A Million Thoughts

by Om Swami

  As with all things, there’s a price to be paid for the attainment of emotional desires as well. Most notably, these desires impel you to look outside for fulfillment. You need ‘somebody’ for companionship, sharing, hand-holding and so on. Since you search outside for inner fulfillment, you set out on a quest comparable to ranging the universe from one end to the other. Till your last breath, you continue to play a puppet to this quest – forever trying to please the other person, to keep him happy, to keep craving for love and so on. It gets very tiring after a while. Physical desires may subside when body grows weak and old, but emotional desires remain alive and kicking. A 60-year- old woman and a 16-year-old girl may have the same desire to be loved and appreciated; with age the body grows feeble but not necessarily the mind. On the path of meditation, emotional desires arise when you forget your true nature, when you lose sight of the fact that you are already complete in every sense of the word.

  The term ‘emotional needs’ is a misnomer. Emotions are a product of the conditioned mind and as such mind has no needs.

  The sight of a slaughterhouse may trigger a negative emotion in you, whereas it may be positive for the business owner and neutral for the machine operator. It all depends on how you are conditioned.

  Intellectual Desires

  After you’ve had your fill of wealth, sex and companionship, your mind goes looking for something else. A conditioned mind, outwardly focused, when temporarily satisfied from the fulfillment of physical and emotional desires, gives birth to intellectual ones. Intellectual desires prompt the individual to create something new or to engage in seemingly selfless social causes. Fulfillment from these desires lasts longer than the first two ones. When all else is going well, and when you feel that sense gratification and emotional fulfillment are not enough, these ones take birth.

  Fulfillment of any form of desire, be it physical, emotional or intellectual does not offer lasting fulfillment either. They continue to bind you predominantly because you have simply engaged your mind elsewhere rather than settling it. Pursuit of these desires creates something valuable for the society though. Creating a charitable organization, working towards a material or spiritual discovery, devoting to a social or a religious cause are examples of intellectual desires. Better than the first two, these help you turn inward. The greatest thinkers, inventors and scientists were the products of pursuing their intellectual desires.

  Transcendental Desire

  Sometimes, a rare few sit down and reflect on their lives; they question the real meaning of life. Realizing that you can’t just be running around fulfilling your desires to have glimpses of happiness, one day you sit down to take a hard look at your life. Now you are searching for the meaning of your life. You refused to be tossed around in the endless pursuit of desires. This reflection is the seed of the finest form of desire – transcendental desire.

  Unlike the other three, this one is always in singular. When the only burning desire to discover your true nature remains, half the work is done. Chances are you have this desire because you have realized the futility of gratifying infinitely insatiable desires of the first three types. Fulfillment of the transcendental desire frees you from the fetters of ignorance, removing all shackles of conditioning. Desire of this nature is the ultimate quest of discovering your own truth. Without saying much, you could be Krishna, Christ, Buddha, Mahavir or any of the greatest preachers, prophets or thinkers the world has ever seen.

  Have you noticed how when our desires are not fulfilled, we feel low, broken, dejected, hurt and sometimes completely shattered? We work very hard so we may feed them but many more keep on arising. The moment you buy a car, you start looking at more expensive ones. As soon as you have a house, you start dreaming of a bigger one. This may not be wrong, but this does take us away from enjoying our lives in a more lasting and befitting manner.

  Good meditation teaches you how to drop your thought. The moment you drop your thought, desire vanishes in thin air like a dewdrop upon sunrise. With practice you learn to take your mind off each time a desire arises, especially undesirable ones, the ones that become temptations have the potential to completely throw you off the course. As you progress, you actually start to see you desires as mere thoughts with no intrinsic value. To detect emergence of thoughts requires an ever-present and alert mind – quite like the security system at the airport that beeps even if you walk through it with a penny in your pocket.

  You don’t have to be alarmed when desires come knocking, they are only natural. They are attractive fruits on the mind tree, sumptuous, luscious, shiny fruits waiting to be plucked. How many can you clip or pluck after all or can you? One day you’ll need to get to the root. And the root of the desire tree is aptly called mind. Expectations are the illegitimate children – with desires as their step-siblings – of an ignorant mind and conditioned self. If you get married to a desire, be ready to pay child support for a very long time to come. They keep us entangled. They keep us engaged in meaningless pursuits for a long time, till one day it’s too late to change the course of our lives.

  Not every lingering thought becomes a desire though. Some become expectations and some take the form of an emotion.

  When Desires Become Expectations

  Even though our desires are endless and we remain busy chasing them throughout our lives, it is not their pursuit that is burdensome. It is our belief that our desires must be fulfilled or that our happiness depends on the fulfillment of our desires.

  This creates a baggage of a different kind. It’s the heaviest load but an invisible one. We remain unaware of its weight as well as oblivious to its continuous build up.

