The moment we hear the word lust, there is an immediate feeling that this is not good. We need to avoid it, we need to look away, or something in a similar thread, the thought process starts. A subtle wave of guilt, shame, or judgment rises up inside us before even knowing it. But we never really try to understand lust. We never sit down with it to see what it actually is. We avoid it, and by avoiding it, we keep it inside or down, repressed, pushing it into the dark corners of our mind, waiting for a weak or vulnerable moment in our life to come and hunt us. When we are lonely, when we are sad, when life feels empty, that is when it returns to hunt us.
In fact, this is what has been taught for generations by religion and moral codes: that lust is bad, avoid lust, run away from it. Society has built a massive wall of “shoulds” and “should nots” around this single word. But we all know from experience that just by saying lust is bad, it does not go away. Just by labelling it as a sin, it does not disappear. Just by avoiding, repressing, and keeping it inside, it does not go away. It simply stays there, breathing under the surface, almost lingering 24×7 like a shadow, affecting our lives and waiting for the right moment to come out.
This is why lust is something to be understood, and by understanding, only your relationship with lust transforms.
Not that lust transforms; your relationship with it transforms.
You cannot change something that you are constantly fighting or running away from. In fact, without truly understanding lust, life can’t be a spiritual process; it can’t be a journey. It is the foundational understanding for inner work. That is why if you are really looking for any sort of truth in life, any longing for real connection, any longing for love, any inner calling you have, understanding lust is a must. You can’t bypass it.
Redefining Lust
First of all, lust is generally associated with sex. Which is a very narrow definition of lust, a very shallow way of looking at it. The real word for lust is: Vasna in Sanskrit. Many, without understanding, looking at it from a surface level, have translated it as lust – that is related to sexuality. So in this post, I will actually be talking about Vasna – that is called in English as lust. Lust is more of a mechanism or tendency in each and every individual towards something.
To understand at the level of action, lust is a grasping of something or anything without which you think you will have no meaning in life, you will not survive life. It is a feeling of desperation within to have that. Lust always comes with a frantic chase in life. You are always running, rushing, always trying to catch up to something. The key belief behind a lustful chase is that if I get this, my life will be fulfilled. It is the constant whisper in your head saying, “Once I have this, I will finally be okay.” For example, some people chase money, as if without it, life will have no meaning. Some lust after sex, definitely. Some lust after love or a relationship, dragging themselves behind another person. Some people even lust after spiritual enlightenment or attaining a healthy personality, as well. So the object of lust can be anything, but behind the chase of that object lies a desperation to have it.
To understand lust at the level of the mind: lust is an attachment to anything. It is as if your mind is continuously attached to it, glued to it, unable to think about anything else, unable to pull itself away. It becomes an addiction or a chronic obsession. It can be money, sex, food, love, a relationship, another person, knowledge, anything. The mind keeps revolving around the same thing continuously. Then what happens is your whole life gets controlled by the mind, what you think, do, plan, and perceive, with the object of lust at the centre of it all. So in a way it can be said that lust makes you perceive life, reality, not as it is, but with the object of lust at the centre of it. Lust keeps your attention attached to the object of lust without your control or choice.
For example, let’s say you are going to a scientist or a great scholar for a work-related purpose. Let’s say you lust for sex. Everywhere you keep seeing sex, the possibility of sex, your eyes are constantly searching for it. Now, as you are speaking to him, your attention is constantly drawn to the beautiful intern working in his office, who is sitting behind you. And this leakage of attention, without your control, is making you not really listen to the scholar you are interacting with. Now, let’s say you lust after money and flashy things. Now, the scholar, his knowledge, his deep insight, the beautiful intern, has no meaning for you. You have noticed a tiny watch the intern is wearing that looks very expensive and designer-like. Your mind could not help but think about it. This is what lust does in your mind; your mind filters reality with the object of lust. It creates blindness, making you see only what your hunger wants to see, while you miss the entire universe happening right next to it.
