Desire is a Dynamic Energy🔗

Our true desires are called our 'needs'. Borrowed desires are called our 'wants'.

Fear and desire are the fundamental energies that drive our lives. We act either out of a desire to achieve something or reach somewhere, 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 behavior.

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 energy to fulfill them. According to the Jain tradition, the Divine sends us with enough energy and capacity to fulfill 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 fulfill 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, their desires, and during this meditation the tree sheds almost all its leaves, as if the leaves were dried and dead. What leaves the tree retains glow like golden leaves. If you can understand which desire is innate and which is accumulated, spiritual growth happens automatically.

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 realization comes that, as a matter of natural course of events, these desires will be fulfilled.

The true desire for fulfillment

When you have a headache, you are not comfortable with that state – because you know that it is not your true nature. Your true nature is having no headache. In the same way, when you have some desire, you immediately want to come out of it – because deep fulfillment is your very nature and desire causes an imbalance in that fulfillment.

Two important truths you need to understand:

• 1. Your whole life is a long chain of events performed towards the one goal that is fulfillment. Whatever you may do, whether it is eating or drinking or having relationships, wealth or joy, it is all to experience fulfillment. In different directions you seek fulfillment instead of seeking it directly.
• 2. Fulfillment is within you, it is your very nature. That is why you are trying to come out of non-fulfillment.

The fact that you are searching for fulfillment means that fulfillment is known to you. Otherwise you would not search for it! In the instances in your life when you have felt some fulfillment, there is also a hope that you will experience it again. That is why you extend your life.

Desire, knowledge and action

The desire that is pure and not directed towards any particular object or person is simply an overflowing energy that is called icchā śakti or the 'desire energy'.

From the navel, energy comes as pure energy. In the heart region, this energy gets converted to the power of desire. This further gets converted into words in the throat region. When this energy gets converted into words, it is called vāk or the 'speech energy'. To give an analogy, the energy that comes from the navel is like loose cotton. The cotton becomes thread in the throat region. Or you can imagine it this way: the energy that comes from the navel is like molten iron. The throat is like a forge where the product is formed!

Anyhow, the speech energy moves further to the brain. There it stays as knowledge or gets converted into a command. In the brain, the energy could stay as the power of knowledge or jñāna śakti. For example, the desire energy related to the body can become knowledge of the body.

The other option is, the words get converted to a command and get executed as well. The command goes to the entire body and moves you. This is called the power of action or kriyā śakti. For example, the desire energy related to your body can express as the power of action like moving your body.

Pure icchā śakti or desire energy which comes from your being gets converted in the throat region to jñāna śakti – power of knowledge and kriyā śakti – power of action.

If the energy is not processed and channeled properly, the knowledge and action become disconnected from the power of the pure desire energy. The knowledge and action should be in tune with the desire energy. Then it forms a virtuous circle of desire leading to better knowledge and action, which in turn leads to clearer desires!

Let us say you have a desire to make a million dollars. If it gets converted properly as knowledge, you will have a clear plan and do the right actions to become a millionaire. If the desire energy gets converted as too much knowledge and less action, then you will end up only thinking more and more, building castles in the air.

On the other hand, if the desire energy gets converted as too much action and less knowledge, then you will end up working blindly. For example, you may work really hard like driving a truck from Los Angeles to New York, but can you become a millionaire this way? There is action but not the right knowledge. So the proper conversion of the desire to knowledge and action has to happen. The reason why this conversion doesn't happen properly is lack of awareness.

When you are honest and integrated with the desire, there is no conflict and the conversion happens properly.

The power of love

You might have even experienced some incidents like this in your life. A girl who is afraid to cross a busy street, if she sees her child run across the road will just jump onto the road to save the child without a thought about her own safety.

We should understand how she has lost her fear all of a sudden. The reason is that the love for her child has awakened the dimension of motherliness in her. It is the same thing with every relationship of love. If the feeling of love blossoms in somebody, immediately all the fear will leave the person's inner space.

Understand, love has tremendous power and so does lust. If you have a lot of energy in your mūlādhāra chakra, it will override the other chakras immediately. There will not be any fear in your svādhiṣṭhāna chakra and there will not be any worries in your maṇipūraka chakra. These higher chakras will not work when the mūlādhāra chakra has the full power. Without the person's knowledge, it will unleash the latent unknown potential in him. It will spread his potential to the outer world too.

Different people activate different dimensions inside you. If you have a lover, the feeling of love will be awakened in you.

If you have a son or daughter, then the dimension of motherliness will be awakened in you. If your mind is ready to receive the experience of different dimensions, those dimensions will blossom in you.

If you are completely open-minded, every person you meet in your life will cause you to blossom further. But if you are egoistic, even your spouse or your lover cannot cause you to blossom. Please understand, you have a great responsibility to create an open and non-egoistic mind before entering into a relationship such as between husband and wife or between lovers. Then the very feeling will transform you eternally. If this eternal transformation does not happen, you miss a major dimension of your life.

Why are we not able to feel true love? It is because of our saṃskāras, our emotional attachment to the past memories. Your inner space is filled with too many things related to the past. So your inner space is not available to the present moment. You can only love or feel connected to the people or objects falling in tune with the past memories you loved. If you can drop the emotional attachments to the past, suddenly you will see you have so much of inner space available to you. You can then directly open up to anybody who is in front of you without asking for his or her past.