Pranic Body🔗

The pranic layer is filled with all our desires. Desire is energy. How to handle desire energy?

Mahavira says: when we are born in Earth we bring with us all we need. Why do we feel we do not have enough? For instance we take 10000 dollars to buy a car. You meet someone who tells you to buy a television. Then you do not have money to buy the car.

What you bring to fulfill in this life is prarapta karma. After you are born society imposes its desires on you which you try to fulfill. You are fulfilling someone else's desires. You are caught in a trap. You do not have energy, money or time to fulfill all these desires. Do not waste life in fulfilling someone else's desires.

How do I know which desire is mine?

When you infuse energy into the pranic layer only your real desire will stay. Like in a tree, you shake and all old dry leaves will fall. Only young leaves of energy will stay. Other people's desires will all fall away. Your dreams, your desires, this world are all made of same stuff. When you work on energizing the pranic layer all the desires imposed on you by others will drop.

You design your desires when you are born. When other desires are imposed on you, your breathing changes, it becomes shallow. Kids breathe with their whole body. When social conditioning happens, your breathing becomes shallow.

Prarapta karma is your own samskara that you brought with you. Other samskaras society adds and your prana changes. When you readjust your prana all the false desires fall off. The purpose is to strengthen your own desires, not to drop all desires.

If you do not work out desires that you brought with you, your prarapta, you become suicidal, you develop cancer. We bring with us right from birth the plan for major events such as what we want to be in terms of career, marriage, children etc.

The idea that the nature of desire is never to be fulfilled is wrong. Prarapta karma that you bring with you brings its own energy for fulfillment.

Vali in Ramayana has a boon. When someone stands in front of him half that person's strength goes to Vali. Similarly when you face a desire half your power goes to that desire and you always lose.

Now open the Pandora's box ands see what is inside. Do not condemn your desires, do not suppress them, do not judge. Whatever is there let it out. There are four types of desires: sensual pleasures, name and fame, material possessions, spiritual experiences.

Write down all your desires. Do not edit when you write. Write in the language you think. It is for you. Write in a separate paper. When you have finished writing, edit and update. Wherever you have a self contradicting thought or desire, change that to a positive thought. For example, instead of saying 'I should not be poor', you can say, 'I should be wealthy.'

Let go of the negative thoughts. When people you trust and love make limiting, negative thoughts you are harmed. You may talk to yourself especially in the mornings and before going to bed. Do not have any negativity in these thoughts.

A man with an advanced mental age is one who learns through intelligence; he is the one who clearly understands from his first desire, that no desire when fulfilled will give him true happiness. There lies the difference. He will be able to see through the whole and analyze the whole thing. He will know that real fulfillment comes from inside and not from outer world things.

Own desires versus borrowed desires

For example, when you are on your own at home, you will think that it is enough if you have a home and car for yourself. You will feel relaxed at this thought. You will feel moments of gratitude and fulfillment. After some time, when you step out of your house in your car, and stop by at a traffic light, what happens? A Mercedes Benz pulls up beside your car and your mind simply switches its thinking. You start thinking that your car is just no good. You start thinking that it is high time that you bought a new car, if not a Mercedes Benz.

Just a few minutes earlier you were happy with your own things, but now what has happened? You are starting to work out a new desire, a borrowed desire. Be very clear that this is not your own desire. It is a borrowed desire belonging to someone else. It is the desire of the owner of the Benz car. This is how you start working out others' desires in your mind.

Of course, you will never own up to borrowed desires. It happens so subtly in your mind, that the exact source of the borrowed desire goes unsaid. It is a cunning and subtle game of the mind. And we will always say that we are not bothered about others.

With clarity, you will be able to clearly identify what your own desires are, what others have imposed on you and what desires you have borrowed from others. The first set of desires alone need to be fulfilled without any harm to any person or property. The other two need to be dropped with the help of clarity.

If you live this way, you will no more be fulfilling others' desires and you will be no more living others' lives. You will live your own life, and experience fulfillment.

