Happiness and Desire

In what way can you attain this goal and hold this happiness eternally in your heart? If you are thoughtful person, you will recognize that in everyone there are three different beings - the mind, the emotions and the body. And if you observe you will find that each of these beings has a separate existence of its own and tries to create and to act independently of the other, thus causing disharmony. Absolute happiness comes from the establishment of harmony between these three. If you are driving three horses - each desiring to run independently of the other two - unless you are able to control them and drive them all together, you will not reach your destination.

The mind must have a goal of its own, but it must be a goal created by you yourself; otherwise it will lead to superstition.

What is the ultimate goal for the mind?

It is the purification of the self, which means the development of individual uniqueness.

As the seed is forced by the life within it to break through the heavy earth and come into light, so if you are urged by the desire to find freedom, you will break through all limitations which bind you. To gain freedom, great desire is needed. People are afraid of desire, thinking that it is something evil which must be destroyed. But this is a mistaken attitude. Desire is the motive power behind all action. If you would light a great fire to warm and comfort you, you must give fuel to it - feed it with great logs of wood. So if you would fulfil life you must have great desires, for desire brings experience and experience leads to knowledge.

If a man knows how to use desire, it will bring him to the freedom for which he longs. If desire is killed or suppressed, there is no possibility of freedom. Most people in the world have intense, burning, vital desires, but instead of utilizing them and training them, their either suppress them or are
controlled by them.

Without desire there can be no creative work. If you kill desire you become like a piece of dead wood, or else you become an automaton, a machine. Machines have been invented to minimize human labour. Physical problems perhaps may be solved in this way, but mental and emotional problems are more difficult to solve, and because the way to solve these problems is so little understood, religions, creeds, and dogmas have been invented.

If desire gives life it should be encouraged. If desire creates sorrow, through understanding that sorrow must be overcome. Because man does not want to be free, he kills his desires; because he does not want to attain true liberation, he is making of himself a machine. Use desire as stepping-stone to kindle greater desires, to awaken greater delight and longing.

But intelligence is necessary in order to develop your individual uniqueness, to purify your desires, to realize that self which is the self of all - to realize that absolute union with all things which brings to an end the sense of separation. It is necessary for the mind to be simple, but simplicity does not mean crudeness. We should not turn our back upon the results of progress and evolution, but on the contrary we should utilize them.

A mind that is simple will understand perfection because it is part of perfection itself. A mind that is crooked cannot understand the Truth. A mind that is complicated, that is full of the knowledge of books, though they have their value, is apt to become crystallized. In all great architecture, painting and sculpture, in all the greatest forms of beauty, there is simplicity and there is restraint. Simplicity of the mind is the greatest and most difficult thing to acquire, but in order to be simple you must have had great experience. Simplicity of the truest kind is the highest form of spirituality.