Handling Desires : 6.

The mind can, therefore, satisfy itself by various means. Our attempt at a sublimation of desires would not always be fruitful, because who is to control or subjugate the mind? There is no doctor for it. It is the mind itself that has to rectify itself by an internal adjustment of its constitution. The mind is the patient, and the mind is the doctor. This is something difficult to conceive. How can the doctor and the patient be the same? But this is the situation. There is a peculiar feature in the mind which can act as a regulator for another feature of the very same mind which is to be regulated. In common language it is sometimes called the higher mind controlling the lower mind, etc.


Thinness of desire is an occasional device which the mind may adopt for the sake of making it appear that the desires are not there, while this subtle connection in the form of that thinned form of desire, thinned shape of desire, can swell it into inflated action the moment opportunities arise or suitable conditions are provided.

At other times, desires are intermittent; they come and they go. This is called vicchinna avastha, while the thinned form is called tanu avastha. Today you are angry, and tomorrow you are in a very pleasant mood. You have seen husband and wife quarrelling. They will not talk to each other, but they do not hate each other really. Even if they put on the appearance of disagreement, anger, and a mood of rejection, as it happens among members in a family, it does not mean that they hate one another. 

They have tremendous ties of attachment which can manifest at other times, under different conditions. It is a subtlety of love which gets suppressed by a fit of displeasure, at which moment it may look that the desire has gone or the love is absent, but it is pushed underneath. It is not absent, and tomorrow it will come up. It is possible that today you may be very affectionate, tomorrow you may be quite the contrary, and the day after tomorrow again you will be something else.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued   ....