Buffalo in Beauty Parlour: The Lost Art of Desiring!

On a visit to a national park, one sees a teenager waiting impatiently for her date. If you paid close attention you could see several shades of the rainbow rising on her cheeks. Her boyfriend arrives. They exchange shy, quick-silver glances. Time stands still. The whole earth whirls on its axis. The cosmos conspire to hush everything into whispers of secrecy.  Only two hearts rev up their beats, like the spin cycle of a washing machine. Oh, God!

Desire is a gift of existence given to a human being. Only a human possesses such subtle capacity to desire. A buffalo has no desire to visit a beauty parlour. Even if it has a date with a fellow buffalo!  A lion does not know how to desire chocolate chip cookies. An animal cannot concentrate long enough to desire something beyond the basic instincts of food, safety and mating.  If one examines the anatomy of human desire one will find that desire starts with narrowing down concentration to the object of desire. Only a human being is capable of such focused and persistent attention. Repeated focus on what we desire brings about a flow of energy between the subject and object of desire.

Multinationals build empires on the foundation of this one human privilege: insatiable desire. Shopping malls choreograph the dance of desire: display of food, apparel, entertainment for shopaholics to feast on. The mall owners, the shop owners and the brand-owners are all part of the choreography. They peep into the unexpressed aspects of what a shopper craves for. Steve Jobs, Innovator and former CEO of Apple would often speak about this choreography of desire:    “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”

Getting close is like unlocking the heart of desire. Have you wondered how a little child can get your attention at will?  She has access to so little vocabulary and minimum use of verbal language. Yet, the child can persuade you in ways most adults can’t. The secret is this: the child is not using its logical, rational mind as its vehicle of persuasion. What is the child using then? Elemental sounds, an uncluttered mind and deeply integrated head and heart. This is the recipe for a pristine innocence of a child that we all long for.

Most of us may know what to desire. Very few learn the secret of how to desire.

One may desire a double promotion or a ‘singles’ status. Yet, it gets complicated as we get stuck in the web of our crafty minds that has lost touch with its innocence. Masters talk about how a pure heart, rather than a swollen head that can desire and win a kingdom. The heart is the power source of the largest electromagnetic field in the body. Dr. Rollin McCraty tells us that the electrical field of the heart is about 60 times greater in amplitude than brain waves. The magnetic component of the heart’s field is around 100 times stronger than that produced by the brain. This field can be measured several feet away from the body.The dimension of your success in fulfilling a desire is measured by the strength of the desire. This in turn depends on how much of your heart have you put into your desire.

 The best trick I know is this: desire something, commit my heart-felt energy to it and then get my ego and head out of the way of its manifestation. Imagine that you plant a tomato seed and inspect the seed every five minutes, expecting to see a tomato growing from it! If you truly desire to grow a tomato, plant the seed and wait for Nature’s timeline to produce the desired fruit. When you invite someone to enter your house, you do not stand at the entrance. Do you? You invite and then make way for the person you invited to enter your house on his or her free will. So this is a simple thumb rule for desires to be fulfilled:

Fulfilment of desire = Working + Waiting

Working requires focussed attention. Waiting demands patience and perseverance.  Both are mental states. The classical Indian expression for desire is Iccha Shakti. Focussed will, the masculine principle is iccha. Patience and perseverance, the feminine principle, is Shakti which comes from the depth of your nature. The fulfilment of desire is the mateship of the masculine and the feminine.  A desire is anything but ordinary. It is the meeting between you and your deepest source. This source is infinitely greater than your body and mind. Let me illustrate this with what I once heard from Mother Teresa—a woman who needs no introduction. A Nobel Laureate, she had once revealed the secret of her success to me over a chat in her home in Central Kolkata. She said,

Do Small work with great love  

From what she said, this is what I understood about the secret to the fulfilment of all desires. Small work is about narrowing down attention to the object of desire. Small work is about taking the mind repeatedly towards your goal and away from goal-irrelevant activities. Great love is about waiting for your deepest source to work out your desires towards fulfilment. Small work is like a concentrated seed. Great love is soil, the sunshine, water and air which the seed needs to fulfil its potential. Have you worked hard enough when you planted the seeds of your desire?  Now, get out of the way and let the great love of Nature do the rest!

? Debashis Chatterjee, 2015