AI summary: This article has been inspired by the teachings of the Samaya Srividya tradition as taught by Swami Rama. It traces how kama, the prime desire, gives rise to delusion, pride, greed, anger, and envy. The tradition holds that fulfilling desires fuels more desires. Since living without desire is impossible, the sages teach that purifying the antahkarana and using buddhi to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy desires is the path to liberation. It outlines four kinds of desire: negative, positive, the desire for self-knowledge, and selfless desire. Directed inward as a single burning desire for liberation, or outward as service to others, kama loses its power to bind and becomes a means to freedom.
Kama, mother of all desires
Kama, the prime desire, is the mother of all other desires, and it gives rise to both—the desire to gratify the senses, and the desire to help others selflessly. Kama motivates you to do anything and everything. Kama is blind desire; it has no sense of discrimination, judgment or understanding. It motivates you to do something simply to fulfill that desire—because it exists.
Analysis of desire
When a desire is fulfilled and you attain what you long for, then you believe the object belongs to you. In reality nothing is yours—it’s the worldly illusion that makes you believe this. This delusion is called moha.
Fulfillment of the desire feeds your pride (mada). This is intoxicating, and when you are drunk with pride, you compare yourself with others and reinforce the thought, “I have it, and you don’t.”
Together with delusion and pride you experience greed (lobha). Lobha strengthens the desire for more.
When kama is not fulfilled, you get angry and frustrated—that’s krodha, the emotion of anger. When you’re angry, you’re completely blind and you can even hurt your child or spouse whom you love so much.
You also start comparing you have with those of others and are full of envy and jealousy. You go on living this way, feeding your ego with feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction.
Delusion, pride, greed, anger and envy—all of these negative emotions strengthen kama. You are now just deeply entrenched in this cycle of emotions bred by the mother of all these mind patterns: desire.
Contemplation Exercise 1: Recall an incident when you experienced the emotion of pride, greed, anger or envy very intensely. Use Internal Dialogue to trace the desire or expectance that led to the emotion.
Desire fuels desire
At some point, you begin to wonder how you can transcend your desires. Consider what you are actually doing through your actions: you trying to fulfill your desires. Yet they are never fulfilled—all your actions achieve is adding more fuel to the fire of your desires.
For example, a couple builds a home. Both the wife and husband are happy with the beautiful house but they lack furniture, carpets, decorations, etc. When they have children, they want toys, books, and pets. They are caught in a web of desires.
You have been doing unconscious experiments with all your desires, but such experiments have already been done consciously by the great sages. The great sages taught that fulfilling desires can never make you happy; the question is, how can we attain a state that is free of desire?
How to transcend desire
It is not possible to live on this plane of existence without any desires at all. Even while you still have desires, you can be happier if you understand how to reconcile these.
Desire is at the root of everything. In order perform the action appropriately, one needs to purify one’s desires. Purification of desire requires the purification of the lower mind (manas), intellect (buddhi), ego (ahamkara) and the memories (chitta). These four are called antahkarana, the inner instrument. Purification of the inner instrument helps one employ his resources rightly. A person with a purified mind purifies his desires and performs his actions while keeping the highest goal of life as his main focus. Without inner purification, a human being fails to envision the true purpose of life.
Desires should be filtered by the sense of discrimination within you. Your buddhi, intelligence, has the function of judging, deciding, and discriminating which desires are useful. You should learn to develop that function within yourself. Then, decrease your desires. It is the useless desires that create problems for you, not appropriate or helpful desires. For example, the desire to eat food is not itself a problem, but the desire to eat unhealthy foods is.
People desire sensory pleasures and so they work towards collecting the objects of the senses. But when they attain these objects, they fail to enjoy them. Actually, there is an irony in life: when you claim, “This is mine,” the fear of losing the object doesn’t allow you to enjoy it fully, and on the other hand, when you internally renounce by saying, “This is not mine,” then you can truly enjoy.
There are 4 kinds of desires
Negative desire
Positive desire
Desire for self-knowledge
Selfless desire
Contemplation Exercise 2: Can you recall attachment to an object that you successfully uncolored (consciously or otherwise)? What change did you notice after this in your relationship to this object after this?
Negative desire
Emotional immaturity exists when we are tossed by many desires for the objects of the world. Our relationship with these objects is always in flux. As we gain and lose that which we desire we are bound to experience the various negative emotions as long as we
have strong desires for these objects. A person with strong desires becomes self-centered and isolates himself from the reality of the phenomenal world. That leads him to create his own reality. The desires of the selfish person are never fulfilled. The more desires one has, the more discontent he becomes. The endless desires make the person deluded, diseased and a victim of circumstances. This is negative desire.
Positive desire
Positive desire emerges with greater self-awareness. When you realize that certain problems are self-created, but that you also have all the potential within to remedy the situation, you develop the positive desire to become the architect of your own destiny. This positive desire will guide you to lead a life of discipline and motivate you to overcome the whims and fancies of an untrained mind.
Desire for self-knowledge
Higher knowledge is that knowledge which helps human beings direct the primitive urges and emotions. When the necessity for that higher knowledge is strongly felt, one becomes more one-pointed.
When you awaken to higher knowledge, you give up your dependency on the world of objects where change and decay are predominant, and instead seek that which abides. Once that higher knowledge is attained, the grief and woe that come from worldly desires are transcended. Generally, people receive things of the world yet they are never satisfied. But if your desire for attaining truth is fulfilled, you can live with fewer objects of the world. Then life becomes meaningful.
The senses (indriyas) and mind of ordinary people are controlled by their desires. When one desires to enjoy sensory pleasures, the indriyas and the entire mind are turned outward toward the objects of desire. The untrained mind feeds the the fire of desire which turns into a blaze. Desire robs the antahkarana of its energy. But when you realize the root of the problem you will strengthen only one desire: the desire to attain the state of equilibrium. Then instead of being an obstacle, kama becomes a means to liberation. When that force is directed inward instead of toward the temptations of the world, then one’s journey is driven by the power of kama, the strongest force.
The one who has a burning desire to attain freedom seeks self-knowledge. All the small desires are swallowed by this great desire for self-knowledge and liberation. This is why the desire for self-knowledge is also called one-pointed desire.
Selfless desire
There is a fourth desire. This is a desire for the welfare of others.
One lives in the world not for his selfish ends, but for doing selfless actions for others. Such a desire does not bind, but becomes a means of liberation. The desires to serve others, the nation or humanity are great desires. All the truly great men and women who have lived on this earth have been totally selfless; they lived to serve and help others. They knew the cosmic principle—that the only way to freedom is to learn to give. This is the law of life: give and give up.
Contemplation Exercise 3: Do you have a selfless desire you have not fulfilled? If yes, what are you waiting for?