If you want to understand lust at an emotional level, at a very subtle energetic level, lust is a leak in your energy system or your nervous system. For example, look again at the man who is lusting for sex while talking to the scholar. If you could feel him energetically, it would feel like even though he is talking with the scholar, his energy is leaking towards the intern. It is almost like he has a hole in his nervous system that is leaking energy or emotion towards her. It will feel as if his whole system and body is not truly engaged in that talk with the scholar; a part of him is simply not there. And most importantly, this leak in the energy, this hole-like feeling in the nervous system or body, is happening without any control or even without any knowing. That is the very nature of lust.
So, you can use this redefined understanding of lust directly in your meditation and your inner work. You can look at your life right now and become aware of your lust across three different levels. First, look at your action: see where you are desperately taking action, where you are chasing frantically in the outside world, that is your lust at the level of action. Second, look at your mind: notice where your mind continuously revolves, thinking, analysing, and planning around an object without your conscious choice, that is your lust at the level of the mind. And finally, even when there is no action happening and no active thought in your head, you can feel directly into your body and notice that subtle leakage of energy, that empty, hole-like feeling pulling at your nervous system, that is your lust at the level of energy.
Qualities of Lust
Why lust?
The answer seems simpler, right: it’s about pleasure, or it’s about fun. And this is the biggest misconception. Lust has, in fact, nothing to do with pleasure. The reason behind lust is the need for unawareness. Unawareness is an attempt to forget life, forget the real problems of life, and numb yourself. A great way to understand unawareness is alcohol. Most people drink to forget life, and this need to forget is exactly why lust exists. There is a desperate need to avoid looking at your own reality.
Some chase for fun or pleasure. Like sex, travelling, alcohol or something that is pleasurable to forget life. Actually, these people are very close to reality, because after a few months or years, they realise that the chase is not giving them real joy. They start to see that they are just trying to forget their problems. With just a little bit of awareness, they can encounter the truth.
But there are other chases that are highly lustful, yet the people chasing don’t even know it. Someone might be trying to get enlightened or find God, and many people lust after this, actually. This is dangerous because they project the image that they are on a great, purposeful journey, but all they are doing is using spirituality to remain unaware. Someone can also be lustful after serving the community or helping others. Many people hide their need for unawareness by working constantly, going to the temple or church, and helping everyone else. They project the impression that they are doing great service to society, yet they are just fulfilling their lust and need for distraction.
Selfishness
It can happen that two people are doing the exact same service to the community. One is actually trying to help others, and the other is simply trying to forget their own life’s problems. This is why what someone is doing on the outside is not important; what inner state they are in is everything. The one who helps others just because he wants to is selfless. The one who helps others just to look away from his own problems is selfish.
A major quality of a lustful chase is that it has nothing to do with the object itself. It is just a selfish need for unawareness.
Chasing but Not Wanting: Lust a False Desire
Many people who are caught in lust never get what they chase, and they always complain about it. But the truth is, they don’t get it because they don’t really want it. What they want is unawareness, and they are getting exactly that.
This is a very delicate phenomenon that happens when you are in a lustful chase. You really don’t want what you are chasing or trying to get. It is a false desire; what you want is the busyness of chase, the fantasy of getting it one day, the thrill of chasing. And in this, you are actually getting what you want – that is, the need to forget life. You don’t want the object of chase or object of lust.
One of the most beautiful and painful ways life guides you to truth is by never truly giving you what you lust for. And even if you do get it, it becomes a short-term satisfaction that fades before you can even grasp what is happening. The reason remains true: you don’t want it. And when you get what you don’t want, you have no capacity to keep it, you have no reason to keep it, and you have no ability to relax into it. Many people get very bitter in life when they don’t get what they chase or lust for, whether it be love, sex, money, success, power, external validation, or approval. They get bitter at God; they get bitter at life. This bitterness comes because when someone is chasing the object they lust for, they really, really assume they deserve it. They think it is their purpose, their fundamental right, or their ultimate goal.
