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 three 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.