Despite the group having been together for four months now, differences and petty quarrels persisted in the Nasik ashram. On the afternoon of April 13th, (1937) Baba mentioned this problem and explained the difference between needs and wants:
As I said this morning, “It is time we started dying.” Dying not the ordinary death, but the death of low desires. It is all bliss everywhere, but all people are miserable because of ignorance which forces them to fulfill desires. Yet the goal of each and every one is to attain the state of desirelessness. Is it clear? It is really all happiness, infinite unfathomable bliss when you desire nothing. Let desires die – but how?
You want millions of things. You say, “I want this, I want that.” If you were to keep an account of your wants – oh God! Needs are not wants. Everything beyond needs is wants. And wanting inevitably leads to suffering.
So try your best, your very best to want less and less of that which is beyond your needs. Try loving and loving more and more, and then you will want less of that which is beyond your needs and want more love. Try seriously. It will all be bliss if you do not want anything. But you must try consciously. The stone wants nothing, but wants nothing unconsciously.
Let us begin by dying! The more you want, the more miserable you are. If you think seriously for just five minutes of all the things you have wanted during your life, of what you have gotten, and what you did not get and today ask yourself if you are satisfied with life. All that you enjoyed in the past, is today nil! All you have suffered, today is nil! It was all illusion.
So, when it is our right to be happy, why try to be unhappy by wanting things? Don’t want, be happy. If you want, the wanting makes you restless. If you do not get it, you are disappointed. If you get it, after having it, you do not want it – you do not enjoy it.
Therefore, long and be restless for one big thing. Long and want the one thing that will kill all the millions of other wants. Long for union. How clear and simple. Try with all your heart. Do not say yes and then not do it. Begin seriously now.
You cannot love each other. All right, but try at least to give in to each other. But even this you do not do. Why? Because you are not honest. That is why I love the mad at the Rahuri ashram. They are honest in their insanity. You come from far away to love me and to realize me, but here you have turned into fighting cocks and hens!
I think I will have to leave you all and go to Nepal or send you all to the Himalayas. So begin by wanting less. Try to love more. Try to have more tolerance. It is sublime happiness all around and yet everybody is sad, miserable and suffering. So, do you all promise to begin dying?
Lord Meher, Original ed., Bhau Kalchuri, Vol. 6, pp. 2151 – 2152.