Have you ever prompted AI with your real desire?
These people know exactly what they want in the instrumental sense: more money, faster growth, greater efficiency.
There are two gaps one is our wants and getting them (this is actually happening via ai) and the second is what we want and what we really want (people are not really paying attention to it)
Why do you want what you want? Sit with it, and it becomes a trapdoor. You want wealth. Why? Because you want security. Why? Because you want to feel safe. Why? Because somewhere very deep, you want to rest in something you can trust completely. You want to be held by something that won’t let you fall. Every desire, followed to its root, reaches toward this. The mystics called it God. The Sufis called it the Beloved…
What is Samsara?
We mistake the surface desire for the real one. We try to satisfy through endless rearrangement of circumstances what can only be satisfied through direct contact with what is. The Buddha called this samsara, and his famous image — that you could give a person two mountains of gold and they wouldn’t be satisfied — is a precise diagnosis of what happens when the motivational system is confused about its own nature.
When the first gap was wide, you could maintain the fantasy that getting what you want would satisfy you, because you never quite got there. The distance itself preserved the illusion. You could spend a lifetime pursuing wealth or status and blame the lingering emptiness on not having arrived yet.
Clarification of desire
long before exponential technology, the clarification of desire was the central task of human maturation.
When desire is clarified — when it is untangled from fear and compensation and the desperate grasping of insecurity — what remains is a wanting that is naturally aligned with truth, beauty, and goodness … What we most deeply want is to live in the love of goodness, truth, and beauty for its own sake. This intelligence, the intelligence of life itself, is not neutral. It is a movement of care, of creativity, of love … Let your will be God’s will. Let your will be the will of life. Not submission to an external authority, but the discovery that your deepest wanting and life’s deepest movement were never separate.
If you've ever done this investigation honestly and followed a desire past its surface object, past the fear underneath it, past the compensation underneath that…you know the strange thing that happens at the bottom. The wanting doesn't disappear. It clarifies. It gets simpler and more enormous at the same time. What's left isn't an idea about goodness. It's something more like a gravitational pull — a wanting so basic it doesn't feel like yours anymore. You want things to flourish. You want to be in contact with what's real. You want to offer something that matters. … Beneath the confusion, beneath the compensation, beneath everything we think we want, we helplessly love what is good, true, and beautiful. We can’t help it. It’s what we are.
