Wants and Needs: What Diksha Did
On the steps of Ganga Darshan, on the morning of a Basant Panchami, and on what a thread can do across thirty three years.
I.
The road from Varanasi to Munger, in 1993, ran through a country of small towns and sugarcane fields and the slow afternoon light of Bihar. I was a boy. I remember being thrilled at the prospect of a road journey, with that particular animal joy that has nothing to do with a destination, only the changing light and the motion of a car carrying three people somewhere. We had set out in the morning. We arrived in the evening. Somewhere between those two ends of a day, another kind of journey was being completed inside that one, and I had no idea.
That absence has stayed with me for three decades as the truest fact I know about how grace operates. I had no anticipation. I was not preparing my heart. I was looking out of the window at the trees. The most important moments of a life arrive without announcement; they walk past us in ordinary clothing, on ordinary afternoons, in cars that smell of petrol and packed lunches. We are equipped to recognize them only afterwards, in the long quiet of remembering, and the remembering is the second gift.
II.
We reached the ashram in evening light. My parents and I sat on the steps of Ganga Darshan, watching the slope of the day fold itself toward the river, and a flock of children moved past us, the local children of the place, talkative and bright, going somewhere with someone. Across the left side of my eye I saw the right side of a face. The face belonged to a man walking with the children. He was wearing geru.
I did not yet know who he was. The pull arrived instantaneously, so much like a magnet that the word “instantaneously” feels already too slow for the way it actually happened. The pull was bodily. It came into the chest and the temples and the soles of the feet at the same moment. It came into a child’s body, and a child’s body, still open in the way adult bodies have learned to close, registered the whole thing.
In the lineage I would later come to belong to, this kind of love has a name. Satyananda-ji called it prem: the preliminary form of devotion, the raw love that arrives before any attitude or any practice has been built around it. The gopis of Vrindavan felt it when they first heard the flute. A boy felt it on a flight of steps, in evening light, when a face turned across the periphery of his vision. A man wearing geru walked with a flock of children, and somewhere in the simple geometry of that evening I had encountered the form that would hold the rest of my life.
III.
The morning of Basant Panchami arrived two days later. The line in Satyam Vatika ran long under a benevolent February sun, and there must have been hundreds of us, sitting in the patient crawl of the line as it moved towards the head. The patience itself was part of what was being given. A makeshift tent had been put up at the head of the line; off-white cloth, simple cut, the sort of tent that has gone up across this country for ten thousand mornings of celebration. A single bamboo pole held it firm against the small wind of the morning.
I have come to think about that bamboo pole often. A piece of cut bamboo, doing what cut bamboo does. Holding the canopy under which a parivarik diksha was given to a family of three.
My parents and I received our mantras together. Swamiji was seated. The mantra was given to us in a small printed booklet, in the way of a tradition that has trusted paper as much as it has trusted breath. He looked at me. He smiled. The eye contact was a small thing in the geometry of an ordinary morning, and a quiet weight settled inside me that has been there since.
I have called the morning of that diksha the most important singular moment of my life. There has been one other moment of comparable weight, performed many years afterwards, in a circumstance I will leave to its own quiet. The two moments rest together in my memory the way two stones might rest on a low altar. The first established my association with my destiny. The second, when it came, felt like a second birth into the destiny that the first had named. The relationship between them is, I suspect, the inner shape of this essay.
IV.
A few days later, the three of us sat with Swamiji in the Jyoti Mandir. I was on the cusp of becoming a serious tennis player, fourteen years old and as proud of my game as fourteen-year-olds are. The conversation, with the lightness Swamiji always carried in his rooms, turned to my tennis. I made some remark about my forehand or my serve, with the particular pride of a boy who has just been admitted into adult conversation. He laughed. The laugh itself was a teaching, though I would not understand that for years.
Then the question came that families bring after a diksha. What about chicken curry. Were we to give it up. Swamiji’s answer was two words. No problem. He said them with the same lightness with which he had laughed at the tennis. He gave us, in those two words, a single smiling fact: a mantra had been given, and the rest of the life was still ours to live in the way we had been living it.
The popular imagination of an ashram tilts heavily towards restriction. The disciple is measured by what they have given up; the chicken curry is the first casualty, then the morning coffee, then the hairstyle, then the music. What I received that day was a different teaching, and it has taken decades to understand the depth of it. Diksha is a reorientation of the inner compass. The senses go on with their business. The compass quietly turns.
This is rarer to encounter than one would expect, and easier to misunderstand from either direction. A seeker who hears it casually concludes that diksha asks nothing, and goes on living in the way of wants, and wonders later why the mantra has not delivered him. A seeker raised in a stricter idiom concludes that the test is the giving-up itself, and spends years measuring his progress in subtractions. The truth has a different shape. Diksha gives you a thread. The thread does its work in the depth of the life, in the slow migration of the centre of gravity. The chicken curry is incidental.
