I have learnt to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than attempting to satisfy them.-John Stuart Mill
Less desire means less pain, more satisfaction, more freedom in your life, more inner peace and happiness.- Lama Yeshe
Happiness does not depend on what you have or who you are, it solely relies on what you think. – Buddha
Nah. Not really.
On a depressing, rainy day, when your meticulous and exuberant plan for life is just not working well, when the next raise won’t come, when the business is not taking off, or the fiance’ cancelled the engagement, you are drawn to find solace in these therapeutic quotes. Aren’t you?
“I won’t bother to work so hard anymore”, you tell yourself. “Maybe I am not meant to be a millionaire” or even “Maybe I am best alone, who needs a relationship”. Buddha was right, the wise and famous are saying so, it must be true then. Some therapeutic quotes, a little peace. You might feel sorted, at least for now. Till it begins all over again. Unfortunately, such second-hand, vicarious therapy is short-lived. The band-aid of wise quotes comes off in a couple of days, and you are out there again, hankering after the next worthwhile pursuit. Remember?
But Buddha was right, was he not? Why can you not be content with what you have? He and many other Godly beings said that the root of all suffering is attachment to desire, and hence we must give up on them. You must eliminate desires, and then be happy, why can you not be!
Because it’s not possible. You cannot wish yourself out of your desires, you cannot rationalise them away. You cannot control them through will- power permanently. They will rise, and rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, like waves in an ocean, in a deafening, overwhelming crescendo of mad urges and cravings. They will rise in spite of your will power, seep through unmanned crevices, change forms, sneak out in a camouflage of perversions and addictions.
No sir, they will not go away. They will hide and disguise themselves, but they will burst out, sooner than later.
Buddha was not wrong, he was just being pithy and brief. Everyone of these above quotations is perfectly true, but they cannot be implemented just like that. They beg the question of ‘How?’. Give me a mechanism. Show me the way. These quotes are actually the curtain, the credit roll, the climax, to a roller coaster ride of the movie of the human existence. You cannot possibly practise NOW that which the greats, the wise ones unearthed at the end of their journeys. It will just be a short-term palliative. A band-aid. An ineffective exercise in self-denial. It’s not possible right now as you are. All of us, I mean. We must undertake the journey to know, we must dig deeper to understand. Otherwise, these lofty ideas will only be those platitudes which stroke us into a temporary sleep on that disappointing, depressing day.
SAMSKARA: The seed of desire. The propellant for life.
What is desire? Where does it come from?
Let us say that you have never been outside your country to a foreign one. You watch, hear and read about other exotic countries on television and in magazines and books. You read about the architectural beauties of Europe, which attract you, or the human right horrors of Sudan, which repel you. In effect, you are having an experience which is leaving behind impressions, along with a positive or negative emotional charge. These impressions are the seeds of future desires, where you will want to visit Europe someday, or you will avoid going to Sudan at all costs. Now let’s say the positive impression about Europe became a strong desire to go there, and you did. Your desire was experienced. You loved it, and it left further positive impressions in your mind. You will want to visit again, or you might want to live there in the future, because the strong positive impressions are now lodged deep into your psyche. In an alternate scenario, even with a negative impression of Sudan, you are forced to travel there for work. You find Sudan to be just as bad as you think, or maybe worse. You have stronger negative impressions in your psyche now, and you could generalize that impression for the whole of Africa, or somehow to all African people. You could avoid going to Africa ever again, in fact you might want to avoid all black people all together. In a contrary scenario, lets say you went to Sudan and found out that it is actually a beautiful, peaceful place with friendly people. They are kind, welcoming and you have a wonderful time in the country, in their company. The negative impression you carried before your experience will then weaken.
Hence, the impression from an experience becomes the seed for desiring a new experience. i.e. experience feeds desire and desire feeds experience, in a cyclical loop. Even though the above-mentioned examples are very simple, the underlying mechanism for life is exactly the same with far more complex impressions. These impressions are unmanifest and subtle, the seed for future desires, called as Samskaras. These samskaras manifest into desires, which physicalize into experiences, which in turn leave behind new impressions, or new samskaras. The new impressions may strengthen the old samskara or weaken it.
A samskara is like potential, latent energy, which manifests into a gross desire. This in turn converts into experience, like kinetic energy. A samskara must be exhausted, converting from the potential to the kinetic. As long as there are samskaras, there will be experiences, for the potential energy will keep urging to convert to the kinetic. Energy just changes form, from the subtle to the gross, and back to the subtle again. Remember the laws of conservation of energy? Samskara and experience are invariant with respect to each other. Even the fundamentals of existence have gauge symmetry, like the fundamentals of physical nature.
The holographic principle of physics tells us that our 3D universe could actually be a holographic projection of ‘information’ from a 2D surface around it. In a rough analogy, samskaras could be similar ‘subtle’ information that may be holographically projected as experiences.
Hence, as long as there are samskaras, there will be life, as life is a series of experiences. A samskara needs a corresponding experience to be exhausted. The tricky thing is that any experience leaves behind a subtle impression, which will in future rise to manifest as a new experience, and hence it is a never-ending cycle. A feedback loop. Samskaras-desires-experiences-samskaras-desires; it never ends.
A samskara thus has a dual characteristic. It is the remnant/ residue of an experience which left back a strong or a weak emotional charge. It is also the latent, unmanifest potentiality of future desire. Till the time an impression / residue is animated by its emotional charge it remains alive, but dies when devoid of this emotional charge.
A samskara is a residue with an emotional charge. A positive charge on an impression manifests into a desire for re-experience, or a new desire altogether, a new wanting.
A negative charge on an impression manifests into a fear of re-experience, or into a new fear altogether, a new repulsion .
Furthering our example about foreign countries, the desire for re-experience would be wanting to visit Europe again, or a new desire of studying and living in Europe.
In the negative case, fear of re-experience would make one avoid Sudan like the plague, and a new fear would be assuming that all black people, and all African countries ought to be feared and avoided.
Thus you see how our current desires and fears arise from our previous samskaras. Dont you also see, how fear is a desire too, a desire to avoid? Fear is a negative desire, is it not? You could be studying hard to either gain distinction or to avoid failing, the motivation is always the desire. In fact, the entirety of human life is spent in exhausting/ actualizing/ consummating of the manifest samskaras of the individual. Why do I say manifest? Because manifest samskaras are desires whose time for consummation has come. There also are unmanifest samskaras sitting in the extra-psyche-mind, ones which we will speak of shortly .
Samskaras are thus the impetus, the ammunition, the propellant for the engine of human life. The end-goal, the overarching principle of human life is the exhaustion of all samskaras, unmanifest and manifest. It is essentially a self propagating, self referring feed back system, and will continue endlessly without conscious intervention. Since samskaras are the impressions of desires, it follows that exhaustion all desires is necessary for the ultimate culmination of human life, i.e. not of death alone. One does not exhaust all samskaras in death, not necessarily. The manifest samskaras of this lifetime may have exhausted, but the unmanifest remain in the bank vault of old ones. ( add figure.)
The samskaras are the most fundamental building blocks, the deepest substratum of our minds, our psychologies. How do the samskaras evolve into the complex structure of our minds?
Let’s explore that.
