Desire

Health and Happiness - Dr Dwarakanath

Sankara is a guru who never left any stone unturned, he saw not just the problems in a situation, and he also found the solution to it. He says, free yourself from desire (or lust), anger, greed, and delusion. Meditate on who you are. Ask for yourself, who am I? The fools who fail to understand the self are caught even here in this life, in hell-fire and suffer torture. From the hierarchy of things, the sloka starts with kamam, krodham, lobham and then moham. So, it is clear that the root cause of all other evil things is the desire. All these are various forms of the evil known as desire. Desire is the root cause for forcing one to hanker for sense-satisfaction. Desire in itself is not wrong, but which is contrary to dharma and induces one to achieve the desired object by any means is dangerous. Without hope, which is another form of desire, there is no life. We should assess genuinely of the desire that crops up in our mind through discrimination, before deciding when, how and where to fulfil it. The first step every human being has to take is to get rid of the desire from its roots. It is not that easy, because, if one desire is satisfied, another wells up. And the life passes by fulfilling one desire after another and there is no end to it. All of us think that we can be happy if the first desire is satisfied and with that starts the endless chain of desires and one does not find an end to it and it goes on till one leaves the body. That is the reason, we must be ever ready to eschew the desire the moment it springs in the mind, especially when such a desire it unreasonable and inconceivable. The mind must be diverted to something else, preferably to good thoughts or spiritual thoughts. The beauty of the mind is that there is no room for two thoughts in the mind at the same time. So, if one succeeds in engaging the mind by lodging and entertaining it with good thoughts always, there is no room for bad thoughts at all. Otherwise, the mind will become a slave to thoughts and schemes to fulfil them one way or the other. A sinful thought pollutes the pure heart, even if it is in dormant state, as it springs up at an opportune moment. Since anger gives birth to hatred, one should take maximum care and precaution to keep away all kinds of desires from the mind.

When one desire is not fulfilled, it sows the seed of anger and it is the greatest enemy of man. Anger harms not only the self but also others. The more one feels hurt, the more the intensity of the anger. Anger reduces one's reasoning faculty by reducing one to an animal. Then lobham or greed signifies the profitless pursuit of things unaware of their real nature and lack of value. Lobham is such a desire that we are not entitled or eligible but still one wants to have it.

If we wish and do all such things to make others to believe so that we can get a good name in the society, such actions are mere pretentions, not born out of a noble thought or one really intends to serve other. Attachment to worldly things will make us to forget the actual source of pleasure. We should grow from the objective knowledge to the subjective knowledge to understand the real nature of the supreme source. The knowledge that we gain from the books may make our lives happy in a materialistic sense, but that knowledge does not teach us anything about our own self. The real knowledge, which makes us to realise what we are, is the spiritual knowledge. The spiritual knowledge is the key to discover one's self and once it is achieved, life will become crystal clear. The purpose of this life is to gain that self-knowledge (atma-gyaana), which dispels all types of desires, anger, greed and delusion. Aham Brahmmasmi!

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