But life, in its real compassion, never truly gives you what you lust for—for it is not what you really, really want. However painful it might be, life remains aligned to truth, even if you would like to run around lusting just to avoid that truth. That is why not getting what you lust for is a great compassion from life, for you are simply being guided to the truth.
For example, let’s say a man is lusting after a woman. If it is lust, it is just his need to forget life; it is not about the woman at all. He might not even think she is beautiful or special. But his mind creates a fantasy that this woman can make him forget his problems. This chase gives him the forgetfulness he is looking for. That is why so many times, when people finally get the partner they lust after, they lose interest almost immediately. They blame the partner, but the truth is they were never looking for the partner in the first place. They were looking for unawareness, and the moment the chase ends, the unawareness fades, and reality comes back.
At the heart of any lustful chase is this paradox: you do not desire what you think you are lusting after. You are looking for unawareness, and that is exactly what you are getting.
Avoidance
Everyone who is lustful has something in their life that they are avoiding. And it can be anything. In fact, the problem is often totally different from what they are actually chasing. Someone is chasing sex, but the real problem in their life might not be about sex or relationships at all. It can be as simple as filling out tax returns that they are avoiding. Someone else is chasing money when money might be the least of their problems. Lust simply chooses an object to run toward so you can keep running away from yourself.
But behind lust, there is a mechanism that makes lust very dangerous. The next section will explore this.
Kick and Desensitisation
The recent release of the Epstein files shows how many horrible acts are committed by rich and powerful people. Rape of underage girls, killing, torture of babies, and maybe many more unthinkable inhuman acts that I can’t even think of now. But do you wonder where these things are coming from?
It is coming from the cycle of kick and the desensitisation mechanism associated with lust.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine a person who earns 5,000 dollars a month. For them, travelling on normal trains, booking flights, and going on a standard vacation every year feels normal. Life feels boring and normal. Because it is normal, they stop getting a rush from it; the pleasure fades away. To get that feeling back, they must do something much bigger, like spending 50,000 dollars on a highly exotic trip that is right at the edge of their budget. Only then do they feel that rush, the intense kick when lust gets fulfilled.
Then let’s say they start earning 50000 dollars a month. Suddenly, that expensive vacation feels like nothing. They become completely desensitised to it. Now, to get that same kick back, they need to spend 200,000 dollars, or do something most people can never even dream of.
If you keep repeating this cycle, what happens? When people start earning billions of dollars, they can buy absolutely anything – yachts, power, high status, sex, everything. But they sit on top of their billions, with all this luxury, and slowly it starts becoming normal, boring, day-to-day reality. There is nothing that can make them unaware anymore, forget life. Everything feels mundane, flat, so that itch remains to forget life. There is no more kick left in the normal world. So, what do they do? To feel any spark of life, to get that drug-like pleasure back, they go after perverted, forbidden things that nobody has ever done or thought of, just to feel that kick one more time.
Now look at how this exact same mechanism operates through sex.
A man finally gets the woman he has been lusting after. At first, the intimacy feels amazing – it is full of kick, full of powerful rush. But after a few months, it becomes normal, just like anything else in life. She becomes a normal person to him. The initial kick goes away. What remains is mundane, day-to-day life, which now feels unpleasurable and completely empty because the high is gone.
The itch to forget life and become unaware comes back. He starts getting more women, one after one. Each new brings a brief excitement, a new rush. But after some years, this also starts feeling like normal, same, the kick fades away, and he becomes desensitised to it.
Now, he must try something different just to feel anything at all. He escalates to multiple partners, taboo sex, and different fantasies. Each indulgence pushes his threshold higher.
What used to give him a massive kick now gives him absolutely nothing. He is trapped in the exact same cycle as the billionaire, kick, desensitisation, and needing more. He must keep chasing more extreme and distorted things just to feel that old, original rush. It is the exact same downward spiral, whether it is driven by money, power, or sex.
The danger of this mechanism associated with lust is that lust really drives you to extremes. The kick and desensitization cycle starts to spiral you downward.