  From the moment you can recall to the present one, it has been on your consciousness. You have accepted it implicitly like a citizen accepts the laws of the country of residence. It is an unequivocal, silent and unconditional acceptance. If you haven’t guessed it already, I am referring to the huge weight of expectations. You may believe that you don’t have any or that you have only the basic and realistic ones. Think again, I urge you, after going through the following section.

  When a lingering thought is not abandoned, it becomes a desire. When we contemplate on the fulfillment of desire and feel that it is our right to see it fulfilled, that somehow we deserve it – it becomes an expectation. For example, it’s 4 PM and you are sitting at work, partly bored and partly engaged in your assignment. Out of nowhere, an image of a nice meal crosses your mind. Rather than dropping the thought of food, you pursue it and soon find yourself craving for a good dinner when you get home. This is desire. Let’s say your wife is a homemaker and a good cook. Since she’s your wife and looking after the home, you ‘expect’ to be served a good meal for dinner. Or maybe you expect this way because you saw your mother or grandmother doing it when you were growing up. Or perhaps you expect it because you feel it’s the basic right of a husband. That’s what expectations are: desires with rights attached to them.

  You get home and announce at the door, “Honey, I’m home!” You are ‘expecting’ a warm welcome, a hot meal. But Honey is not exactly sweet and welcoming today. Maybe she just found out that the dress she bought for Rs. 5,000 last week is on sale today for Rs. 2,700. You announce again but she tells you to stop shouting. What happens next is better left to your imagination.

  Expectations are those desires you believe you have the right to see fulfilled. Due to our own conditioning by numerous factors, we develop expectations. They are the primary cause of all grief and stress. When we expect, we place a burden on ourselves as well as the one we expect from.

  Different Kinds of Expectations

  Lingering thoughts that we pursue and contemplate on become the building blocks of our world. Cemented in attachment, we keep erecting the walls of desires around us eventually finding ourselves completely trapped with no escape doors. Expectations are not just what we have from others or what they have from us. They are of thre
e types in fact, and all three arise when we fail to drop the thought that seeded it at the first place.

  From Self

  The expectations we have from ourselves are at the root of our grief. We expect ourselves to be disciplined, calm, together, always caring and so on. But when we procrastinate, get angry, indulge immorally or act selfishly, somewhere we feel guilty. Even if no one was hurt or harmed in the process, we still feel bad. Primarily because we have certain expectations from ourselves and we failed to fulfill them. The troubling thing is that not all these expectations are right. Most of these have been handed down to us by our society, teachers, parents, peers, religion and so on.

  Based on your education, samskara, upbringing, your social circle and your professional life – all of which play an important role in your conditioning – you expect yourself to be a certain way before others. You have set for yourself certain benchmarks and standards derived out of information passed onto you in many forms; normally based on the religion you practice and the company you keep in addition to other social and personal factors.

  When these expectations, the ones you have from yourself, are not met, they give birth to shame and guilt. You feel low and tormented. In a state of as much denial as disbelief, you feel miserable and lost. You eternally stay buried under these expectations, majority of which is a big load of rubbish. With mindfulness you can filter them, keeping the ones that strengthen your consciousness and make you a more compassionate person.

  From Others

  Our second big load of expectations come from our relationships with others. We justify the expectations we have from others believing that we rightfully deserve to be treated a certain way; whether it is in the form of reciprocation, love, things, words, gestures. Based on all that you have observed and absorbed, all that you have been told and taught, and all that you feel you have done, you desire a certain outcome, often favourable. Because you feel what you desire is legitimate, just and natural, you add to the burden of expectations. The beauty and love in most relationships gets crushed under the weight of expectations. If the two partners in a relationship could lower their expectations they have from each other, love in such a relationship will only flourish.

  Expectations put pressure on the one you expect from, all the while increasing your own burden of expectations. When these expectations are not fulfilled, they give you grief and disappointment proportionate to the magnitude of your expectations. Make a list of all the people you care about and what all you expect from them. When done, know that they expect just as much from you. You relinquish yours and with your purified energy they will accept you the way you are, gradually lowering their own expectations from you. That’s how nature works.

  Others’ from You

  Anybody you know has some form of expectation from you. Even those, whom you don’t know but are connected to you in some way, somehow expect you to be a certain way. Your priest, government, fellow citizens, strangers on the road – they all expect you to be a certain way. If you accidentally bump into a stranger, you are expected to apologize. You are expected to dress in a civilized manner. These expectations are there so the society remains in order, but the world doesn’t take it too kindly if you break them.

  You are under constant pressure from peers, bosses, friends and family. You have laid your burden on them and they have laid their burden on you. Whether or not you fulfill their expectations, just being aware of the fact that they expect from you is generally sufficient to stress out most people. Expectations disturb tranquility. I am not saying they are good or bad, or that you should let go of them. I’m simply bringing to the fore the impact expectations have on people’s lives. From the perspective of a meditator, an expectation is merely a desire we are holding onto. Our ego thinks we must see through this lingering thought. When ego clings to a desire, it transforms into an expectation.

