That One Great Desire
Acharya Prashant: Brahman grows by tapa , what does that mean? Tapa here relates to desire. Desire. Desire is making the impossible happen. The impossible cannot happen. So, obviously, that which is happening is a mirage a chimera. Brahman cannot grow, Brahman cannot take shape, Brahman cannot take shape, cannot expand, take forms or names, move from one thing to the other, become measurable, not possible. But desire is Māyā. Māyā is making the impossible happen. For whom ? We come back to our favorite question. For Whom? Whom does Brahman grow? For itself? Not at all.
Brahman has no need, no capacity, no limit, no obligation to look back at itself to reflect on itself. Brahman does not indulge in anything, let alone these kinds of fragmentations. But Brahman grows, what does growth mean here? Growth means that formless assumes a form. The complete becomes incomplete.
And it’s quite interesting how the complete turning into incomplete has been referred to as growth. But that’s what desire is all about, no? What you actually want is not at all beneficial to you. And what you want actually turns you into someone something lesser, what do you call it? Growth.
So, tapa ; what does tapa mean here? The force of desire, the feeling that there is something amiss, that makes the imperceptible complete formless intangible Brahman , assume tangible proportions. It all starts from that fundamental desire. That desire is Māyā, that desire is the most fundamental power inherent in Brahman . So, Brahman grows into something very subtle, and then from that subtle something; comes gross material matter, which has been referred to as anna , and then from that arrives all the worlds, the various universes.
And then when there is so much spread, so much manifestation then comes the desire to break out of this net, the net of mortality; hence the desire to be immortal has the desire to move into formless complete Brahman again and that completes the circle.
Do you see what is happening here? There is just Brahman , nothing else. And then there is desire, for whom? The desirous one. And then there is desire. The desire is initially only in the form of something very subtle, it is not very clearly sharply expressed, call it just a primitive tendency. Then that tendency starts taking shape. Firstly, the shapes are mental and then the shapes are material. And ultimately those shapes multiply, diversify, interact with each other, and turn into many universes. But all these universes, they are nothing but multiple webs of death. So, the desirous one caught in these universes then struggles to break free of these universes that he himself spawned. Remember the previous verse? Like the spider, builds the web and then takes the web in into itself. Similarly, desire creates worlds and worlds with itself at the center, and then finding nothing in those worlds turning utterly dissatisfied with the world it itself has created, it then aspires to be relieved of its worlds. Desire relieved of its own shadows, its own hopes, and expectations are back to Brahman .
You see, how the entire cycle has been explained? Your world is with you at the center. Brahman is just the substratum; it has been referred to in various ways in Vedantic literature. Sometimes it’s called the substratum, sometimes the background, sometimes the space, the ether in which everything is happening. Sometimes the watcher, sometimes the progenitor, and sometimes the mega controller operates only at the meta-level.
The idea behind all these expressions has one thing in common. Brahman has no interest in any participation at the macro level. At the micro level, it is your own doing, getting it? It’s the play of your own tendencies, getting it? Your own tendencies make you see a problem where there is none. You imagine, and then you do a lot to get rid of that problem and then obviously to do a lot, you create the entire space in which a lot of doing can happen. If you want to play a game, you cannot just play it. Right? You want to play golf or tennis or cricket, right?
You cannot just randomly and suddenly initiate the game. If you are a serious player as we all are, then you in fact required to build an entire stadium, why? Just because you wanted to play one game. That’s what desire does. Because it must do what it must do, therefore it must create an entire universe. That’s the reason our entire universe exists so that you may do just a few things, are you getting it?
Even if you have to play a 10-over match, you need to create an entire infrastructure for it, no? Our life is that 10 overmatch, amounting to nothing, nothing much at all. But what do we do? We build an entire… Like somebody deciding to fly to a place just 200 kilometers away. The place might be just 200 kilometers away, but if you have decided to fly, then what do you need to build? What do you need to build?
Imagine, you actually need to launch satellites, you need rockets. You need rockets that go beyond the atmosphere of the earth. You would be flying well within the limits of the atmosphere, needless to talk of all the infrastructure that you need to build on the ground. The airports and such little things; just because you wanted to experience one flight.
So, just because we want to live that small happy life of 60 years with 2 or 4 or 6 of our near ones, the entire cosmos has to exist, the entire cosmos. No, it does not exist on its own, it exists because you want a nest within it. Your nest necessitates the entire cosmos.
So, your nest is not within the cosmos, the cosmos is within your nest. Poetically you always said that, have you not? But it turns out that it is true conceptually as well. Poetry meets mathematics. So when you say you know my little house is my universe; you are horribly right. It’s your desire that breeds the universe, else there is nothing, else there is nothing.
So, there is a desire that gives birth to the worlds and then there is a desire that gets fed up with the worlds and returns to the pure, the original, the immutable. The first kind of desire that brought us where we are, it’s not much use discussing it now, because the deed has been done.
