The great irony, tragedy and atrocity of desire is that it
no longer pays heed to the desirer. Just as a person who rides on a horse and
then the horse goes wild, when we ride on the horse of desire, desire grows
wild and doesn’t care for what we desire thereafter.
Thus, for example, surveys show that many people who crave
for sex throughout the day often are bored when they actually have sex. Or
people who are compulsively eaters often don’t even really like the things that
they eat. Just as any horse-rider knows that the horse can be a source of
pleasure as well as a source of disaster, even death, so too do we need to
remind ourselves that desire is not always a source of pleasure – it can a
source of utter disaster too.
Unfortunately, we live in a culture that glamorizes desire
and blinds us to the dangers of desire that spirals out of control.
Of course, our desire is not something external to us like a
horse is. Yet our desire is external to us in that it is present in our mind
which is external to us as souls.
The Bhagavad-gita (16.10) warns that desire that is
insatiable binds us to unclean actions – in fact, we get bound by our own vows,
our own crazy resolutions to indulge in ways that are often self-destructive.
When we start practicing bhakti-yoga, we realize that we can
find higher happiness in the devotional remembrance of Krishna. Such
remembrance is akin to a regulation and redirection of the horse – away from
danger and toward a safe home, wherein our desire takes us towards spiritual
growth and ultimately liberation. Thus, the Gita focuses on purification of
desire – with the need for such purification coming from the recognition of the
dangerousness of addictive desire
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