If you are able to live out only your desires, you will die a peaceful death, full of satisfaction even if it is on the platform. If you live your whole life with borrowed desires, you will never see real fulfillment and even if you are living in a marble house, you will have a prolonged death, pulling and pushing, unable to get liberated from your unfulfilled borrowed desires.

In Jainism, there is a belief that when you are born, the entire quantity of food and energy that you will need during your lifetime is sent along with you. This is a way of saying that whatever your true requirements in this birth are, Existence equips you with the energy to fulfill them before sending you to planet Earth.

But when you start using this energy to realize borrowed desires, you start feeling that nothing has been given to you; that nothing is enough. You feel tired, exhausted and frustrated that nothing is happening. This is how the problem starts.

Needs versus Wants

There is a difference between needs and wants. Your needs are already taken care of in some way. It is possible to satisfy your needs, but it becomes impossible to satisfy your wants because they are changing and unclear all the time. Every time one want or desire is fulfilled, a hundred more come up.

It is our nature to desire endlessly, because continuously we are seeing what others are having and wanting all that for ourselves. You may not own up to this fact at the outset, but if you deeply analyze yourself, you will see that this is true. Your mind plays so cunningly and passively that you will not own up to this at the first instance.

For example: you go to the shop to buy a fan for your house. But on the way you meet some friends on the road, who tell you that they are going to buy some other things in other shops. Immediately, you are tempted to buy them and so you change your track and go and buy along with them. Then you find that you don't have enough money to buy your fan!

If you start comparing and living out others' desires, you will land yourself in deep trouble because you will not know where you stand. Always measure yourself with your own meter, never with others' meters. It is the most foolish and dangerous thing to do.

Desires are energy for our body, for our being. The word 'desire' itself is associated with suffering and we therefore fear our desires. It is the fuel without which we will not even get up from bed. The moment you wake up, you have the desire to do something, see somebody. To move out of bed you need energy. We have always thought desires are wrong.

Desire itself has no problem. Only when we have self-contradicting desires, we have problems. We want all comforts; we want to take no responsibility. We want to take vacation all the time. We also want to fly to Hawaii and stay in a resort. We need money; for money we have to work; these two desires contradictory. You lie in Hawaii beach thinking about work. When you are doing one thing you are thinking about something else.

For example, if we want to get rid of headache we keep saying, 'Let me not have headache.' But, the word 'headache' gets impressed in your inner space. It is contradictory.

There is a beautiful technique in the Shiva Sutras where Lord Shiva gives a technique to handle one's desires.

When some desire comes, consider it. Then suddenly quit.

Do you see how simple this sutra is? But by its very simplicity it is complicated. To begin with, all simple things need you to be first simple. This is the basic requirement, the pre-requisite to understand or internalize the sutra.

When some desire comes, consider it; then suddenly quit from it, unclutch from it. This is a very strong truth, a very profound statement. He says directly, 'Whenever desire arises in you, consider it'. He means, 'Just see, don't judge'. Simply be an unbiased witness, an observer and not to judge whether something is right or wrong.

If you judge something as wrong you will not be able to drop the idea or desire. The moment you say that something is wrong, you have unconsciously begun to enjoy it because right from a young age you have been trained to derive a certain pleasure in enjoying that which society labels as wrong.

See it and the moment you see it, unclutch from it. He is teaching renunciation, simple and pure. People may have their doubts and ask, 'How can this be possible? How can we renounce?' I tell them, 'Then suffer; nothing wrong; that's all, simple!'

You either learn from an enlightened Master or life will teach you. Life is going to teach you. If you learn from the Master, it will be a lot easier for you because he will talk to you in the same language which you can understand directly. You may not directly understand the language that life speaks; it will give you strong punches. By the time you start realizing them, by the time you start interpreting and understanding the message conveyed by the incidents in your life, it will be too late.

Please understand, you can learn from the Master directly who is talking to you in the same English language that you understand, the language that you communicate in, relate with. If you learn from him, it will be a lot easier for you as you do not have to go through all the painful experiences.

Suddenly unclutch. Even before the mind starts arguing with you, asking, 'Should I unclutch or not?' suddenly unclutch. If you keep arguing with the mind, you will never unclutch.

