Desires are never-ending. An inspector wants to be a director, a lawyer wants to go to the high court, a high court lawyer wants to become a judge, a session judge wants to become a high court judge, and a high court judge wants to become a supreme court judge. There is no end to desires. When one is fulfilled, you go after another.
Desires are like the demoness, Surasa. When Sita was abducted by Ravana, Rama went in search of her. After some time he found a very powerful man to help him called Hanuman, whom we call the monkey god. It was discovered that Sita had been abducted by Ravana and was in Lanka. Hanuman said that he would find her himself. He went to the seashore and from there he jumped across the sea and reached Lanka.
There he came across the demoness Surasa, who said, “I want to eat you.” She made her mouth big enough to swallow him, so he also enlarged his body and become double in size. Then she went on increasing the dimension of her lips, and he also started increasing the dimensions of his body. He became so big. Then Hanuman suddenly decreased the dimensions of his body. He became as small as a mosquito, went into her mouth and came out of her ear.
Desires are like this. You go on fulfilling your desires, then suddenly you stop all your desires – that is you come out of the ear. You become desireless. You have to be desireless, because you get what you are destined to get, not what you desire.
Everyone has a destiny, which in modern language can be called a script. According to the script the film is going on, and what is happening is one act of the film. This life is a drama in which one scene is being enacted, one scene has been enacted and another scene will come in the future. What is meant to happen will happen, there can be nothing else.
These words are being spoken by a person aged eighty-six years, who has faced the ups and downs of life. He has also been successful everywhere he has been. You cannot say he has been unsuccessful anywhere. When Swami Satyananda first went to Shiva Bhavan, in 1957, he had one jhola, shoulder bag, and when he departs this world he will leave behind property worth millions and millions. He will leave behind ashrams all around the world. He will leave behind himself. Nobody can check destiny. Destiny is like a script which everybody brings with them. If there is good in it, good will happen. If there is bad, bad will happen. We don’t have any say in it. You just go on flowing.
Destiny, or what you call fate, is called prarabdha. Desires come and go, like storms, cyclones, typhoons and rains come and go, but I go on. Desires have only one role to play – they keep you hypnotized for your whole life, otherwise the mind becomes radarless. How can you see your destiny? It is invisible. Nobody can see their destiny; neither Rama nor Krishna could see it. Destiny is not like a Hollywood or a Bollywood film. All films have only one obsession. When you see the beginning, you can tell what the whole film will be. But life is not like that.
An ordinary man like Mahatma Gandhi became the father of the nation. The son of a Jew became the prince of millions. Christ was just an ordinary carpenter’s son. China’s Mao Tse Tung was a very ordinary man. He became the maker of what may be the world’s next superpower. Therefore, destiny is never known.
All you can do with destiny is just live a peaceful life, with enough money, a house, and a wife and children who may be totally different to you. That is a peaceful life. I am giving you a piece of advice. Have a nest for yourself, have enough to eat, enough to enjoy, enough to spend and enough to cook, and then you will find out what destiny is, what the cosmos is, what the mind is. Perhaps that is the right way to go. Then you will not be walking about here and there, amidst the ocean of your desires, amidst the frustration and depression and all the other kinds of things that come.
As a human being, it is important to have a place for your physical body. As a human being you must have an outlet for your desires and passions. You must have food, you must have a place to sleep, you must have some security and something to fulfil your passions. These are the four primary instincts of every human being: ahara, food, nidra, sleep, bhaya, security, and maithuna, sex. Organize these four things properly.