Freedom for what – our surface desires or our deepest desires
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Freedom is not just in fulfilling whatever we desire, but in fulfilling our deepest desire. The word freedom has an enormous appeal to it. We all want to be free.
When we seek freedom, we may all have certain conceptions of freedom which may not be adequately examined or scrutinized. And it's only when we scrutinize our conceptions of freedom carefully that we will be able to learn whether what we are doing will lead to freedom or will it lead to entanglement. Will it lead us upwards or will it lead us downwards? So, for example, if a person is an alcoholic and they are trying to recover from their addiction and then they say that they get the urge to drink.
Then they say, I want to do what I want to do. I want to drink and that's my freedom. Well, conceiving of freedom in those terms means that soon they will be relapsing into alcohol and they will be trapped.
So if they are not to be trapped, then they have to say, yes, right now I have the desire to drink. But is this my most important desire? Is this my defining desire? We can have our driving desire and we can have our defining desire. At particular times in our life, certain desires may start driving us.
And we can't just simplistically wish away those desires. When we have that desire, we have it. But whether we want to let it take over our life, that we have to choose our intelligence to decide.
So, this would mean that we have to see for ourselves, is this desire in harmony with my deeper values? If not, then in fulfilling this desire, I may end up cheating myself. So, I fulfill a desire that I feel momentarily. But in fulfilling that desire, which I feel momentarily, I end up abandoning or making myself incapable of fulfilling that which is a much deeper desire for me.
Thus, for alcoholic, the desire to make a worthwhile contribution in one's life, to be responsible, to be, to have, to fulfill one's talents, to do justice to one's potentials, to do something worthwhile in life, those may be much deeper desires. And the desire to drink will actually block them from fulfilling that deeper desire. So, if we can have the intelligence to see the difference between our surface desires and our substantial desires.
So, our defining desire, what is it that we wish to do in our life? How do we wish to contribute during our life journey? At the end of our life, nobody wants to be remembered. I drank 10,000 bottles of wine during my life. That's what I want to be remembered for.
Nobody wants to be remembered for that kind of thing. So, we consider what is our defining desire, what is it that is important in our life? And to have the facility to fulfill that deepest desire of ours, that defining desire of ours, that is actually real freedom. And sometimes the circumstantial desires that pop up because of the physical situation we are in or the emotional situation that we are in.
We see a hotel and we think, let me go and eat over here. We see a circus and let me go and watch it. Like that some desire comes up, I want to see this, I want to do this.
Some desire may come up internal. If we externally start going at whatever we see on the road. Suppose somebody is supposed to go to office and along the way they see a movie theater where some good movie seems to be there.
And they drop going to their office and they go to the movie. Most people don't do that because they understand that the job is important. If they don't have a job, they will be a big trouble.
And the students may do that because they feel I can bunk my classes also, it doesn't matter so much. But the thing is that it does matter eventually. So we have to consider for ourselves what is the best way, what is actually truly important for me and focus on fulfilling that.
And generally saying no to any desire is painful. But if we are focused on something that is more important for us, then saying no to that which is less important becomes not that difficult. If you don't have a yes for something more important burning with us, then saying no to whatever pops up becomes more difficult.
If say I have to go to work, if I have to go to an important meeting, I have to go for an exam, then even if I see a movie theater, even if I see a circus along the way, I won't let myself get distracted. But if I have nothing to do, I am just going on a casual ride and then I see something interesting, I might just go off, I might spend hours and hours over there. Just as we may get distracted, if we are purposeless, when we are driving, nowadays much of our driving, much of our traveling we do not so much physically as digitally.
We sit in front of a device, a computer or a mobile, a phone and then we click on this button and then we may visit a website that has prescribed views, some in some other remote part of the world. So even when we go on a device, if we have a purpose clearly in mind, then we can pursue that purpose. But if you don't have that purpose in mind very clearly, then we will end up getting carried away.
So like that various desires pop up within us and we also have a defining desire, that which is our deepest desire. And we need to have the defining desire at the core of our consciousness. It is that desire which will enable us to move towards Krishna and to be what Krishna wants us to be, to become that which we are meant to be in his service.
To the extent we do that, we will actually be fulfilled in our lives. To the extent we fail to do that, to the extent we will not be fulfilled. So when we get the inspiration to and we deeply contemplate, what is my most, what is my defining desire? What is my deepest desire? And we periodically connect ourselves with our deepest desire.
