In English
The mind is only a bundle of desires
Today man is found of accumulating information by studying books. He likes to indulge in argument and explanation. He can analyse matter and talk along about it. But in the field of the spirit, study, experiment and analysis do not take you a long way. What is required is inner experience resulting from actual practice. When we have before us a plateful of eatables, of what use is it to simply recite the names of the different items? What is needed to benefit from their goodness is to eat them. So also for cognizing the Divine, the mind needs to be used, it being the instrument that can either bind or liberate. But when we use the instrument called mind, we must know all about it. Science would testify that the nature of the mind depends upon the food we consume. The gross material of food we excrete, but the more subtle part is used by our system to feed the intelligence and the most subtle part becomes the mind. In Vedanthic parlance we can illustrate this by an example: "What have I in my hand?" - "A piece of cloth." "What does the cloth contain?" - "Yarn." "Where did the yarn come from?" - From cotton." First cotton, than yarn and, finally, cloth - the names and forms are different, but the basic material is the same. Without the more basic cotton and yarn, we cannot have cloth. So also without food, we cannot have mind to exercise discrimination, mind to exercise preferences and judge do's and don'ts. When every yarn is pulled out, the cloth becomes non-existent. So also when there are no do's and don'ts, the mind cannot exist. For the mind is only a bundle of desires, it is no real entity, it has no power of its own.