I always tell people, 'Don't think before you jump. If you think, you will never jump'. Just see in your life: if you keep thinking, you will never jump. You will jump only the moment you stop thinking. So don't think before you jump. There is a saying, 'Think twice before you jump' or 'Look before you leap'. I say 'No! If you think, you will never jump.' Even before your mind becomes aware, unclutch; you are enlightened.

There is a beautiful story:

A lady goes to Ramakrishna, the great master and says, 'Master, my husband threatens me that he will become a swami, that he will leave me and go away; that he will renounce life and go away'. Ramakrishna says, 'Don't bother, it will never happen'. She is surprised to hear this and says, 'No, no master. He is not joking and is very serious about what he is talking'. Ramakrishna then tells her an incident.

There was this man threatening his wife, 'I will go away and become a swami. I will renounce life and go away'. You know this is actually a technique used by frustrated men in Bharat. They threaten their women because in Bharat women are not economically independent. If the wife nags too much, this is the way the man responds, 'I will go away, I will become a monk, a swami'.

This lady goes and complains to the man's elder brother, her brother-in-law, 'Your brother is threatening me that he will become a swami, please advise him'. The elder brother says, 'Don't bother, it will never happen'. The lady asks, 'How do you say it will never happen? My husband is very serious about what he is saying'. He replies, 'I shall show you how a person becomes a swami, just watch'; so saying he removes his clothes and throws them away. He simply takes with him a towel and walks away. He left the house just like that and became a swami. The elder brother shows, 'This is the way to become a swami' and really became one.

The person who talks will never do; the person who thinks and thinks will never do. The person who is thinking will never jump. Ramakrishna relates this story and consoles her, 'Don't bother, the person who threatens will never move'.

When you are filled with some desire and you suddenly disconnect, you will experience a new inner space, an empty space, that inner space which is ready to experience your own reality. However, the big problem is that whenever you are ready to unclutch from some desire, it is for some other desire, that's all.

You are not ready to unclutch completely. You are ready to unclutch from the one if you have the promise that the other will come to you. If you are greedy for some other desire, you are ready to unclutch from this desire.

Do not renounce for the sake of reward

I have seen people renounce drinking for heaven. Why do they renounce drinking here? Because in heaven they get a different kind of liquor. This is what the so-called religions promise, 'In heaven you will have all pretty girls, you will have different kinds of drinks and music; you will always be jumping and dancing', etc. These people are fantasizing that world and renouncing this world. I always tell them, 'Renouncing for enlightenment is renunciation; renouncing for some other desire is not renunciation; it is a bargain, a business'.

One guy like this thought, 'If I practice austerity here and renounce everything I may get all the best things in heaven'. So he was practicing all kinds of austerities, became a big guru, had many disciples, followers. One day he died and reached heaven.

One of his disciples who was always with him thought, 'How can I live without my guru?' So he also died and reached heaven. While he searched for his guru in heaven he was thinking, 'My guru led such an austere life that he must have got the best rewards; he must really be enjoying with all the beautiful heavenly women and girls and all the drinks in heaven. He must be really singing and dancing and enjoying this eternal pleasure'.

This disciple saw the guru sitting with a pretty girl, probably some famous actress! He was sitting with the girl, drinking and enjoying. The disciple approached the guru and said, 'Master! I am so happy to see your austerity well rewarded. O! What a gift she is for you!' At this, the girl, the actress, immediately interfered and said, 'Stop! I am not the gift for your guru; he is the punishment for me!'

So do not expect some heavenly pleasures in renouncing. See, even in day to day life if you meditate with the thought that you will have more power to enjoy the pleasures, that you will have other benefits, you are again using meditation as a utility.

Unclutch from your desires

Whenever a desire arises in you, just see it; do not judge it as right or wrong; just see. Give the desire enough inner space. Once you see it, suddenly, before your mind even begins to argue, unclutch from it. Don't allow any of your mind's arguments; don't allow it to enter through the other door, to come up with any argument.