  When we are unable to let go of our thoughts, some of them become emotions, and then we attach emotions to our desires and expectations. This is where a thought is transformed into a potent force nudging us to take action. Emotions are the giant killer waves that knock the surfer off his surfboard. They influence the nature of and intention behind our actions. And action, I may add, is the final stage of a thought, for the life of a thought ends where action starts.

  When Thoughts Become Things

  Mulla Nasrudin went to a department store to buy a pullover for his wife. While he was at the checkout counter, a flash sale was announced offering 40 percent discount to customers who paid within the next 60 minutes. Soon, out of nowhere an army of female customers rushed to the counter and Mulla found himself getting pushed and pulled in various directions.

  He tried to be patient and polite but even at the end of one hour, he was still at the end of the line because of the wild crowd. Upset and frustrated, he stuck out his elbows and started pushing his way through all the women around.

  “Don’t you have any manners?” a lady yelled. “Can’t you act like a gentleman?”

  “No, ma’am,” Mulla said loudly, “I’ve been acting like a gentleman for more than an hour. Now, I must act like a lady.”

  Why are we sometimes forced to behave in a manner which is contrary to our nature? It may seem that external circumstances propel us. The truth is we imagine our life a certain way and when things don’t pan out how we envisaged, we feel sad, frustrated or depressed. Our restless mind then prods us to act so we may get what we want. Note two important words here, ‘imagine’ and ‘want’. Imagination is nothing but pursuit of a train of thoughts. When we contemplate on a thought, we are basically imagining. And when the same thought stays, it becomes a desire or an emotion. For, a want is a desire which again is a lingering thought. Why are some people more prone to negative or lusty thoughts than others, for instance? It mostly boils down to our tendencies of the mind. Patanjali gives the most beautiful definition of tendency in his Yoga Sutra.

  kleśamūlaḥkarmāśayodṛṣṭādṛṣṭajanmavedanīyaḥ11

  Psychic imprints, resulting from karma, accumulated over many lives condition the mind and cause one grief.

  The word karma here is meant to signify action and not destiny. Imagine a spinning wheel painted with bright spectral hues. Since it is spinning its face appears illusory white. In reality, there is no white colour on the wheel. It’s the momentum, speed at which it’s spinning that’s creating the illusion of white when the reality is far more vivid and colourful. Similarly, mind is always moving. Like the spinning wheel, it creates an illusion of reality of the material world. It makes the world look like a permanent place. However, that is not so.

  In knowing your true nature, the one independent and cleared of all conditioning, your mind must acquire certain stillness. To attain that stillness and examine the nature of mind, its movement must cease. It must stop spinning. It is only after such cessation that you can see the real colours. With an ever moving mind, we remain oblivious to the impact of our actions. Every action leaves behind a residual trail. Whatever we do with speech, actions or words, leave an imprint on our mind and in our lives. This realization, however, comes to a still mind, a mindful mind. A sprinter running a race has no time to sit down and see what others are doing. He’s too busy getting to the finish line. Similarly, a mind engaged in reckless pursuits has no time to reflect on its own actions.

  Action, further is of three types and each one leaves behind an imprint based on its type. Physical actions may produce tangible residue whereas verbal and mental karma create psychic imprints.

  The residue of karma may fade over a period of time (sometimes lifetimes) but it doesn’t completely get destroyed unless you consciously work on erasing the imprint. Our actions don’t condition us, their residue does. How? Let me walk you through with an example while elaborating on the three types of karma.

  Physical Karma – Tangible Residue

  All physical actions requiring tou
ch are physical karma. Physical karma leaves behind physical residue. Let us say you have an apple. You peel and deseed it to enjoy better taste. You eat the apple leaving the skin and seeds behind. Your action of eating the fruit has resulted in the residue of apple skin and seeds. You dispose of the uneaten parts. A cow comes and gladly accepts that as its food. The residue you left behind has now impacted someone else you may not even know. That apple you consumed is now in your body. It is processed by your digestive system. Two sets of residues are formed. The one that gets absorbed in your body is now traveling in your veins by way of blood and the unabsorbed portion (read: residue) is let out of your physical system by way of urine and faeces. Further, bacteria and other microorganisms may feed on such excreta.

  Your physical karma of eating an apple has left an imprint on you and other lifeforms. The residue from the apple that is in your blood directly affects your physical health. The residue eaten by the cow has a bearing on its health and on the quality of milk it produces. The excrements from your body have an impact on microorganic life forms as well as the environment.

  Now imagine seven billion humans on the planet doing that. Further, envision billions of other living creatures in the equation. The physical world is a residue of the collective karma. It is the residue that matters. Your physical karma has a telling impact on you and your immediate surroundings. Plus, it has an impact on the whole world. It is for this reason that the path of meditation requires a degree of self-discipline and restraint. No matter how miniscule an action, eventually it will impact everyone in the world.