Student: I am doing well here. I have recently spent a lot of time looking for the trigger of desire and fear, meaning between the desire coming up (“I want to watch my TV series” or “I don’t want this…”) and the reaction of acting out the desire/fear; there must be a trigger in between in order to react.
I have been looking for this trigger among many of my desires and fears and did not find anything!
Subsequently it dawned on me that there is no trigger, it is an illusion as well!!
I am so happy about that because there is no more need to change desires and fears, since there is no such thing as desire or fear! It is just a conditioning based on empty air! No reason to follow or stop following particular desire or fear. ☺
Do you know what I mean or does it sound like crazy talk?
Sundari: What Isvara revealed to you about the guna trigger point is correct – but as always, it is a both/and – not an either/or. It depends, as always, from which perspective you are looking at anything.
From the apparent reality perspective, the trigger for everything is beginningless ignorance. The mind thinks it needs something to make it happy, secure, complete, whatever. The trigger for desire/fear is guna-generated of course, what else could be behind them? – rajas and tamas. Desire and fear are two sides of the same coin – desire is a positive fear and fear is a negative desire. There is nothing “wrong” with desire that is not opposed to dharma, and sometimes fear is very smart.
Vasanas are not inherently good or bad. They are the seeds – the knowledge – that drives Creation. Isvara invented them. Nothing stirs in the creation or apparent reality without a vasana driving it, whether it is a one-off thing or an often-repeated pattern of behaviour. A vasana becomes a good one when it drives you into pleasant circumstances and it becomes a bad one when it drives you into an unpleasant situation. Watching TV, drinking alcohol or coffee are very nice vasanas for certain people, and very painful vasanas for others.
A vasana is the momentum from a past action, the tendency to repeat it. It is purely a technical term. But vasanas can also sprout without any previously known tendency or desire because the seeds for all vasanas are Isvara, and therefore exist as potential in everyone. It may seem like “our” vasanas are personal and original, but they are not. All vasanas are eternal because they originate in the causal body.
Isvara churns them out over and over because there is really only one eternal jiva, or subtle body, appearing as many seemingly unique individuals with seemingly unique “issues.” They are not unique (although the ego likes to think they are) but generic and timeless. It is impossible to put a timeline to this logic, because as principles the gunas, the jiva and the vasanas cannot be separated, as they exist “out of time,” in infinite potential within the causal body, which is infinite because it exists in consciousness.
As awareness, the gunas and the vasanas (likes and dislikes/fears and desires, same thing) they generate are not real and they have no power over you. You are trigunaatita. However, for the jiva, the gunas/our desires and fears (ignorance) have the power to bind until self-knowledge fully negates them. There is no shortcut to this, no matter how much you may think they are illusion. There is no way to jump over the jiva to the self, unfortunately. If we don’t dissolve the jiva’s guna-conditioning behind our fears and desires, it will find a way to bite us – just like happened to Ted.
~ Love, Sundari