Don't think your desire is right or wrong. Just see it. Let your eyes be closed. Let them come, let the desires arise, let them happen.

Let all the desires arise in you; don't suppress them; don't judge them; don't say they are right or wrong; just let them happen; consider them and let them happen.

Suddenly, before even your mind recognizes, unclutch from all the desires and relax. Do not argue; do not logically decide; do not decide based on right or wrong. Just unclutch from all the thoughts. Let your eyes be closed, just unclutch from all the thoughts.

Three levels of desires

We handle desires at three levels. In the first level, we have too many desires that are always self-contradicting. Even if there are only only two desires they will contradict. In the second level, there is only one object; you fulfill that but still feel emptiness; it does not fulfill. In the third level, there is no object, just overflowing energy. Desire without any object is bliss. In kids energy is overflowing as desires.

Pure desire is desire without object; overflowing for no reason. When you purify it comes to this stage of satori, a glimpse of samadhi. You are in a state of pure awareness. This you reach not by suppressing but by being aware, by purifying it.

What is the root cause of desire?

We think we have to achieve something, some goal in life. We need to fulfill the purpose of life. All desires are to reach towards what we think is the goal of life. That brings us to the important question…

What is the purpose of life?

The million-dollar question! The answer to this is:

The whole of Existence, the whole universe, is purposeless.

Of course, it would be very shocking to hear this. From a very young age, we are taught and socially conditioned to believe that life has got some purpose. Always we are made to run towards some goal, towards some purpose.

'What is life without purpose?', you may ask. You may wonder, 'How can it have any meaning?' Any activity, let alone one's entire life, has to have a purpose, a definition, an end point, to make it meaningful. That purpose is what drives us, motivates us and provides spice to 7our day-to-day activities.

'You are making us confused,' you would say. 'All our lives we have been brought up to believe that we are here for a purpose. As children we are expected to do well at school. Once grown up, we are supposed to get married happily and bring up children. At each phase of our life, at each stage of our life, we have specific templates, specific guidelines that society and our families have set up for us. How can we let them down? How can we believe that all these expectations are wrong, and that there is no purpose to life?' You would say, 'You are turning our life upside down. You are driving us crazy!'

The more you run towards a goal, the more you are considered a successful person. More the speed, more you are respected; more the speed, more the rewards. From your birth, again and again, society teaches you that life has got some purpose, life has some goal. Life without purpose seems meaningless to us. We cannot even comprehend such a possibility.

Understand that this is what you have been brought up to believe. This is not the truth of Existence. Nothing needs a defined goal to make living worthwhile, meaningful and happy. The absence of purpose makes our life meaningful. Absence of goals in life makes living worthwhile.

The universe, nature, has no purpose. It just is. It exists. A river runs downhill towards the ocean because it is its nature to run downhill. It is not because it has a purpose to meet the ocean. Our life, too, has no purpose. We were not born for a purpose. We were born to live, to enjoy life and to be happy. Instead, we set ourselves up for unhappiness; we set goals for ourselves, and almost always these goals are based on fantasies and not on realities. In the process, we stop enjoying life.

More you run towards the goal, more you miss life itself!

The man who is continuously bothered about the goal will never be able to enjoy his life. He lives in the future and ignores the present. When we are in the present moment, the here and now, we do not need a goal to guide us.

Just the awareness of the present moment will help us decide what needs to be done at that point in time. When the present moment is taken care of with awareness, the future gets resolved by itself. As long as the path is right, whatever destination we reach will be right. We do not need to define the destination; the right path defines its own destination.

However, we constantly worry about the future. We constantly think of the past, relate it to our future and define our expectations based on what we have missed in the past, or what we believe will provide us happiness in the future.

For example, when you are studying you always think, 'When I have a job, my life will be happy.' When you have your job you think, 'After marriage my life will be happy.' After marriage, you think, 'When I have kids and my own house, my life will be happy.' After you have kids and your own house you think, 'When the kids grow up and all my responsibilities are over, I'll be happy.' By the time your kids are settled, by the time your responsibilities are over, when you want to relax, your being is conditioned so much that you can't relax!

