Desire: How to Tell Your Own from Someone Else’s

You come to the same restaurant, order the same food, sit at the same table — and the feeling is different every time. Different cars outside the window, different people, different weather — and the hormones your body produces are different too. You came to repeat what you once liked, and it cannot be repeated. This is where a conversation about desire should begin: desire is formed from the composition of hormones at a moment in time and from current circumstances. Put simply — desire is a consequence of what you surround yourself with consciously and of which processes you are in unconsciously.

Everyone desires to be happy. Everything else is intermediate desires — checkpoints on the way there. And here is the first trap: an intermediate checkpoint can be mistaken for the final goal. A person generates energy, rushes about, and cannot decide — because he does not understand what he wants at this moment and thinks his happiness is still far away. The familiar “I want to and I don’t want to at the same time” — like a child before school. The adult believes he can already allow himself “not to go to school”. But he is already in school. What is happening to him right now is the lesson at which he must finally make up his mind.

All intermediate desires are checkpoints on the way to one thing: being happy.

Whose desire is this?

The second trap is deeper: people often live not by their own desires but by the desires of those around them — trying to please someone at their own expense, building an illusion of happiness. And most never even register it. Understand one thing: the moment you catch yourself caring what others think, that is a signal to accept yourself as you are. As soon as a person consciously chooses to observe himself through his own eyes rather than through the eyes of others, his desires change. By themselves. At once.

How do you test a desire for authenticity? Listen not to the flesh but to the soul. The flesh is an astonishing shell and a magnificent instrument for living in the material world, but it was the soul that came here to live, and everything around exists for its development. From this follows a simple criterion of choice: you may allow yourself to earn less in one scenario than in another — but if you understand that spiritually you are more comfortable here, come here. You will earn elsewhere too. And if you can see that big money will destroy you spiritually, there is no sense in it: everything you earn, you will spend trying to recover what it took from you. They say “money doesn’t smell” — that is a mistake. Clean money comes and goes in accordance with your current spiritual development.

The main task is spiritual growth. You can earn in any scenario.

How desires come true

Can you fulfil your desires yourself? Of course. Inside your body there is a biochemical “cocktail” — a state out of which desires are realised. It is individual for everyone, but the principle is one: learn to create it out of love. First — become aware of pleasure that comes from love. Second — accept your desires as already accomplished, as a given: inside there must appear a state of love for yourself — pride, respect, admiration for yourself as the observer of your own life. That state means the brain admits these events. You can think “this is possible” with one part of the brain as much as you like — if another part disagrees, there will be no realisation.

Then — time and progression. The longer you stay in this state, the faster the event is created, and each following minute multiplies the previous one. And one more condition people forget: clarity about the next desire. The first desire is realised only if it is included in another, larger one. Hold the final checkpoint in the focus of your attention, and the intermediate one as a route map. And guard your energy: empty talk and unpleasant people borrow it from your “cocktail” — until its concentration becomes such that the external stops affecting it.

Every person’s path is a true one: people learn only from their own mistakes. That is what makes the choice of a desire conscious — understanding clearly where its realisation will lead. So do not ask “how do I get what I want”. Ask first: is this desire mine — or am I looking at myself through someone else’s eyes?

The moment you begin to look at yourself through your own eyes, your desires change.

Cover work — “Desire” →

— Evgeny Fleysher