Our most passionate desires are lustful desires, desires that will never be satisfied, and the more we try to satisfy them, the more they grow.
Look at how a slave wants to live. First of all, he wants to be set free. He thinks that without this he can be neither free nor happy. He says: “If I were liberated, I would at once be completely happy, I would not have to please and obey my master, I would be able to speak with whomever I like as an equal, I would be able to go wherever I want without having to ask anyone’s permission.”
But the moment he is set free, he immediately begins looking for someone to flatter so that he can get his dinner, because his master no longer feeds him. For this he is ready to commit all kinds of vile deeds and he again finds himself in slavery, which is even more oppressive than before.
When it becomes especially difficult for him, he remembers his former slavery and says:
“I really didn’t have it that bad at my master’s! I didn’t have to care for myself because I was clothed, given shoes, fed and looked after when I was sick. And the service wasn’t that difficult. And now I have so many worries! I used to have one master, and now look at how many I have! There are so many people I have to please to get rich!”
To get rich he has to endure all kinds of hardship, and, when he does get the thing he was after, it turns out that he has entangled himself in various unpleasant worries.
But still he does not turn to reason. He thinks: “If only I were a great military leader, all my troubles would end when I win people’s praise!” And he sets off on a campaign. He endures all manner of deprivations, he suffers like a convict in a hard labor camp, and yet he asks to go on a campaign a second and a third time. And his life grows worse and worse.
If he wants to rid himself of all his worries and misfortunes, he should come to his senses. Let him learn where the true good of life lies. The true good is in acting in accord with the laws of truth and goodness at every stage of one’s life, which are inscribed in the soul of every human being. Only by acting this way will a human being attain both true freedom and the good that every human heart desires.
— After Epictetus
The one who is overcome by a base thirst for carnal pleasures, a thirst full of poison, around him suffering will wrap itself like a creeper.
But the one who conquers this thirst, from him suffering falls away as raindrops roll down a lotus leaf.
— The Dhammapada
People desire, worry about and suffer for things that are bad. Truly good things result not only independently from our desires, but even contrary to them and often only after worries and sufferings about the bad.
People are often more proud of the strength of their desires than of the strength of their control over their desires. What a strange delusion!
Recall the passion with which you desired many things in the past, which now evoke either revulsion or indifference. The same will happen to the desires that excite you now.
Recall how much you have lost by trying to satisfy your former desires. The same will also happen now. Suppress them, calm them down, that is always the best course of action and also the one that is always possible.