V.
A mantra is a thread. Thirty three years inside the parampara have left the image standing. The mantra threads the disciple, at the level of the breath and the syllable, to the soul that waits to be met. The thread does its work by gravity. The teenager goes on being a teenager. The young man goes on craving ice cream and air conditioning and the small pleasures of a small life. The mantra holds underneath, the way the moon holds the sea underneath the weather of a day. The sea continues to do its weather. The moon continues to hold.
The years that followed my diksha can be called, in the same lineage formulation, the years of bhava. Satyananda-ji distinguished bhava from prem in this way: prem is the raw preliminary love; bhava is the attitudinal channel through which the heart organizes its love so that the love can be sustained over time. The bhava can be paternal, fraternal, marital, even adversarial; whatever its tonality, the bhava is the structure in which the prem learns to live. In my own life, through adolescence and early adulthood, the bhava that was forming was the bhava of a son toward a father whose fatherhood was older than biology and was in no hurry. The mantra was the patient instruction by which that bhava arranged itself, year after year, while I went on with the ordinary business of growing up.
VI.
Sometime in my mid-thirties I began to notice in my own life a distinction that the great traditions have always known and that the modern moral psychology has rediscovered in fragments. There is a kind of motion in a life that originates in wanting. There is a kind of motion that originates in needing. They look similar from the outside. From the inside, they are completely different.
Wants are choices. Needs are circumstances. Wants live in the imagined future. Needs arrive in the actual present. A life lived from wants wears thin as it goes. A life lived from needs holds together as it goes.
The Indian darshanic tradition has held this distinction for millennia, and the Bhagavad Gita’s account of karma yoga is centrally about it. Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna is to act from the necessity that the situation has placed in front of him, with the equanimity that comes when one acts from one’s svadharma and lets the preferences arrange themselves around the duty. The Buddhist tradition draws the same line in different language. Tanha names the thirst that creates suffering, the wanting that never satiates. Chanda names the wholesome aspiration toward what is genuinely beneficial, the directed energy that does not eat itself.
The same distinction has been re-discovered in the Western contemplative and psychological traditions, and the convergence is worth marking, because it suggests we are pointing at a truth at the level of the human itself, common to every culture that has thought carefully about the inner life.
Maslow distinguished deficiency-needs from being-needs: the first are the gnawing absences (physiological lack, safety, belonging, esteem); the second are the orientations of a self-actualizing and self-transcending life. The wants we are trained to chase tend to be deficiency-needs in disguise. The needs that quietly call us, in this deeper sense, are being-needs.
Viktor Frankl, writing from inside the concentration camps, distinguished the will to pleasure (Freud), the will to power (Adler), and the will to meaning, which was Frankl’s own contribution to the tradition. The will to meaning is what the deeper sense of need is pointing at. It is responded to because life has placed it in front of one. It is the work that finds you, and you do it.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, working in self-determination theory, distinguished intrinsic motivation from extrinsic motivation. The empirical literature is consistent: extrinsically motivated activities erode well-being over time, while intrinsically motivated activities sustain it. Wants belong to extrinsic motivation. Needs, in the sense at issue here, belong to intrinsic motivation.
The Stoics, particularly Epictetus, distinguished prohairesis, the faculty of choice that determines what we make of what happens to us, from external goods, the things that lie outside our control. Wants live in the realm of external goods. Needs live in the realm of prohairesis.
Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, argues that the right hemisphere of the brain attends to what is actually present and to relationship with what is, while the left hemisphere attends to what could be acquired and to the manipulation of what is grasped. Wants belong to the left hemisphere’s mode. Needs require the right hemisphere’s mode of attention.
Six traditions, three continents, two and a half millennia, and the same line drawn through the human heart. This is one of the more remarkable convergences in the moral psychology of our species, and it points to something the Indian tradition has been quietly insisting on all along: a life of wants empties as it goes; a life of needs holds together as it goes. The exhaustion of wants is what tanha names; the seeking that never ends because the achieving never satisfies. The sustenance of needs is what Frankl found in the camps, what the Stoics built their philosophy around, what karma yoga is in the end pointing at.
I have a personal formulation for the same distinction. Need is karma. Wants are free will. Karma in the classical sense is the structure of necessity that arrives because of what one has done and what one is. Karma Yoga is the discipline of acting from that necessity. The teenager goes on being a teenager. The adult goes on craving ice cream. And underneath all of that, the load-bearing direction of the life shifts, slowly and almost imperceptibly, from wants towards needs.
