Our spiritual scriptures where on one hand have given the nectar of life, on the other they have also given the poison of wrong notions whose impact we are witnessing today. While on one hand, the scriptures have criticized wealth, woman, sex, desires, tastes and life, on the other many scriptures have also revered woman, desire, wealth, growth and life. Human society internally desires to achieve all the materialistic possessions but our sermons infest it with guilt by saying that to live with wealth, prosperity, woman & sex is wrong. Is it true? Come, let’s try & discover the answer to these questions by our enlightened Gurudev – Editor
You must dream & desire to the fullest because these are the basic elements that give growth & novelty to life. By killing these elements, the growth, development & novelty of life would also get killed. Life will become monotonous, stagnant, dry, and listless like a stinking pond of water. Desires & dreams are in favour of life and not against it and they are indispensable parts of life. A life without dreams & desires is more than death.
The growth & development around you everywhere is the result of these desires and dreams. Dreams, desires and imagination are invaluable & natural gifts of god in man. We must try & utilize these gifts of god not by getting attached to them but by remaining detached from them. We must use them like we play our role in a drama with all our playfulness, sincerity and capability. If these virtues start creating grief, hatred, greed, attachment and sorrow then it means that we are misusing them. Therefore, the question is not to abandon these desires but to become aware and come out of the deep ignorance and the state of unawareness.
God never creates beautiful gardens. He only creates wild forests. We have to convert them into beautiful gardens. He only creates stones; we have to make statues out of them. He only provides with the raw material to prepare sweets but we have to make sweets from that material. These gardens, statues & sweets would never have been possible without our dreams & desires. Never blindly believe the words of our saints & scriptures. Most of the statements in them are against life. They are lofty sermons. That’s why there appears no synchronicity in spirituality and the practical life of man, while the fact is that both spirituality & practical life are intermingled with each other. The spirituality that does not teaches us the art of best kind of living, doeset not gives us the potential to fully blossom and does not provide complete prosperity should be allowed to remain in he ancient books. This fact would sound strange that if all the people on this Earth are made to become Buddhas, nanaks & Mahavirs, then the world would surely be at the zenith of spiritual progress but it would be at the nadir of the material advancement. This one-sided progress is extremely dangerous & fatal. The real balance lies in the combined progress of spiritualism & materialism. Therefore, brahma, truth, world and lie are the ancient scriptures’ greatest half-lies and half-truths. After living in this body for 100 years, if we call it an illusion and call the soul within, real, then what would a bigger illusion, lie and ignorance than this? The body that we keep using for 24 hours, we call it unreal and the soul which we never use and listen only to its words, we call real. The extent to which this body is true, to the same is extent the soul is real too.
Awareness and consciousness are the elements of prosperity of the soul. Money, prosperity, samskaras signify the growth of the body. A person who achieves both types of prosperities is the complete, spiritual man in the real sense. We should strive to make our lives as comfortable as possible. For this, we must dream, have desires, imagine, make efforts and try to fulfil our dreams & desires. Despite failure, we should not accept defeat, but keep trying with all our vigour and energy. Soon after the fulfilment of one desire, we must have another and endeavour to fulfil it as well. This is the way to make this world prosperous and lively.
There is no grief in having desires. In fact, our concepts, attachment to things and rigid expectations cause grief. Failures never block the avenues; in fact each failure leads to a new path and gives further inspiration. Therefore, with every failure, one must try to search for new paths to success and finally, success will be achieved. I have written a couplet on this –
Zindagi me har haar ne mujhe is qadar bharkaya hai,
ki manzil ko pane me ab mujhme duguna josh aya hai
(every failure in life has invigorated me to an extent, that I gather double excitement to achieve my goal)
We are being a wrong notion since centuries that satisfaction is the greatest treasure. I feel that dissatisfaction is the greatest inspirational force behind progress. If you start thinking that I already have a cycle, now why to desire for a car or an aeroplane? Then you would continue to ride a cycle all your life. If you feel satisfied with one room, you would never be able to construct a bungalow. We are the sons of God and God means prosperity and unlimited growth. So, we must try to prosper limitlessly. We have to become Brahma and Brahma means expansion and to become Buddha means contraction. You can never achieve this expansion without being dissatisfied. This desire to expand, research and search new things becomes the cause of great inventions. Why to restrict ourselves to the Moon, why not reach the stars? This dissatisfaction, this thirst, this desire, this dream, this imagination is the prime basis for growth & progress.
Be it a bungalow or a room, a cycle or a rocket; these things do not cause misery. An aware & conscious person uses them with detachment. Despite remaining engulfed in these objects, he remains detached as oil remains detached from water. Therefore, instead of becoming an enemy of desires, dreams, imagination, dissatisfaction and comforts, become the enemy of ignorance. Attaining awareness is the best. It is not wrong to earn money but it is wrong to become attached to money. Dissatisfaction gives momentum to life. Satisfaction surely gives peace but it gives neither liveliness nor challenge nor excitement. What is the value of stagnant water in a pool or that of listless peace in life? Therefore, you must accept satisfaction only after attaining possessions that are worth attaining. Before this, satisfaction is a hurdle in the path of progress. To live with barer necessities is to live like animals (because it cannot achieve other things due to its limitations). To live with the maximum possible comforts is to actually live like a human because man has no limits and has the potential to fulfil his desires. This is the Truth of this world and it would go on like this. Despite the spiritual sermons being delivered by the saints that, ‘relinquish your desires’, human race is constantly developing its desires and dreams and is giving the world a new dimension.
God is not against your wishes, desires and dreams. Instead, He is fully in favour of them. Otherwise He would have created you like other animals. If your desires, dreams cause grief and sorrow to you, it is because of your own ignorance. If you wish, you can fulfil your dreams & desires blissfully by remaining in the state of awareness. Your failures can make you stronger. An aware person can never get disturbed even if he has thousands of desires and a person who is living in a state of unawareness can get disturbed even by the desire to have a cup of tea. Therefore, one should blame one’s dreams & desires but it is the unawareness & ignorance that is to be blamed. Relinquish this unawareness and ignorance, if you must. Become aware, understand the rules. Despite your thousands of desires, you can live a state of complete happiness and bliss. Wrong spiritual notions have created a feeling of guilt within and disturbed us. All saints have been only repeating the texts of ancient scriptures like parrots and have been saying something or the other to make us relinquish and abandon our dreams & desires. Dreams & desires are as natural as the rising of the Sun & the Moon. On one hand, our life becomes difficult in absence of dreams & desires while on the other, our spiritual teachings create a sense of guilt and ignorance in us.