The kick is needed (the rushful pleasure-like feeling) because you need to be unaware or forget life. And after kick comes desensitisation. And the cycle starts.
Why the Kick and later insensitivity?
The first kick feels like a huge pleasure. But it is not really a pleasure. It is unawareness. It is like getting drunk, so you don’t have to feel anything real. You chase something outside yourself, a person, money, sex, whatever, and when you get it, you feel alive for a short while. But nothing outside can keep you drunk forever. The high always ends. After some time, the unawareness fades, and the drug wears off. Then, normal day-to-day life comes back: the same routines, the same small problems, the same empty feeling. Everything looks boring, flat, and grey again.
And with that crash comes the real problems you were avoiding. The inner pain, the loneliness, the fear, the things you deeply don’t want to face. You were using the frantic chase and the high of the kick to run away from them. Now, the high is gone, and those problems are standing right in front of you. This part feels very heavy and unpleasurable. It hurts deeply because you are forced to look at what you were hiding.
This is why lust is never about true pleasure. Lust is about staying unaware. It is a mask you put over life’s real problems and inner wounds. It is the childish part of you saying, “If I keep chasing this and stay drunk on it, the bad stuff will go away. I can trick life.”
But you can’t trick life. The high always fades, and the problems are always waiting for you.
Lust is not Pleasure
Many might understand that this understanding of lust is somehow anti-pleasure, as if I am telling you to reject the joy of the world. It is not. In fact, it is completely the opposite. We have to understand that lust and pleasure are completely different things.
Lust is an aesthetic or a drug. When you are caught in a lustful chase, your whole system is tense, frantic, and running away from pain. Because your mind is just using the object to go numb, you cannot actually taste or enjoy the very thing you are chasing. You are too busy trying to stay drunk on it. One key phenomenon you will come across with this kick-and-desensitisation loop is that you actually stop enjoying the simple things in life.
True pleasure requires presence. To taste a simple roadside ice cream, to feel a single breath, or to truly connect with another person, your nervous system has to be relaxed, open, and fully there. Someone who is caught in a frantic kick-desensitisation loop cannot truly enjoy that cheap ice cream. They can’t devour it slowly and enjoy the sweetness, because their system is too numb, too hyped up on looking for the next massive thrill.
That is why it often happens that people never truly enjoy the object they lust after, even if they successfully get it. To truly enjoy something, you should have the inner capacity to feel its texture, taste it, and relax into it. True pleasure can only happen in total relaxation. But when someone is really lusting, they cannot relax. Their minds are already rushing ahead to the next kick, even while they are holding the current one.
There is a very wise reason why many elders and traditions give the advice: don’t overindulge in things, otherwise you won’t be able to enjoy them anymore. If you become highly promiscuous, jumping from one body to the next, you stop connecting to people on a real level. If you become obsessed with becoming rich, you stop enjoying the small, beautiful things in life. If you become too busy chasing success, you might never truly understand how pleasurable every single breath actually feels when the body is really relaxed.
This toxic need to have more, more, and more is the exact quality of lust. It is an addiction that blinds your senses. It is not that a rich man cannot enjoy money. A rich man who is at peace can enjoy his wealth. But a rich man who is lusting after money can never enjoy money. He cannot feel it because he is too busy running away from his own inner emptiness.
That is why sages have said spirituality is not about less pleasure. It is an awakening to the real pleasures of life.
The Wrong Way: More More
A mind that is unaware keeps thinking and repeating the same exact thing: if I get more, I will finally be fulfilled. It operates on a very simple, foolish logic. Someone lusting for sex says to himself: if I get more sex, more often, with different people, different kinds, more, more, more, then it will happen. The pleasure will stay, the emptiness will go away, and I will finally be at peace. If someone is lusting after money, they think: just a few more thousand, just one more property, just a little more status, and the anxiety will stop.
This entire idea comes from total unawareness. The mind blindly assumes a false equation: more of the object I lust for = real fulfilment at last. It believes that the problem is simply the quantity, that you just haven’t had enough of your drug yet.
