enough time and see what happens.
In general these biological desires are not a problem. You are hungry and there is food. You cook it in an appetizing way and then eat until you are full. Then you get up from the table and go on with the rest of your life.
Or if you are sleepy, you make your bed in a nice way and then sleep until you are rested. This seems like a natural way of handling natural desires, and I imagine it is the way that God intended it. So what’s the problem?
In certain meditation techniques they started to repress these desires. So here’s what happens. Michael was a relatively normal person who started to get interested in meditation. He had little success and so he sought a master.
When he found his master, the master told him that he should only eat until he was half full. Being a good student, Michael started just eating until he was half full. This went fine until about three days later in his morning meditation. Michael started dreaming about chocolate cake with chocolate icing, chocolate ice cream, and whipped cream.
Now being a good student Michael knew that he shouldn’t be thinking like this. So he spent the whole morning meditation fighting with his mind, trying with desperation to stop thinking about food. And the more he fought, the more he spent his precious mediation thinking about food.
And then as the days rolled on, he still kept up the image of being a good meditation student by only eating half as much as he needed at his meals. But when midnight came, he would sneak down to the refrigerator and stuff himself full of food.
So what was happening to Michael? These biological desires are like a pendulum that wants to come to balance. The more you swing it to one side, repression, the more it wants to swing to the other side, indulgence. That is until you let it come to a natural balance again.
What a tragedy — here Michael had the opportunity to discover the very substance of the universe, and to find the source of happiness itself. And here he was spending his meditations, fighting with his thoughts of food.
Unfortunately, the Catholic priests are another good example of what I am talking about here. Lately, the Catholic church is getting sued because of allegations that the priests were molesting the children.
The official explanation is that there were a few “bad apples” in the Priesthood. I disagree. I think that these are normal men caught in an abnormal situation. They pushed the pendulum of repression so far to one side that their sexual desires are coming out sidewise. I think that this whole scandal is a sign from God that the priests should be allowed to get married, so that they can meditate on God and not on sex.
Finally, as a meditator you should know that the source of happiness wells up from deep inside of you. It is the place where you actually experience happiness. There is nothing strong enough to destroy the happiness that you are. Not a slice of pizza, a dip of ice cream, or a boy or girl friend.
Our aim here is to use our life to get to the source of wisdom and bliss, not to waste it fighting with our desires. So if you find yourself fighting with your desires, just remember the old Zen saying, “When you are tired sleep when you are hungry eat.”
When I first wrote this book I didn’t go into the topic of desire with this much detail. But since then I had lots questions concerning these biological desires. Thus to keep spiritual aspirants from getting caught in the clutches of repression and indulgence, I wrote a little more about them.
So I think that you can see that the forces that enliven the body are merely objects in your awareness. They are not you. Whether they are working well or poorly, as awareness you are free of them. They are just objects that you see: they are not your limitations.
Now things really start to get interesting as we look into the nature of the mind. We will see if the thoughts in the mind really define us in the next chapter, “The Mind.”
Krishna and Radha
The Mind
Now lets step into the mind, the seat of your emotions and your intellect. That must surely be who you are, right? The intellect is made up of your doubts, your determinations (what you determine to be true or false, right or wrong etc.) and your knowledge, while your emotions consist of your joys and your sorrows, your fears and your hopes, anger and all of the various shades in between.
In the same way that you are aware of your body and the pranas, in that very same way you’re aware of the mind. You know if you are happy or sad; you know if you are knowledgeable in a certain subject like mathematics or not; you know if I am taking a reasonable position or not. You’re even aware if you remember or forget something.
Because you are aware of your mind, you are the subject and your mind is just an object in awareness. You are therefore even greater than your mind. Take a moment to feel this out for yourself. You reside as the seer of your mind, and your mind is just another object that you see.
When a person thinks, “My mind is not very clear today,” she doesn’t consider how she knows this. Perhaps the reason that she knows about her mind is because she stands as the ever-clear awareness.
A look at a computer might make this a little clearer. A computer has a greater mind than any of us. In seconds it can calculate problems in mathematics and physics that would take us lifetimes to calculate. A computer can hold volumes and volumes of knowledge in many fields. When programmed, a computer can even imitate emotional thoughts, like those used in computer games.
Then why aren’t we envious of a computer? I don’t know anyone who wishes they were a computer. The difference is that we are aware of our mind and a computer is not. Although we may never have recognized this Awareness, we still value it, because that’s what makes us alive.
Awareness is not thoughts aware of other thoughts that are aware of other thoughts going on and on in an infinite regression. No matter how far you let this regression go, you’re still aware of this whole process occurring in your mind, aren’t you? This shows that the Awareness itself is not a thought. Because of this, you can’t program a computer to be aware of its own thinking. It also points to how Awareness is greater than the thoughts in your mind.
Furthermore this shows that there is something that we value even more than our mind. Although we are not yet quite sure what this is, we have a sense that this thing is what really makes us — us — and not the ups and downs of the mind.
But since we place so much value on this thing that we call “mind,” and the things that we think, we will explore some of its aspects, to show what they do and how they are not really you. We will start with the subconscious. Now we are learning that we stand as the subject. We are aware of limitations, not bound by them. Next is there really a state that’s not quite aware called the subconsciousness?
The Subconscious
More about Awareness later. But first there is one thing that we should discuss: the popular idea of the subconscious or the unconscious. These ideas are used in psychology. They’ve been picked up as popular words for behaviors or feelings that seemingly cannot be accounted for. “I don’t know why, but I constantly feel down or depressed,” “I just can’t seem to shake it,” or, “For no apparent reason I just break out in anger or fear. I just don’t know why.”
One important part of the path of Self-Knowledge is to recognize everything that you take to be you.
