Handling Desires : 3.





This process has to continue every day. As our great guide Patanjali puts it, success is quick in the case of those seekers who are persistent in their practice and do not break the practice by discontinuing it even for a day, and keep up the intensity of the practice in the same manner as they entertained it in their hearts at the commencement of a fit of renunciation with the love for God in their lives. All this is easily said but very difficult to practice because while we may be wise, the forces of the world – also equally wise – are capable of circumventing every one of our precautions, and sometime harness the very means of our protection as instruments of their action.


The very caution that we have taken may become an instrument of our indulgence and fall. In other words, even our friends may turn against us and become enemies. The conducive atmosphere that we are thinking of in our mind may become an obstructing atmosphere. We have only to study the personal lives of sincere seekers who live in far-off places, away from towns and cities; their thoughts, feelings, and emotions are to be studied. We will find that it is a very complicated tale – not always a happy one to hear – and there should be no wonder if after years of practice, no tangible result has followed.


Our desires have various stages and forms of manifestation, and they are very wise, like snakes. They know how to act when the time for action comes. They know how to withdraw themselves when it is time for them to withdraw themselves. Prasupta, tanu, vicchinna and udara are supposed to be the four conditions of desire. If circumstances are unfavourable, the desires will be sleeping.


Suppose you are in Gangotri or Uttarakashi with no cloth, no woollen blankets, no financial resources, and nothing to set you into action in the direction of fulfilling your wishes. You would be undergoing a kind of compulsive austerity, and for a time it will look like you are on the spiritual path, practicing penance for the sake of God-realisation. But, beware! The desires are sleeping. A sleeping person is not a dead person. So, when there is a latency of desires in Gangotri, etc., it does not mean that they are destroyed, because they are lying in ambush to catch you at the earliest opportunity that may be provided to them.


Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ....


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