All Desires Are Addictive!🔗

Q: Swamiji, you have said that the mind can never be stopped. Yet you speak of the no-mind state as the ideal. How can we reach the no-mind state if the mind cannot be stopped?

As long as you are alive, your body-mind system is alive; by definition your mind is active. Your mind is nothing but the distributed intelligence of your system, the collection of your thoughts and memories. So long as you are alive, and your senses are active, you keep collecting data, storing and analyzing them and influencing yourself by all this.

You cannot stop this activity. If you try, you will be like the man who tried to stop thinking about monkeys. What you can do however, is decide not to follow the thoughts. You just witness the thoughts as if you are watching clouds in the sky. Do not get involved. This is possible. You then get out of the clutches of your mind. Instead of your mind controlling you, you can control your mind.

I ask participants in some of the programs to write down their thoughts for about 20 minutes, without editing. When they read what they wrote, they realised that what they have inside them is a madhouse! The thoughts are totally unconnected, illogical, random and meaningless.

Still worse, amongst all these random thoughts, you pick up a few thoughts at random and make pain shafts or pleasure shafts for yourself. All your problems arise as a result of your connecting thoughts in what you think is a logical manner.

The moment you unclutch from your thoughts and therefore stop making the shafts, it means that you accept and realize that your thoughts are unconnected. Then, you gain freedom and you reach the no-mind state.

This is the state that you should achieve in meditation. You should move into the present moment, being aware of what your thoughts are but without connecting with them, and becoming completely unclutched. You then become truly aware.

This is what is also referred to as the witnessing state. You are just a witness to your thoughts without becoming a part of them. You watch your thoughts without becoming involved in the activity. It is as if you are watching the clouds in the sky; you are seeing but you are separate from what you see. This is possible. All you need is some practice.

Q: How can Krishna generalize saying that desire leads to destruction? The world cannot operate if we have no desires and if everybody only meditates!

Well, for one thing, this world was in operation before you and other human beings came onto this planet; it will continue to operate even after all of us are gone. As Buddha says, this universe was always there and will always be there. This world and the universe are in operation not because of us but in spite of us!

We, the humans, are an insignificant part of the entire system. We are just a tiny bit of that energy; but we are so full of ourselves that we feel we help operate this world. That is the irony!

When you realize truly who you are and how you are part of that existential energy, you realize two things simultaneously. Firstly you realize how insignificant you are; that you are just a part of the whole; that you are not separated. At the same time, you also realize that you have immense potential; that you are Existence; and as part of the Whole, you are the Whole yourself.

This may seem contradictory at first, but this is the truth. You need to experience the truth to be able to express it. For the time being, please consider this to be the absolute truth whether you understand it or not, accept it or not, believe it nor not. It makes no difference to the universe what you think.

The route to destruction which Krishna warns us about is this: attachment, desire, anger, delusion, loss of memory, loss of discrimination and destruction. This is the vicious cycle.

There is a virtuous cycle that Shankara presents: getting together to learn the truth, nonattachment, freedom from delusion, equanimity of mind and liberation. These are one and the same; one goes down, the other goes up. One takes you down to destruction; the other takes you into liberation.

When you take this body, when your spirit, Self, ātman, or soul enters the body, it does so out of desire. It does so out of unfulfilled desires that it carries from its previous life. The mindset that is the essence of these unfulfilled desires is called vāsana and the bundle of carried-over desires in the new body is called prārabdha karma. If you do not have this bundle of karmas, you will not be reborn; you will be liberated from the cycle of life and death.

This collection of unfulfilled desires that you are born with is energy. It is not something negative or something positive; it is pure energy. You come into this life with this energy that will fulfill itself, if you are aware of it. All you have to do is live life as it presents itself and accept what happens to you.

Unfortunately, during the process of death, in the causal layer of energy, one loses this awareness. As a result, we spend our lives collecting other people's desires as if they are our own. Most of our desires are borrowed through comparison, envy and greed. As such greed has no end.

It is this aspect of attachment and desire that Krishna is talking about. It is this bundle of desires that we borrow from others that Buddha says causes suffering. This is what Shankara says we must dissolve in our search for Truth and liberation.

The meaning of our lives is to be aware and fulfill all our carried-over desires so that there is nothing left unfulfilled. This fulfillment leads to mokṣa, liberation, Self-realization, whatever name you wish to give it. As a consequence you will not be reborn, unless you wish to be.

This is not an easy concept to explain in a book. We cover this extensively in our second level meditation program called Life Bliss Program Level 2, also known as Nithyananda Spurana Program. Simply put, when the undying spirit within us leaves the perishable body-mind system at the time of death, it passes through seven layers of energy. At each layer up to the final layer, it experiences and relives the memories of its life. Through the meditation techniques that we use with each layer, these memories called saṁskāras are dissolved.

For now, be clear that all the attachments and desires that you have, ultimately lead to grief and destruction, as Krishna says. You do not have the intelligence to stop at a point and say I have had enough. Even if a person is eighty he still wants to live. If he has grandchildren, he would like to live to see his great-grandchildren. There is no end to desires, even though you know that you will die; even though you know that you will carry nothing with you when you die. Yet, you do not wish to die empty-handed. You wish to die with name and fame, with possessions, with a dynasty that will carry your name, and many such desires. What for?

Do you think you will remember any of this when you are born again? Or even if you do as a result of some malfunctioning of your brain circuitry, do you think you can do anything constructive with all these desires?

We are addicted. We are addicted not merely to what we think are addictive drugs, but we are addicted through attachment to many things in this world. When the attachment is positive we are attracted; when the attachment is negative we are repulsed. What attracts us at one time scares us at another. What attracts one repulses another. This is the delusion that Krishna talks about. We are not in touch with reality; we live in a fantasy world that we think is real.

Buddha says everything is impermanent, aniccha. When you understand this, when you understand that all the material possessions and relationships which attract and repulse you are all delusions, that they are impermanent, only then can you move towards the truth. Otherwise these delusions corrupt your mind and destroy you. You become rudderless in the vast ocean drifting towards destruction.

In His compassion, Krishna offers the solution as well. Restrain your senses, He says, and develop equanimity without like and dislike, without judgment of good or bad, without attachment to pain or joy. You will then attain peace and bliss. You will be in nityānanda - eternal bliss.