A goal is very important in life. As some say; if you don’t have a goal, your life becomes like a car without a driver. It can crash anywhere and anytime. I realized this truth recently, in the last few months.
I had achieved most of the things that people desire. I am a doctor working in the US. I have beautiful wife and kid, and a nice family. I drive a nice car, have a nice house, and possess everything I could possibly want. [break]
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The only thing I didn’t have was a goal. So I began to drift away from my world, as if I was in autopilot mode. I was not thinking, just being pulled towards everything outside my world. As if my senses wanted to taste everything, do everything. This is what happens when you don’t have a goal in your life, desire takes over you. Desire to fulfill all your sensual wants.
Desire is a thought that comes like a spark. You can desire your goal. Or you can desire what your senses want. When you are led by your sensual desires, that is when you function on autopilot mode, which is dangerous.
It is very hard to focus on the desires of your soul without being distracted by the pleasure of your senses. Maybe that is so because it is hard to define the soul in the first place. We all have a physical body, and a mind, as well as something higher than that. Maybe this something higher is the soul, or the spirit as some would call it. For your thoughts to be pure, it has to come from the soul. It has to be something that you love and love without any reason, without any expectation. It has to be love without any attachment, reward, or bodily pleasures, something that will make you happy forever.
How can you know which happiness will last without guilt? When we do something that our senses want, we are happy. But does the happiness last? No, it doesn’t, we want more and more. Then it turns into addiction. It becomes our habit, and we want a reward all the time. This is when we enter a vicious cycle.
It’s very hard to control our mind, hard to just stand still without thinking. Because from an evolutionary point of view, our brain is supposed to work constantly for survival. From the hunting-gathering age to this point, our brain has grown in sophistication because we have used it for survival. We developed methods of thinking in complex ways, forming memories, and judging what is dangerous and what is not in the environment. We developed emotions that helped us to form social groups. We gradually developed social systems and hierarchies, religion and philosophy. All these things helped us survive and led us to this point, lifting Homo sapiens to a new level.
Desire constantly overwhelms us. We constantly judge our environment, and link it with memories that we have amassed since childhood, so that we can understand what is dangerous and painful and what is not. But we have come a long way from our hunting days, we don’t live in a hostile environment any more. Most things around us are not dangerous. As a result, most of the time we do things that our senses wants, like pursuing good food and sex, or anything else that fulfills our sensual desires and makes us happy.
We must not forget that from our hunter-gatherer days until now, our thoughts and desires have shaped us, by shaping our very genes. Species similar to us like Homo Neanderthals and Homo Habilis became extinct, and only we, the Homo Sapiens, survived. Maybe their thoughts and desires led them to extinction, because ultimately, they become habits and shape our genes. Likewise, if we let our thoughts and desires be directed just by our senses, then in our autopilot mode, eventually we will start making bad decisions, hampering our family, society, and ultimately the nation. And one day, maybe we too will become extinct.
Food for thought!
The author is a pediatrician and Assistant Professor at Campbell University, the US
bhattaraiparag@gmail.com
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