Ceiling on Desires()

23Mar08

According to Baba, mind is a bundle of desires, and desire is a bundle of thoughts. He uses the analogy of a cotton cloth. A cloth is made up of strands of thread, and each thread is made up of fibers of cotton. So a cloth is essentially cotton. When you remove the threads one by one, eventually, the cloth disappears.

That’s why Baba talks often about putting a ceiling on desires. As a programmer, I like to view desire as an “abstraction of thoughts.” In computer science, the concept of abstraction means putting together a bunch of individual instructions that together perform a meaningful function. So, for example, the function GetMoney might look like this:

GetMoney(amount)
{
- Enter ATM card
- Enter pin
- Enter amount
- Push confirm button
Return requested "amount" of Money
}

So you can see how, when we want to get money, we don’t really think of it in terms of the individual instructions within the function GetMoney. The function GetMoney encapsulates all the required instructions, and more importantly abstracts the function of getting the money, i.e., hides the individual details of how to get the money. If we “call” the function GetMoney, automatically, all the individual instructions within the function GetMoney get executed too. Ok, now that I’ve summarized CSE 101 for you in two sentences, see if you can understand these two functions:

GetMind()
{
string of desires =
- desire of owning a Ferrari
- desire of being a multi-millionaire
- desire of having a healthy, long life
- desire of being famous
- many more desires...
Return string of desires
}

GetDesire(Ferrari)
{
string of thoughts =
- thought of show off
- thought of speed
- thought of best car in town
- thought of cool image
- thought of luxury
- thought of power
- thought of center of attention
Return string of thoughts
}

Hope that made some sense to you! The important thing to note is that our mind is made up so many desires, and each desire is made up of numerous thoughts. A lot of these thoughts are in fact the reason behind our misery. In a later blog post, we’ll explore why obsessive thinking is a disease and why most eastern religions advocate the elimination of thoughts, but for now, the important thing to see is that, when you remove one desire, you end up removing multiple thoughts at once. It’s really tough to work at the level of thoughts, but working at the level of desires is definitely possible, and I believe that that’s why Baba stresses so much on the Ceiling on Desires program. In fact Baba abstracts it even further for us by saying that there are only four major categories of desire: energy, time, food, and money.

The object of the program is to prevent waste of money, time, food or other resources and to use all these for the welfare of the people. The money that is saved need not be kept for the Sathya Sai organizations. It may be used in the best way you choose for the benefit of others. Do not waste time. Time wasted is life wasted. Time is God. Sanctify all the time at your disposal by undertaking service activities in a pure and unselfish spirit. – Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba

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Tags: ceiling on desires, desires, mind, Programming, thoughts