Hello friends, welcome to the podcast. I am Julian and you are you and I am very glad and grateful to be here with you in this moment of time.

Desire is a very misleading concept.

We tend to think about desire in a strange way as windows of freedom of indulgence.

We think about during our lives we are carrying on thinking about something that we desire, possibly even in the long term.

We plan for it. Maybe we save up money for something.

And then ultimately we step into what we perceive is freedom and indulge ourselves by obtaining that desire.

In other cases there are smaller, more passive desires that we engage with every day. Think about food for example.

Whenever we see a sweet or something like that, that we typically don't always grab and shove in our mouths the second that we see them.

We typically have a moment of consideration where we think what have I been eating like lately should I have this sweet treat or not.

And the idea of saying yes I'm going to have it and feeding into that desire feels like that you are going through this window, this portal into freedom for a moment.

Because we typically see not instantly going after all of our desires as a type of restraint.

Since we are not living in a completely hedonistic way where we eat and do whatever we want 24-7, we feel that we are restrained and when we indulge in desires that we are letting loose, letting go and quote-unquote enjoying ourselves.

While the actual pleasure of obtaining those short-term or long-term desires is real, what's interesting is that if you look at this process at a deeper level, you see that actually those moments of indulging of desire are one of where the least free.

In actuality, freedom is whenever you desire nothing.

That's because in these moments where we are thinking about having the sweet treat or were saving for something that we really want over a longer period of time.

Those desires are controlling us.

They have the illusion of freedom, the illusion of indulgence.

But actually, if you are saving for this big payoff, this big desire in the end, you are being controlled by that desire the entire time that you are saving.

Other things in life that you could be doing, other experiences that you could be having, the mental real estate that has taken up by always thinking about that thing, the anticipation, the energy that's used in the lead-up to acquiring that desire.

We are being completely controlled and manipulated that entire time by the desire itself.

Because it's completely changed our behavior, it's changed our focus, our point of view of how we see things if they relate to being a contributing factor to us achieving our desire or not.

And so on.

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