Let’s look at desires!

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Something happens and then suddenly a desire arises related to that. Please help me understand this!

Acharya Prashant (AP):

This should tell you that your desire is actually just an external stimulus,

an external stimulus that activates your conditional patterns.

This means that you have very little right

to call your desire as really your own.

Desire can be provoked in and every advertiser knows that. The world is a great advertisement! The entire world is a hoarding; ‘Come and Buy!’ It’s only purpose to provoke desire in you.

Once you’ve known that; now how do you take your desire too seriously? If it arises, then you know that, ‘Something has happened in the environment to arouse this desire in me.’

Without an environmental factor, desire couldn’t have come up. And if it is the environment that is inducing desire in me, then how is it my obligation to fulfill that desire? Then I’m being taken for a ride, I’m being exploited.

Question: Does that mean we are destined to desire?

AP: Of course you’re destined to desire but that does not complete the story of…