When thoughts become desires

When we are mindful of our thoughts, actions and desire, they subside on their own.

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.

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.

Emotional Desires

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

A conditioned mind, outwardly focused, when temporarily satisfied from the fulfilment of physical and emotional desires, gives birth to intellectual ones.

Fulfilment of any form of desire, be it physical, emotional or intellectual does not offer lasting fulfilment either. They continue to bind you predominantly because you have simply engaged your mind elsewhere rather than settling it.

Transcendental Desire

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.

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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.

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.