How would you feel if you are able to find out your true purpose in this birth? With this clarity, you would not be wasting so much time, money and energy on unnecessary distractions and self-conflicting desires in life.
That was exactly what happened to me when I was given the gift of knowing my true desires by my spiritual master, Paramahamasa Nithyananda in July 2006. Since then, my entire life has changed tremdenously with all the alignments I made over the last 7 years. To me, this was the first sacred gift I received from him i.e. from ignorance to clarity.
Last week in the “Holistic Sleep Therapy” workshop which I conducted with a few sincere participants, the emotion of fulfillment filled me when I saw they also were gifted the revelations of their true desires. They are the blessed ones because this knowledge is going to change their life forever.
To know your true desires, you have to understand the science behind the pranic energy body. From the Yogic physiology, the human body is seen as layers of consciousness. There are 7 energy bodies in the human body: which is 1) physical, 2) pranic, 3) mental, 4) etheric, 5) causal, 6) cosmic and 7) nirvanic. The second energy body – the pranic layer, is filled with all our desires. Desire is nothing but energy. Desires are energy for our body, it is the fuel without which we will not even get up from our bed. To move out of your bed, you need energy – that energy is desire. Desires itself is not a problem, the whole problem is we start having self-contradicting desires.
Mahavira, a great enlightened master said that when we were born on planet earth, we brought with us all that we needed to survive and achieve those desires for which we took birth. Yet, why do we feel we do not have enough? Why do we keep running for more?
Understand that those desires which you bring with you to fulfill in this life are called Prarabdha Karma. Prarabdha karma is your own samskaras (engrams) that you brought with you when you assumed the body. But after you are born, society imposes thousands of desires on you. You pick up other desires from each and everyone whom you meet in life; from advertisements by media and try to fulfill them. These are the borrowed desires which your picked up after you landed in the body. Instead of fulfilling your own desires, all the time you are only fulfilling someone else’s desires. As a result, you are caught in a trap, you don’t have energy, money or time to fulfill all these desires. Therefore, forgetting that all those borrowed desires were really the ones that you picked up from others, you blame life and God for not being able to fulfill your desires. You do not feel a sense of abundance and the blessed showering of Existence in your life. Instead, you feel depleted and cheated.
How do I know which desire is mine?
I was taught a powerful technique by my master. He explains that when we infuse life energy (prana) into the pranic energy body, only our real desires will stay. The borrowed desires will leave us like how a tree will be when we shake it, all the old and dry leaves fall away while only the young leaves will remain. Understand that your own desires that you came with into this life are already imbued with the energy to fulfill them whereas the borrowed desires are not so deep and energy-filled. But what happens is that you use that energy you came with to fulfill these borrowed desires and then you complain that life does not supply you with the energy you need to fulfill your desires. When you work on energizing the pranic layer, all the borrowed desires imposed on you by others will drop away!
The truth is we design our desires when we were born. When other desires are imposed on us, our breathing changes, it becomes shallow. When social conditioning happens, our breathing becomes shallow and confined to the nose. When you re-adjust your prana (life energy), all the false desires fall off.
All other actions and miseries that happen in you are due to the borrowed desires. They will take you again and again to the outer world and put you only in bondage and depression. If you don’t work out the true desires that you brought with you, you become depressed and suicidal, you are likely to develop diseases or even cancer. Without fulfilling your true desires is tantamount to having the fuel you took to exhaust in this body but you didn’t burn it while in the body. At the time of death, the soul goes through enormous torture and suffering as it passes through the pranic body. So, it is absolutely important for any human being, as a part of their spiritual inner work, to know their true desires or Parabdha Karma in this life time.
Another important thing you should know – you may be given the idea that your desires are never to be fulfilled, this is a wrong cognizance. You just have to fulfill your Parabdha Karma – the desires that you bring along with its own energy for fulfillment. Your own desires if allowed to be fulfilled, will by nature purify and expand your inner space.
At a deeper spiritual level, when we light the candle of understanding or knowledge, the desire disappears. It is not a question of what we desire, the very act of desiring itself is misery. When we become desireless, the “I” or the ego disappears, then whatever we ask for will happen. By watching every act that you do, every thought, every desire that possesses you, the inner chattering drops because the energy that was earlier used for fueling the chattering, is now being transformed into watchfulness. When this happens, clarity arises and the desire dissolves, the attachment to the desires also drops.
The more you witness your desires, you will be able to see 2 things. First thing, desire by its very nature cannot bring you fulfillment. The moment when you realize this, the desires disappear. Second thing, you will see that only when you transcend desires, do you reach fulfillment. Having realized the very nature of desire, you accept that desiring is the nature of the mind! When you cognise the beauty of purposelessness of life, you just go beyond the mind and fall back into your Being in restful awareness. Every moment will become a meaningful and joyful experience, that is the bliss of the very existence. Namaste 🙂