A small story: A very successful investment banker from New York was getting burnt-out. He had been earning millions since a young age by constantly running behind goals and targets. His friends, seeing him getting burnt-out, told him to take a break.

Knowing that the word 'relaxation' was not in his dictionary, they advised him to go to a distant rural spot well-known for fishing. They told him that fishing was very good for his health so he could come back even more energetic.

The man agreed and he went out and bought designer gear; clothes, shoes, hat, and, of course, the most expensive fishing gear including designer bait. He took a flight, flew to the nearby city and then drove from there to the village. He booked himself in the most comfortable place to stay.

Early next morning, he dressed up and with all his gear, went to the fishing spot. He sat under a shady tree, made himself comfortable and put his fishing line into the water and waited. He waited and waited. An hour passed; there was no sign of any fish being caught. He was getting impatient but he could not accept that he was not successful at something as simple as fishing when he could handle such a complex business.

Just then, an old man, a local, dressed in crumpled shorts and a simple shirt came by and sat a few meters downstream from him.

The banker watched this old man with amusement, convinced that this simple man would also not be able to catch any fish. The old man had a fishing rod, which was nothing but a long, sturdy twig and a can of worms for attracting the fish. He settled down and put his fishing rod into the stream.

Within minutes, the old man was catching fish; not just one, but one after another. Without hesitation, the old man was throwing the fish back into the water and laughing. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.

Suddenly, the old man became aware of the young banker staring at him. He turned to him with a broad smile and greeted him, 'Hi', he said, 'Why don't you shift over here? This is a better place to catch them.'

The young banker quickly moved next to the old man who guided him as to where to cast his rod. Soon, the young banker was also catching fish; he was very excited.

The banker was a typical businessman. As soon as he started catching fish, he got the idea about how this could be used to make money. He said to the old man, 'You are so brilliant at what you do. You should come to New York. I can introduce you to rich people who you can teach and you can make a lot of money.'

The old man listened attentively to the banker. He then asked the banker, 'Are you rich?' The banker said, 'Yes, sir. I earn a lot of money.'

The old man asked, 'What do you plan to do now, now that you have a lot of money?' The banker replied, 'I am married to a lovely lady and hope to have a couple of children.'

The old man continued, 'Then?' The banker said, 'Oh, we shall build a lovely house. We shall take vacations. When we need to take a vacation to get relief from my stressful work, I shall come here and fish.'

The old man simply said, 'But that is exactly what I am doing now!'

Most of us need to get stressed out before we can relax. We do not understand what it is to relax. When I tell people to relax during meditation, they ask me, 'Master, please give us detailed guidelines how to relax!'

The tension of running behind something has become part of our being. It has become part of our conditioning. After that, resting will not be rest anymore; it will not be relaxation anymore. Happiness is where we are; it is not where we think we should be.

Be very clear: life has meaning but no purpose. Enjoy the path and the goal is reached! Your very nature, bliss, is the path and the goal.

The alchemy from desire to compassion

We may wonder why we exist when there is no goal then to work for or look forward to. But, we have to understand an important thing: when desire disappears, the energy behind the desire still remains.

The first line of the Isa Vasya Upanishad is 'Īśa vāsyam idaṁ sarvam' - All that exists is energy. Desire is also a form of energy. That is why you can turn one desire into another.

The desire energy at one point may be a manifestation of greed; in another the same energy may transform to anger. In another case, it may transform to depression.

Energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be transformed. This is what science also says. So, what happens when we transcend desire? It cannot now be manifested as greed or fear or anger which are all due to external causes. The whole energy manifests itself as pure causeless compassion. You cannot create compassion; it happens because the whole energy is just overflowing.

The power of awareness

An important thing to understand: Desire can exist only in unconsciousness. Only when you are unaware can desire exist. Look inside yourself when you have a desire or when you are angry or depressed. Look clearly what is arising in you, what is happening inside you. The moment you look at the desire objectively, with awareness, you will see that the desire simply loses power; it just dissolves.

