Eliminating desires and becoming free of desires is one way to progress in spiritual life. But doing this is very difficult task. It is also suggested in scriptures that mental discrimination is very important in eliminating desires and following is my experience in this.

 

I found that my mind is burdened with desires and as long as those desires are not fulfilled, I found my mind wandering. I found following time management principles helped me in identifying my hidden desires and gradually come face to face with them. I will write in more details about how time management helped me in my spiritual life. 

 

As long as a desire is not fulfilled we feel we are missing something very important in life. But once we get a taste of that, we realize we had higher expectations and that our mind has fooled us by promising something which is not really there.

 

1. Desire for chocolates: When I was in India, I used to like a particular brand of chocolates my brother brought from US and devour them. After I came to US, I greedily bought a big packet of the chocolates. I started eating them whenever I got a chance. I was teased for my 'petty desire'. Gradually I found that I lost my craving for the chocolate and now stopped eating it. I had developed a dislike for chocolates now. 

 

2. Desire for Buying and 'Possession': During my childhood I had desire to buy lot of books and build my own library and I fulfilled my desire to buy lot of books once I started earning on my own. I also found that I kept on collecting books without actually reading them and they are just piling up in my library. When I came to US from India, I gave away some of the books to library and some books I packed them left them there. Similarly I also experienced desire to "possess" lot of cassettes etc which made me go on similar buying spree. Now I have grown tired of this and don't do it anymore.

 

I do have similar desires in many aspects. With such 'powerful marketing' techniques which I have seen in US which fuel more desires in us, I realized that there will never be an end to 'list of desires'. Buy one item and later you feel like buying another.

 

At this time I realized that I should come up with conscious efforts to overcome desires. I have started to consciously distinguish between "harmful desires" and "harmless desires".

 

Harmless desires are those which are not likely cause any damage to my character and create a negative experience in my mind: A desire to taste a new variety of chocolate, a desire to visit a famous place. Harmful desires are those which are KNOWN to be destroyers of character and even onetime temptation is harmful. Needless to say Sex, Wine are examples of such desire. These are known for strongest negative influence on one's life.

Overcoming Harmful desires: 

 

Whenever I get a temptation which is a harmful desire: I strongly pray to God to eliminate this desire from my mind and take out the roots of this harmful desire from my life through his grace. I keep doing this continuously and do know that I am receiving his grace.  Someone like me coming from India to US is most likely to get tempted to buy/watch sexually explicit movies and magazines as they are much easily available here. These temptations did come to my mind a few times after coming to US and whenever such temptation came up, I sincerely prayed to God to eliminate this temptation from my mind and I have succeeded. I know the devil will tempt me again and I know HE will save me. Mind is so intelligent in tricking us that we will believe that we are making a big mistake in not yielding to such temptations. I know that my own will is not enough to control my mind and strongly pray to God to help me. I take name of Lord Hanuman and ask him why such desires keep coming to my mind and request him to eliminate such desires and help me turn my mind to him.

 

Another harmful desire which I know is: desire for fame. I know it is very tempting to become famous, successful and this is very intoxicating. There is nothing more intoxicating than gaining lot of attention from lot of people. I did experience bouts of 'fame' and got carried away by same. When my homepage became successful, I got intoxicated and started shamelessly promoting myself. I started giving lot of self importance and my ego became strong. After sometime I realized my obsession with fame and deliberately told myself that I will not indulge in any self-promotion. There were lot of times where I was tempted to promote myself again and I told myself it is not worth. I have made my goal of updating and promoting it only to help others and not for any fame. Name and fame is not what I want. Still lot of temptation to gain fame keeps surfacing and controlling this ego is not a job that can be done with my own will. I seek help from God in this also and tell him to help me overcome my ego. 

There are many more negative qualities like jealousy, anger which gain control of me from time to time and I hope to overcome them through prayer and lot of self-talk. 

Overcoming Harmless desires:

 

Whenever I get a temptation which is a harmless desire: I consciously indulge in that desire and tell my mind strongly: "now that you had taste of it, remove this desire from my mind and don't come tempting me again". I indulge in lot of self talk and exercise my will. I found this strategy successful.

 

Similar to examples I narrated in the beginning of this article there are lot of such harmless desires that keep popping up. I understand from whatever experience I gained that suppression of desires is not what is needed because deliberate suppression is harmful. Instead discrimination of desires by learning from our own experience and others' experience is very important.

 

Example:

Buying new items: Once I have realized through my experience that buying books is not really useful, I keep telling myself strongly whenever I get the temptation that it is fruitless indulge in something which I already found is vain. After coming to US, I had planned for buying a camcorder so that I can use it frequently. I even dreamed up ways of using that once I buy it. Somehow I managed to get a camcorder as gift. After couple of months I realized that I really didn't need it. I hardly got to use the camcorder. Now my mind is asking me to buy a digital camera. Now I am not allowing my mind to tempt me. I have learned my lesson. I don't need things like that any more. I also discussed the same with my friend who expressed same experience. He also thought he will be able to derive great satisfaction by owning a digital camera. But after 3 months purchasing he admitted he hardly got to use it.

 

Whenever I think of overcoming desires I always recollect what Sri Ramakrishna did. I read he used to throw money into water and say "not this, not this" so that he loses interest in money.

 

I know this is only a beginning of a life long journey where I will encounter many more temptations and this early lessons in my life will definitely help me to use my discrimination to eliminate desire and lead my life towards God.

Summary

Life is strongly influenced and guided by our mind which starts giving out a list of 'desires' to be fulfilled and we run around trying to fulfill those desires. Our mind keeps telling us that by doing what it tells us we will experience happiness and bliss. Mind is very clever and persuasive. It can come up with wonderful reasons for all the temptations and lead us in a wrong way. Making conscious efforts to control mind is important. Suppressing desires is not useful as they spring back at a ripe time. "Replace a negative tendency with a positive tendency". "Reason your mind out of it". "Pray to God for strength and support". These are 3 ways in which we can achieve success in eliminating desires. This is my personal experience. 

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