DESIRE, Ravi p.

DESIRE   Desire animates the world. It is present in the baby crying for milk, the girl struggling to solve a math problem, the woman running to meet her lover and later deciding to have children, and the old woman, hunched over her walker, moving down the hall of the nursing home at a glacial pace to pick up her mail. Banish desire from the world, and you get a world of frozen beings who have no reason to live and no reason to die. WILLIAM BRAXTON IRVINE, On Desire              A desire of something for its conduciveness to something else that one desires. Extrinsic desires are distinguished from intrinsic desires, desires of items for their own sake, or as ends. Thus, an individual might desire financial security extrinsically, as a means to her happiness, and desire happiness intrinsically, as an end. Some desires are mixed: their objects are desired both for themselves and for their conduciveness to something else. A desire is strictly intrinsic if and only if its object is desired for itself alone. A desire is strictly extrinsic if and only if its object is not desired, even partly, for its own sake.                Desire is the basic urge, which impels man to act, is desire. Whether it is education, wealth, career, worldly pleasures or even the goal of liberation from bondage, it is the desire to achieve some end, which gives the impetus to human actions. So it becomes vital to understand when desire takes root in the human mind. According to the scriptures, desire sprouts in an individual even before birth; the embodied soul is fully aware that God is providing an opportunity to work out its Karma and hence desires to put an end to rebirth. But due to worldly affliction it forgets this goal the moment it is born and the desire instead becomes deflected to material gains.              It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to satisfy those that follow.                                                                                                Benjamin Franklin