Time & Perspective Quote by Swami Sivananda

Desire, here, is treated less like a romantic longing and more like a mechanical process: a thought-wave that crests, collapses, and is instantly replaced. Sivananda’s line has the cool precision of a diagnosis. He’s not moralizing about wanting things; he’s mapping the mind’s assembly line, where one craving is “satisfied” only to make room for the next. That matter-of-fact rhythm does the rhetorical work: it makes the reader feel the churn.

The real provocation is the tiny “interval” between desires. Sivananda elevates it into a laboratory sample of liberation: a moment when the mind is briefly unhooked from its usual attachments and aversions. “Perfect calm” isn’t presented as a heroic achievement but as something already occurring, constantly, unnoticed. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to our habit of treating peace as a future purchase - after success, after romance, after the next fix. He suggests it’s available in the gaps we rush to fill.

Context matters. As a 20th-century Indian spiritual teacher in the Vedanta-yoga tradition, Sivananda is echoing the classic idea that suffering is fueled by vritti (mental modifications) and raga-dvesha (pulling toward and pushing away). His “freed from all thought, love or hate” is deliberately austere: even noble emotions can become forms of stickiness if they’re compulsive. The intent isn’t numbness; it’s training attention to recognize that the mind’s default mode is not serenity or chaos, but oscillation - and that freedom looks suspiciously like a pause.