You create the reality around you

A fundamental law of Existence you need to understand is: you, your desires create the reality around you. Existence responds to what you desire. For example, if you are afraid, that very desire of having fear will invoke in the other the desire to frighten you. If you are not afraid, the desire in the other simply disappears.

Existence simply responds to what you ask for. Constantly, it is getting to you what you ask. Only we need to have the intelligence to know what to ask for.

Bliss attracts fortune

Your thoughts and Energy directly affect your body, your cell structure, your decisions, your capacity to fulfill your decisions, the outer world incidents, even accidents. Currently, you are always centered in either greed or fear. Every action that you do is out of either desire or fear. It becomes very easy for others to exploit you because of this; you become very vulnerable. You create a mental setup that creates and attracts similar incidents to you. You also corrupt your Energy flow with this.

If you can change your mental setup from this type, to one of Bliss, or Ānanda, then your Energy flow will start brimming and your thoughts will be much clearer and more in the present. When you do this, you have every power to control the outer world incidents because you and Existence have a very deep connection at the Energy level. This is the thread that you need to catch in order to understand that Bliss attracts fortune. When you are blissful, when your mental setup is not one of worry, fear and greed but one that is in the present, always joyful, you will automatically attract all good things to yourself.

Desire is never in the present; the Truth is always in the present

It is not that desire is right or wrong. It is not the object of desire either that is of concern. Desire itself will be dropped when we get the maturity to realize that desire is never in the present and the only Truth is the present moment.

Another thing we need to know about desire: desire is always from the past. We cannot desire something absolutely new. Can we desire something we do not know something about already? So, desire is always from the past. You cannot ask for anything from the past or future because both don't exist. The only thing that exists is the present. And in the present, you cannot desire. You can just be in it and enjoy it.

The Bhagavat Purana has a beautiful story:

Once a crow was flying with a piece of meat in its beak. There were many crows pursuing it trying to grab a share of the meat. It tried flying higher and higher to escape them, became tired and suddenly, it dropped the meat. Immediately, the twenty crows simply followed the falling piece of meat.

Seeing this, the crow realized, 'How nice it is to carry nothing! The whole sky belongs to me.'

The piece of meat he was carrying was creating all the trouble for the crow. The moment he dropped it, all the birds pursuing it simply disappeared.

Similarly, in our life also, once the meat of desire is dropped, the whole sky of enlightenment belongs to you.

Desire means you have moved away from reality, you have moved away from that which is. Desire means you have fallen into the trap of a dream. Desire means you are not here now, you have gone somewhere in the future.

Your desire means you are not satisfied with what you have. If you can accept the present moment, you will drop from the vicious cycle of desires. This is what is surrender. Surrendering is non-desiring.

From desire to clarity

When you light the candle of understanding, desire disappears. It is not a question of what you desire. If you desire you are in misery. When you are desireless, the ego disappears, so the misery disappears.

All desire must disappear. Only in a desireless moment, what you are asking happens.

When we hear this, the next thing that happens is wanting to be desireless. But this is one more desire. You cannot desire desirelessness. You can simply understand the futility of desire. Understanding it, the desirelessness drops.

Watch every act that you do. Watch every thought, every desire that possesses you. As you watch, your chattering mind chatters less, because the energy that was becoming chattering is being transformed into watchfulness. Clarity arises from this and the confusion dissolves and desires drop.

When you watch your desire, you will be able to see two things: desire by its very nature cannot be fulfilled. When you realize this, the desire disappears. Only when you transcend desire do you reach fulfillment.

When you realize the nature of the desire, you accept desiring is the nature of the mind. Please be very clear: acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is defeat. One becomes resigned when one feels all is hopeless, nothing is possible. But it is not that the desire has dropped. You want to do, you want to become, but seeing that great mountains are on the way, you feel it is not possible. So you console yourself. But the desire is there, lurking behind.

No defeat can ever destroy desire. It will wait for the right season, and whenever you are feeling more energy again, are more positive, the desire will come back and the resignation will be gone.

Acceptance is a totally different thing. Acceptance does not mean that you have accepted defeat. It simply means that there is no defeat and no victory.

Part 2: Nithyananda Spurana Program