We periodically do what is required for connecting with that desire, for reinforcing that desire and making that deepest desire our strongest desire. Then having a yes for that desire burning within us will make it much easier to say no to other desires. And that's how we will be able to overcome our lower desires and move towards our higher desires.
So this is just not just this is about processing our desires. But right now our talk is about freedom. We need to redefine freedom in such a way that we see the facility to fulfill our deepest desires as freedom, not the facility or the opportunity to fulfill our surface desires as freedom.
So for an alcoholic, the stray desire is the desire to drink alcohol. Although that desire may keep coming, that's a very surface and external desire. And sometimes they may have to restrict themselves in that.
Alcoholics, when they want to recover, sometimes they are placed in centres, in places where they are restricted. It's called de-addiction centres, where they have counsellors, they have facilities for constructive engagement and they have no access to the substance to which they are addicted. And they themselves may go into such a de-addiction centre where they restrict their freedom for the purpose of regaining their freedom.
So we restrict our freedom to do less important things so that we regain the freedom to do more important things. In this, the right definition of freedom is extremely important. The right definition of freedom is the freedom to fulfill, not whatever desire comes in our mind, but to fulfill our deepest desires.
To some extent, we need calmness and clarity to even understand what our deepest desires are. Of course, at our core, we are souls and the deepest desire of the soul is to love God, to serve God and to attain God. And while we are on the journey in this world, going towards Krishna, He has given us some talents by which we are meant to make some contributions.
So if we keep our ultimate purpose of going towards Krishna and our immediate and intermediate purpose of serving Krishna during the life journey, then these two can help us find out what are our strongest desires, what are our deepest desires and make them our strongest desires. The more we can see our desires in relationship with our core self and understand that all desires are not the same, that there are desires which are higher and there are desires which are lower. In our inner priority, in our scale of importance, we see because we are finite beings with finite amount of time and energy, we cannot possibly fulfill all our desires.
So we can only fulfill some of our desires and we have to select those desires. So freedom, as I said, for an alcoholic who is trying to recover from alcohol, voluntarily goes to a de-addiction center to give up the freedom to drink so that they can regain the freedom to do constructive things in their life. So in a world that bombards us with so many advertisements, watch this, touch this, eat this, buy this, write this, then we are often inundated with superficial desires.
And if we think that fulfilling those desires is freedom, then actually in our very pursuit of freedom, we end up losing our freedom. In our very pursuit of freedom, we end up losing our freedom. Because we fight for the freedom to fulfill our superficial desires and teenagers especially, I want to hang out with these friends, I want to do this, I want to do that.
Parents also, of course, have to give the teenagers a reasonable amount of freedom. They can't control teenagers, growing teenagers, the way they controlled their kids when they were their pre-teens. So expecting that amount of deference itself is unreasonable.
But children may define freedom in terms of, I want to take drugs, I want to drink, I want to do this, do that. But that freedom will actually take away their long-term freedom, their freedom to fulfill their destiny, to become a worthwhile contributor in life, to do that which they are meant to contribute. So by understanding that freedom is a matter of selection rather than of just rejection of all restriction, it is a selection of what helps us to best grow.
That understanding can help us become more realistic and more balanced in our pursuit in life. So by studying scripture diligently and by regularly introspecting to understand ourselves better, we try to understand ourselves not in the narcissistic sense, I am so special, but we try to understand ourselves in the sense that we are parts of Krishna and our body and mind are the resources that we have for serving Krishna. So how best can we serve him with what he has given us? So if somebody has given us a car and we are meant to ride in the car, we need to spend a reasonable amount of time to understand how that car functions.
Our goal is not simply to fall in love with that car and to just enjoy that car. That car is for a purpose and we do want to fulfill that purpose. But to fulfill that purpose, we need to understand what that car is.
How does it function? What are its strengths? What is missing in it? And our own body and mind are far more complex than a car. So we need to understand ourselves better. Spiritual knowledge helps us to understand our spiritual identity as souls.
And the purification coming from the spiritual practices of Bhakti Yoga help us to better understand our own mind and body. What it can do well, what it can't do so well. What is our strength? What is our limitation? And then we can serve the best.
So when we create a situation or when we place ourselves in a situation that is conducive for the fulfillment of our deepest desires, then that is when we become truly free.