Diksha set this shift into motion in my own life. The shift is the answer to the question that gives this essay its title.
VII.
When the centre of gravity migrates, fluencies become available. The writer who tries to describe such things is tempted to claim them as evidence of his own progress. They are something else. They are what becomes available when the seeking has stopped grasping for them.
In Mumbai, in 2009 and 2010, I took eight months of guitar lessons. I was a beginner in the way one is a beginner in one’s thirties: awkward, slow, mildly worried about the ordinary embarrassment of slowness. One afternoon, a riff arrived under my fingers from a place outside my technique. I sat with it for a long time. The riff itself was modest. The surprise was vast. The surprise was that something had become possible that had previously been outside the field of the possible.
Through those same months I wrote. Every Saturday and Sunday I sat in the cafe at Prithvi Theatre with a notebook, and the cafe was kind enough to permit a long staying, and the words came. One of the things that came was a piece of prose on the colour blue that ran to eighty or a hundred pages. I had set out to write a small thing about a colour. The colour had simply opened, and I had followed it where it went.
These illustrate the deeper movement. The fluencies are the fruit of the migration. To pursue them is to step back inside the wanting, and the fluencies promptly step away. They arrive when the seeking has loosened its grip on them. From inside the spiritual path, when one is far enough along to feel anything at all, the taste is precisely that: a giving that comes because the asking has gone quiet.
VIII.
Three names, then, for one current. Satyananda-ji distinguished prem, bhava and bhakti as three forms of the same essential love. Prem is the raw preliminary love, the love that arrives before any organization has reached it. Bhava is the attitudinal channel that holds the love and gives it a shape it can sustain. Bhakti is the final fusion, where the I disappears and only you remains.
In my own life, prem is what arrived on the steps of Ganga Darshan in the evening light of 1993, when I was a boy and a face turned across the periphery of my vision. Bhava is what was forming through the years of mantra, the years of teenager and young man, while the love was learning to organize itself into the steady channel of disciple and son. Bhakti is what one begins to glimpse, in maturity, in the small intervals when one’s wants have grown quiet enough that one’s needs are doing the carrying.
I make no claim to having arrived at bhakti. I claim only that the direction is now visible. The thread holds, the centre of gravity has migrated, and somewhere ahead, in a year I cannot foresee, the I that has been holding the seeker steady will quietly let go, and only the you will remain. That is the work of a lifetime.
IX.
Let me say plainly what I believe about Swamiji.
Paramhansa Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati is the greatest living yogi of our times. His greatness is of the kind the world will know only in retrospect. He has carried the responsibility for an entire lineage with the steadiness of a man indifferent to recognition. He is the kind of figure for whom Dostoevsky’s idea of indefinite responsibility was named: the responsibility one feels for everyone before one feels it for anyone in particular. I will hold the claim without softening it. I have lived inside its truth for thirty three years.
When I try to describe what his presence does, in the lives of those who have been allowed to come near it, an image from biology presents itself. The expression of a gene, in the cell, requires the gene to find its RNA, and the RNA in turn carries the code into the substance of the DNA from which the actual life of the cell is built. The gene by itself is potential. The gene asks for an interconnector. The RNA is that interconnector.
The disciple’s own life carries within it millions and billions of years of genetic code, the accumulated imprint of every life that has come before, every breath of every ancestor of the soul. The code is already there. The code has been written. The disciple is asked only to remember what has been there from the beginning, and remembrance, in this sense, asks for an interconnector.
The guru is the interconnector. Swamiji’s mere presence in a life acts as the RNA that carries what is already coded into expression. The disciple is delivered into a different obligation: to look within at what has been waiting there from the beginning, and the guru’s proximity makes the looking possible. Hence the central instruction of the lineage: remembrance. Remembrance is the form the looking takes once an interconnector has been given.
X.
I have been carrying this love for thirty three years. The love has matured, the way any love that survives matures. It began as a magnetic pull on the steps of Ganga Darshan. It became a steady channel through the years of mantra. It is, in maturity, beginning to know itself as the simple fact that one’s life is held. The wants continue. The cravings continue. The teenager inside the man inside the disciple is still here, and will be here for as long as the body lasts. And underneath all of that, the thread holds, the centre of gravity has migrated, and what one does with one’s days now arrives in the register of need.
One small thing for the reader who has come this far. Whatever your tradition, whatever the form of your seeking, the migration this essay has been describing is available to you. The interconnector you require may have a different face, a different geru, a different language; the migration from wants to needs is the inheritance of every human soul, accessible wherever the seeking has grown quiet enough to receive it.
Hari Om Tat Sat.
With unbounded love and gratitude to my Guru.