But it never works that way. It can never work that way. The more you chase, the further away fulfilment feels. You are running toward a horizon that keeps moving. Because you are treating lust like a solution, the kick fades faster each time you indulge. The high gets shorter, and the crash gets heavier. Soon, the normal amount gives you absolutely nothing, so you need something stronger, bigger, or stranger just to feel a spark of life. This is how the chase becomes more perverted, more extreme, and more destructive. You start crossing lines you said you would never cross, all because you are trying to satisfy a hunger that cannot be satisfied by objects. Still, after all that running and escalating, the feeling of being complete never comes. You are left sitting with the exact same empty, hole-like feeling you started with.
That is why the “more more” way is completely wrong. It is a stubborn assumption of the mind, not a truth of life. You cannot fill an internal, psychological void with external, physical quantities.
Awareness: The Right Way
Have you ever caught yourself doing something you don’t think you should be doing? You are getting angry at a friend, and immediately you catch yourself getting angry!!! This very awareness of you becoming angry creates an immediate split; you, watching your anger, can’t decide whether you should or should not, and the anger that wants to come out of you. This is the very nature of awareness; it creates a split in you. Awareness initially creates a strange split within you. When you come to lust, you will see a paradox. You see that you don’t actually want the object of your lust, but you still want it anyway, simply because it will make you unaware. You catch yourself in the act of trying to get drunk on reality.
This is why the real solution to lust is awareness. Nothing else. You have to become aware of everything, all your wounds and fears that you are trying to avoid by indulging in lust. In your unawareness, you might initially think, “If I don’t get this object, I will never feel fulfilled.” But you will be surprised to see how much of a stupidity that was, once you face the things you are avoiding in your life, your mind, and your body. So, start becoming aware of life. Start right from your object of lust, your patterns, and your attachments. Watch yourself so closely that not a single thought, emotion, or action goes unnoticed by you. Only take care that not a single thing happens without you consciously knowing it. And slowly, lust will lose its grip.
It loses its grip because you start to see that you never wanted these objects in the first place. Lust is not a real desire; it is a false desire. This is why sages have said: life can fulfil everything that you truly desire, but it can never fulfil your fantasies. You can become rich, but you can never fulfil the fantasy of being rich. Your true motive was just to become unaware, and when you remain totally aware, that need naturally goes away. The equation is direct: the less aware you are, the more lustful you are; the more aware you are, the less lustful you are.
When someone is caught in this unawareness, whether for travel, sex, food, or success, you’ll often hear them say, “I love this.” But if you tune into their energetic presence, you feel a clear split. One part appears to be enjoying it on the surface, while another part is quietly uneasy, disconnected, or even slightly ashamed. A portion of their being is using the activity to forget something, while another part knows that the forgetting isn’t real. You simply cannot outrun yourself. Lust prevents you from being whole; you are never fully there.
Compare this to moments when someone acts from an inner overflow, from a place of truth and wholeness. You can feel it immediately. Whether they are singing, speaking, creating, making love, or simply sitting in absolute silence, there is no split inside them, no hidden agenda, and no desperate grasping. The action arises naturally, like a river overflowing its banks. A person singing not to escape their inner pain, but because the song is bursting out of them, that is a divine thing to witness. You don’t just hear the voice; you feel the absolute fullness behind it. In fact, most of us have experienced such moments in life that feel whole, truthful to the very core of who we are, as if there is no split between what we want and what we are getting in that moment.
This is where psychology and science end, and spirituality begins.
Beyond Psychology and Science: Where Spirituality Begins
Till this point, you have read about the mechanism of lust and how it can turn your life upside down. You have seen how awareness is the real solution to becoming whole. When we look at it this way, the equation seems clear: almost like a formula in a psychology textbook. The equation says: when awareness comes in, lust goes away.