We do exist today at least in our own frame of reference, right? Evolution has taken place, we cannot de-evolve now. What do we do then? We make use of the second kind of desire. What a second kind of desire? That will take you back to where you came from, getting it? That’s the import of this verse. One has to be very careful, otherwise, it’s quite easy to be misled by the use of the tapa and anna here. Remember that Vedanta has nothing to do with stuff miscellaneous. It talks only of the one, if the one is too difficult to talk of, it talks of two; Truth and the mind. And if the listeners clamor too much for detail, then at most it talks of three, Truth, the mind, and the body.
The rishis were simple people, they loved relaxation, and they were too wise to indulge in needless details when the thousand are all included in one; how wise is it to talk individually of the thousand? Like efficient mathematicians, they referred only to the one. Which one am I talking about? Mind. Why refer to the thousand things in the mind? Simply call all that as mind stuff, full stop. Otherwise, there is no end, with nothing at its center, the mind still has the magical capacity to keep weaving an infinite net, innumerable things the mind can breed.
The wise one says, why talk of all that diversity? Why are we so interested in it? I know all those things are just one. Otherwise, one can just be lost in the count, getting it? There is no end to diversity. If you cannot see the commonness behind the stuff, the one-ness behind the things, then you will be consumed by the count. So, they don’t talk about many things. So, rishis have no business talking of anna , food or grain, cereals, or mundane things. Moment, you see such a thing being talked of, you should immediately know that something else is being referred to.
Never deviate from the first principles, never. All the verses have to be read in the light of the first principles and the first principles have nothing to do with food. Disputably, the rishis were fun-loving people, but they had higher sources than food to extract fun from. They won’t be so particular about anna , have to give it a place of pride adjacent to Brahman , in the same verse where you are talking of Brahman ; if you find anna too mentioned then you should know, it’s just a pointer towards something else, right?
So, what does Anna refer to? Material; gross manifestation, gross mind, so there is nothing, then there is just the little sensation, that little vibration, the beginning of movement, which is nothing but the beginning of deviation from the center; which is nothing but the beginning of Māyā. And then that which is in the beginning just a little vibration, a bit of a spasm, in due course of time explodes into the entire universe.
And which in due course of things, sees its own futility and therefore recedes back into the source, getting it? The entire curve is the movement of Māyā or desire. You should know the point you are standing at on that curve. If you know where you are, you also know what you want to do.
You have already come to a long distance, cannot undo the journey, you cannot un-travel the distance, what do you do then? Complete the cycle. Have the right desire that stimulates you into the right action. And therefore the verse says, “Satyam lokaha karma suchamrutam”. The right work, the right action that will lead you into immortality, that’s what you need to do now.
Now that you have chosen to be in the world of action, you cannot avoid action. Act rightly, therefore; act vigorously, act rightly. Would have been wonderful had you not needed to act at all, had you not been present at all, had you not taken birth at all. But you are born now, the past is irreversible. In our own eyes, we exist, and we exist as creatures of suffering. Therefore, what do we do? We do justice, this birth. Having chosen to be born, does not justify your birth. “No, but we didn’t choose to be born.” You see if you know that much, I too know that you know that much, so if I am saying that you have chosen to be born, obviously there is something I mean. Kindly try to grasp.
Our consciousness goes into ourselves only to a small degree. Your self is like a deep well, and your consciousness is like the light of a feeble electric torch that you throw into the well; how deep does the light penetrate? And the well is old and deep. It’s not as if it is a reservoir of clean and clear water. There is all kinds of dubious nefarious stuff cluttered within it and primitive spiders have woven webs that your torchlight cannot penetrate. The area illuminated by a torch light is the conscious mind, it is only a small part of yourself, beneath that there is a lot, that you do not know of, so your choices come from there.
You refuse to own those choices because those choices aren’t conscious choices. Your refusal means a little; they are your choices even if they were unconsciously made. So, being born is one such choice. And how is it possible? When I am not yet born, how do I decide to be born? How is it then conceivable that a child decides to be born? Maybe only the body is born? Maybe the tendency that decides to take birth exists even before the body.
Maybe what you are calling as birth is just the physical appearance of the desire? Maybe the desire pre-exists in its gross appearance? Oh! How is it possible? You mean that, I existed even before my birth? Of course, you did. Not in a physical way but you did exist, but I am not talking of the atman here. I am talking of that primitive tendency that pervades all existence. The tendency that keep giving birth again and again in the form of every new child. The tendency decided to take birth, right? That tendency is you, so you decide to give birth. No, fine; having decided to be born, now make good use of whatever is available to you.
To put it realistically, let’s make the best use of a bad situation. We may decide to entertain ourselves by thinking that it’s great to have taken birth and we are here to really have a good time, it’s like being invited to a party or something. No one is born on a Saturday night. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that way and we know that. Yes, the first step in spirituality is to honestly acknowledge that it’s not quite the great situation we keep telling ourselves it is.
So, let's make the best of a bad place, right? Which is that you are condemned to desire, at least desire rightly. You cannot not desire, you cannot not act, you cannot not want. The best is to obviously be in a situation where you don’t need to want, but you need to want. You need to want, you need to want, you need to be attracted, you need to beg, you need to practise, you need to work, you need to love. Desire rightly, act rightly, think rightly, work rightly, love rightly. The result of the right pursuit that it be that you come to a point where you will not need to work or desire or act or even love.
