing things with awareness will never bring you under any sort of binding. It will not bind you in space and time. You will be a master. Doing things mechanically will bind you and cause you misery. You will be a slave.

To drop an addiction, flood it with awareness. It will transform in the right way. Never think that you need to drop an addiction, because anything that you resist will persist. You simply need to transform it through deep awareness.

Be Blissful!

The pain of transformation

PAIN can become a very creative energy. It can become a remembrance of God. It can become prayer. It can become meditation. It can become awareness. It can cause tremendous transformation in you.

An important secret of life that you need to understand is that if you become aware of something, you can get rid of it very easily. If you are not aware of it, there is no question of getting rid of it. The pain is a pain because it exists in your unconscious, not in your awareness. Your fear of facing the pain allows it to exist and grow more and more — like a tumour. A master will simply remove this tumour through his ‘master surgery’! And when it leaves you, you transform into a new person.

What is the attitude needed to deal with the painful ‘surgeries’ of the master? Sometimes, just the awareness itself will dissolve the pain. Now, what is the correct attitude to deal with these painful ‘surgeries’? It is having complete trust that whatever ‘pain’ the master causes is only for your good and nothing else. The ‘surgery’ itself is because of his boundless love and compassion for you. If this is clearly understood, then even if it hurts, you will go through it with deep gratitude for what the master is doing to you.

One more thing: the pain is also because you start thinking it is a pain and labelling it so. The master can teach in just two or three seconds what will ordinarily take a lifetime or a few hundred years or a few births. The master is intense life. He will just remove the ‘tumour’ and throw it away. So, even if it is intense, it is better to go with the master than with life because the master does a very quick process. Also, if you understand what the master is doing to you, you can enjoy it as the ultimate happening in your life.

Further, the pain you will experience continuing life with the ‘tumours’ will be much worse than the pain you experience when the master removes them. Removing a ‘tumour’ will take hardly a few minutes; the master just removes it. Over. Once you understand this, you will no longer label the transformation as pain, you will welcome it.

This story may sound very strange, but this is the way of most Zen masters. Pain has a tremendous value in awakening you to reality. That is why it has been used by many masters to awaken the sleeping disciple.
In the moment of great pain, the mind stops, there is only pain. In that moment, the Truth is delivered!

Be Blissful!

Integrate & come out of the worry cycle

INTELLIGENCE is the only way to get freedom from anything that bothers you. If you are sweating about the small stuff, then there is something wrong somewhere. Be very clear that all miseries arise because of self-contradictions. You yourself are not fully clear about what you want to do and so you are unable to do it. For that clarity to happen, you need to nurture your own intelligence.

When intelligence surfaces, self-contradictions will disappear and you will start becoming integrated. When you start becoming integrated, your intelligence will further grow. This is the cycle you need to get into. This is the cycle that can clear your worries also. Understand that you have given a lot of power to your worries by simply talking about them more and more.

For example, when a housewife picks up the telephone, she will start by telling her friend that the maid did not turn up for the day. That is her depression for the day. If you are really depressed about the maid not coming and are really interested in coming out of it, then you should simply drop it and finish doing the work yourself! Doesn’t this sound more logical?

If you are really interested in dropping your inner chatter and worries, you could try a small exercise. Think of all the things that give you joy. Make up your mind that you will allow your mind to linger on only these things and nothing else. Anything else, you will give just enough energy to get it done and then forget about it. If you try this exercise, you will see that you conserve a lot of energy. All your worries simply disappear and you will acquire a new mental set-up altogether.

Do an honest check for yourself and find out if you are secretly nurturing your worries. When you stop going behind your worries, you will be able to see how others are helplessly caught up in that cycle. You will be able to see how they magnify their worries by endlessly talking about them to people. This talking about worry is what I call ‘worrying about the worry’! Only when you are able to watch this, will the worry cycle break. Until you become the watcher, you are caught up in the emotions, giving so much of power and control to them. Check yourself to find out if you are starting to feel comfortable with your worries. This is the scale to see if worries are controlling you or you are controlling your worries.

If you are feeling comfortable talking about them repeatedly without taking any action, then worries are controlling you. If you don’t linger on them and address them correctly, then you are controlling them! Be Blissful!