And this is what everyone has told you since the day you were born, isn’t it? The books, the scriptures, the self-help videos, your parents, your elders, everyone tells you what to do, what to be, what is right, and what is wrong. But we all know from experience that this changes nothing. The tragedy of most self-help and spiritual writing is that it stays entirely in the realm of intellectual understanding. People love the diagnosis. They sit around saying, “Ah! Now I see. I am using sex and money to escape my childhood trauma.” But then what? That diagnosis changes absolutely nothing. It leaves you empty because life is not an equation to be balanced. Life is not a psychological problem to be solved, nor is it a game to win. Life is far more mysterious than that.
There is an experience of pure lust, which feels heavy and horrible, and there is an experience of pure awareness, which feels incredibly sweet. In between those two states is where we all live. And I, too, am standing absolutely in the middle with you. In fact, a part of me is writing this very paragraph right now just to avoid doing something else that I am aware I should be doing.
That is why this whole blog post is an invitation to walk the path. Destinations are very easy to fantasise about, but how to actually walk the path?
Meditation: Holding the Contradictions
If you seriously start exploring life or lust or your own attachments, you will come across immense contradictions within your own mind and body.
If you assume lust is bad, you will repress it and look down on it, and that itself will give lust more power over you. It will hide in some deep corner of your mind, waiting for a bad day to take over your life. If you assume lust is good, you will blindly indulge in it. But in both states, you feed the mechanism of lust. In repression, you give it power over you, and in indulgence, you give it more energy and time. Most people spend their entire lives trapped in this exhausting binary cycle. They go from thinking lust is good, to lust is bad, to lust is good, to lust is bad. When you repress lust, there is a constant feeling of inner anxiety within you, as if you are trying to hold something forcefully. To relax from this anxiety, you start indulging in lust: the kick and desensitisation cycles start coming up, making you more and more numb to life. In both, you hurt yourself. In repression, you hurt yourself internally through tension, and in indulgence, you hurt yourself externally by chasing the high.
Naturally, the mind starts screaming: “Then what am I supposed to do?”
And you will also realise you can’t outgrow something in life by condemning it, you can’t outgrow something by simply accepting it. Say, one day you decided, “Okay, I will accept it. I will accept my lust so I can be free of it.” But the moment you do that, you are just playing a subtle game with yourself. You are trying to use “acceptance” as a weapon to kill the desire. One part of you pretends to accept it, while another part is constantly peeking behind, whispering, “Did it happen? Did it leave me yet? Is it gone?” This is not acceptance. It is just another trick of the mind trying to get what it wants. You see the confusion here?
And sometimes people lust after transcending lust. So this transcendence of lust is their object of lust. So many spiritual people, this is their main lust – how to transcend lust. Because they think once they transcend lust, life will be perfect.
This is why you will realise something: you can’t let go of lust, yet you must. How?
Everyone has to find that answer for themselves. Because only till this point, psychology, mental gymnastics, and science can take you. Beyond this point, the mind can’t take you, because beyond this point meditation starts, being alive truly starts. This is exactly where true meditation begins.
By meditation, I do not mean sitting cross-legged in a quiet room and visualising a light. I mean offering an absolute, raw, non-judgmental presence to this exact moment in you, this confusion, this pull of right, the pull of wrong. And who is to say that you are not already whole even within your own splits? Who is to say that you are still whole, even if a part of you wants to indulge in lust and a part of you doesn’t want to? Or maybe you are not whole. These are the contradictions, confusion, and life brings, a real spiritual path brings.
In exploring lust, you will also come to a delicate understanding of life. Lust, too, is a beautiful part of life – but it will not save you. The need to be unaware, the need to forget things, the need to simply shut down everything and experience the drunkard state is also deeply human, and a natural part of being alive. But you also understand that lust will not save you. Lust will not heal the parts of you that feel broken and wounded.
In meditation, you come to hold these contradictory truths within you at once: lust will not save you, so you don’t take its frantic demand seriously, but lust is not bad either, so you stop condemning it.
But to come to this space where you can hold life in its entirety, confusion and clarity, awareness and unawareness; you can’t rely on intellectual understanding. Therapy, science, psychology, and books will not take you there. It has to be your own understanding, based on your own life experience.
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