The lifespan of every thought, however good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, is exactly the same.
It emerges. It manifests. It disappears.
These are the only three stages in the life of a thought. If you don’t recall a thought or if you don’t pay attention to a thought, it must disappear on its own.
Thoughts that you do not let go leave an imprint on your mind.
That imprint is the residue. Meditation is the process of washing away that residue. It is the cleaning of your slate and keeping it that way. When we fail to abandon our thoughts, they assume different forms. They can become desires, expectations or emotions.
When Thoughts Become Desires
There’s a beautiful story in Durga Saptashati, a puranic text. While slaying the demons, Mother Goddess came across a particularly different and difficult type. His name was Raktabija, the one who is born from blood. Raktabija had a special boon. For every drop of his blood that would fall on the ground, one thousand more Raktabijas would manifest, and each new Raktabija would have the same boon. It was practically impossible to exterminate such a demon. As soon as he was attacked, blood would spill and thousands like him would spring forth, creating armies after armies of Raktabija in the battlefield. It was a problem unlike any other that the Goddess had encountered
A long battle ensued, after which the companion energies of Mother Goddess decided that just attacking Raktabija wasn’t enough. There had to be someone to gather and drink his blood before it spilled on the ground. A form of the goddess, Ma Kali, emerged from the forehead of the goddess. Before Raktabija’s blood could touch the ground she would lap it up with her lolling tongue. Eventually the forces of goodness triumphed over the demons.
Similar is the case with our desires, for Raktbija was nothing but a symbol of desire. For every desire we humans fulfill, a thousand more will take birth. Suppressing them is the same as attacking them. That’s not the solution. Fulfilling them is accepting your defeat at their hands, giving birth to a thousand more. Ma Kali emerging out of Devi’s forehead represents mindfulness. When we are mindful of our thoughts, actions and desire, they subside on their own.
Look around and you’ll see how each one of us is driven by our desires. The kingdom of consciousness is under siege by the desires of our mind. All that we have accumulated or hope to achieve has originated from our desires. Our unfulfilled desires froth, ferment and layer up on the tranquil surface of our mind. Unless we understand the nature of our desires, we have no hope of winning over them, they can’t be tackled individually.
They are Raktabija. We have to go to the source if it is peace and everlasting bliss we seek.
Going to the source is understanding the nature of your desires. The seed of a desire is thought. That’s the bija, seed, of this Raktabija.
Just like moisture is inseparable from water, and, heat from light, desires are inseparable from mind. For desires are but thoughts ‘un-abandoned’. And, thoughts are just that – thoughts.
They are neither good nor bad, neither sublime nor ridiculous, neither right nor wrong. All such labels are mere designations you have given them based on your conditioning. Intrinsically, thoughts are all the same – identical. It is what you do with the thought that matters than the actual thought itself.
When a thought emerges on the canvas of your mind, if you don’t drop it, its pursuit will either take the form of a desire or an emotion, positive or negative. All karma originate from thoughts. A lingering thought destabilizes your mind, disturbing your state of tranquility like the ripple in a still pond. A quiet mind remains unaffected by the fulfillment or abandonment of desires; both outcomes are perceived by the mind anyway. So, whether you want sense gratification or gratifying recognition, satisfying love or a simple laddoo, as far as mind is concerned, there is no difference.
When a desire is fulfilled, it gives you temporary joy and pleasure. The outcome is as ethereal and elusive as the desire itself. If desires could be satisfied forever, it would not be fallacious to seek fulfillment. However, when fulfilled, countless more spring up like Raktabija. Once you understand the nature of desires, your life is simplified. While desires cannot really be classified, to aid ease and understanding, I am categorizing them for you. They are primarily of four types:
Physical Desires
All forms of sense gratifications are pure physical desires. You envisage a pleasant outcome from the fulfillment of these ones. Such anticipated pleasure prompts you to hold onto the thought of satisfying your desire. As a result, your actions, emotions and intelligence work together to attain that fulfillment. These desires can be insatiably active or eternally latent in you, or sometimes both. Whatever you enjoy through the body is basically sense gratification.
Most people expend their whole life satisfying these ones.
They experience everything through the body, live for the body and die for it. They remain faithful, obedient and unquestioning servants of the body. Their life revolves around the body’s needs for food, clothing, copulation, comfort, care and so forth. Fulfillment of physical desires is fundamentally linked to a body’s well-being. Human body, however, continues to deteriorate and many work incessantly hard to maintain it.
It is not wrong to fulfill physical desires. It’s just that everything we pursue has a price. If you are willing to pay that price, by all means you are welcome to go after these desires. Fulfillment of physical desires, however, rarely ever leads to everlasting happiness. There’s transient pleasure that fades as quickly as the skies clear after a heavy shower. When we continually work to feed our senses, driven by our physical desires, our emotional desires too multiply automatically. And this leads me to explaining the second type:
Emotional Desires
Emotional desires are directly linked to your conditioning (you may think of it as upbringing for now) and karmic residue from previous lifetimes. These are driven by our mind’s tendencies that we have been carrying over millions of lifetimes. Have you not noticed why everyone has a desire for a certain type of partner in their life? The same person who appeals to you as your soulmate could be downright repulsive for someone else. Emotional desires spring from the deepest recesses of the mind. These are not just the thoughts you’ve contemplated on consciously. They have arisen from the impressions of the subconscious. The deep desire to feel loved, to feel wanted. Need for love, reciprocation, recognition, appreciation, companionship and sharing, etc., form the tall list of emotional desires.
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.