In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna says, ‘Oh, Arjuna, wake up from the state of mind, influenced by desire and jealousy.’ Wake up from that state of mind which is deluded by conflicts. The conflicts are delusions, not reality. At another place, Sri Krishna says that desires and frustrations follow man all the time because not every desire is fulfilled. When the desires are fulfilled, it does not matter much to him. However, when the desires are not fulfilled, it matters. If you have twenty desires and eighteen are fulfilled and two are not, they will matter to you. If you have eighteen desires and you get sixteen but you don’t get two, it will bother your mind.
So, there are two forces. One is desire and another is frustration. Where there are desires, there ought to be frustration. Now, you ask a question, ‘Well, my desires are fulfilled’. Are you sure? All of them? Yes, many desires are not fulfilled. What happens to you? You say, ‘When my desires are not fulfilled, I am frustrated.’ So, the first stage should have had a deeper influence or impact on the mind than fulfilment; and every action that you do in life has desired fulfilment, undesired fulfilment or mixed.
If a baby is born into the family and if the mother is dead, what are you going to do? Which will have impact, the birth of a baby or the death of the mother? Just imagine; you will not say you should laugh and weep at the same time. The mind will be influenced by the negative, not by the positive. This means that the mind has to be trained from negative situations and at the same time, when we are living in positive situations, we have to balance the mind.
What happens is you try to balance the mind in negative circumstances. When everything is unlucky, bad or frustrating, you are trying to balance your mind. This imbalance, this disharmony caused during positive moments of life will become your disqualification when you face the negative side of life.
When you have a lot of money, fame, friends and a good body, you do not try to train the mind. That is the disqualification within. The training comes when negative situations arise. You have to try to train the mind while you are in positive situations as well, only then you can face negative situations. Otherwise, if you try to face negative situations, there is tension. Desires and the resultant frustrations are known as gluttons, who eat too much. They consume every bit of peace of mind; they consume everything.
19 October 1980, Bogotá, Colombia