Q: Swamiji, how can we differentiate our desires from what we have borrowed from others?
It is simple. First, true desires always make you feel content and happy when they are fulfilled. On the other hand, a desire that is not yours makes you feel uncomfortable at the end of it. You feel as though you have run after something you never wanted from deep within. It usually comes with a trace of guilt or discontentment at the end of it. You also feel tired and fatigued.
Please be very clear, a desire that is genuinely your own carries with it the energy to fulfill it. Once it has been fulfilled, a positive feeling of satisfaction flowers and that desire no longer bothers you. It has been fulfilled so it drops from your very being, freeing you from it. Logically speaking, when all these desires are answered, we become completely free. Till then, our desires run our lives.
However, the problem is that we waste so much time and effort fulfilling somebody else's desires. Naturally, we feel drained because we are left with no energy to listen to what we want from deep within. By the time we understand that we should direct our energy to working towards fulfilling our desires, we have accumulated a lot more desires inside. And there is no more time left, we must say goodbye to the world.
Then we take another body and start the whole process once again. We come with our updated baggage of desires and once again, instead of fulfilling them, we spend our energy in accumulating more desires. Please understand, if you spend your energy accumulating more dreams all the time, then when will you have the energy to fulfill any of them?
That is the reason we live with a constant sense of discontentment throughout life. First we need to figure out what our wants are, then, we must work towards them. When this process is done with awareness, there is no room for envy or jealousy.
In our Nithyananda Spurana Program, also called Life Bliss Program Level 2, when we work on the second energy layer of pranic energy we go deep into our desires, needs and borrowed wants. Participants compile a list of all that they think are their desires now. At the end of the meditation process related to the pranic layer, they find to their surprise that what remains in their memory is a fraction of what they had so laboriously written down. It is as if they had a tree full of leaves, and after meditation all the withered leaves had fallen off leaving a few energized leaves on the tree.
This meditation brings to focus the prārabdha karma, the desires carried over from one's previous birth. These desires are our genuine desires and they carry their energy for fulfillment. Once these prārabdha karma desires are fulfilled, we are no longer in the bondage of karma. We are liberated.
People say, 'It is not our fault that we have forgotten our genuine desires that we left the last body with.' Not being able to remember what those desires are may not be your doing. However, the desires with which you left your body in your last life were your doing; it was your free will. If you meditate deeply, it is possible to understand what those desires were and what the purpose of your life is this time around.
If instead, you decide to follow your senses, and not only your senses, but the senses of all other people who surround you and then decide to blame Existence for not remembering anything, nothing can help you. You will continually go through the cycle of samsāra, life and death.
Just by listening to these great truths and by going through specially designed meditation programs, you can recollect and re-experience the desires with which you were born. By focusing on these desires you can dissolve your karma and be liberated. It is possible. And that is why enlightened masters happen again and again: to make us understand that it is possible and also show us how.
Secret of Secrets
Thus ends the ninth chapter named Raja Vidya Raja Guhya Yoga, 'Supreme knowledge and secret,' of the Upaniṣad of the Bhagavad Gita, the scripture of Yoga dealing with the Science of the Absolute in the form of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna.