#platform/youtube #channel/Master-YongHua #playlist/dharma-glimpses ![You Are A Slave Of Your Own Desires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHXmov5dHjw) And so he says, you see, up to now I talked to you about how much trouble it is to live, how much suffering it is for us to live in this world. And no one is spared from it. Doesn't matter who you are. You can be rich, you can be famous, you can be young, you can old. We all have so many so many afflictions. We have so much suffering that is not funny. Ordinary people prefer to look away from that, choose to ignore that because they they tell themselves so we suffering. So what are we going to do? so we ordinary people distract themselves from that. They say okay I suffer during the week working and on the weekends or after hours I go and have fun to compensate for it. This is a a typical reaction of all of us. we distract ourselves instead of trying to find a solution. Okay. And that's the nature of entrapment of slavery. Slavery is that the Masters give the safe enough for them to keep going and not ever consider escaping the state of being a slave. is breaking the the shackles and the feathers. Not at all. And this is that's why the Masters are extremely extremely clever that they can that they can keep the slaves in bondage and we all disapprove of that right in our cultures. Look at have slavery in the US in the ancient times have a lot of sla slaveries in all cultures. Okay. In Egypt, for example, they built the great pyramids from slave labor. And and so you see, humanity excels at using slavery to maintain itself and get what it wants. And so we are all skilled at doing that. We submit ourselves. We we we are willing to slave for our not our Masters but our desires in this world. That's what we do in this world. We slave for our desires. So in other words, when you think about it, we are a lot more clever than our own Masters because no matter what, we continue to slave until the day we die. Okay? The slaves, they eventually rebel like in this country the in the south, the slaves eventually rebelled. Okay? But for us ordinary people, we were willing to slave ourselves for our desires until the day we die and then plan to come back and continue. And no one ever dare questioned that. It's so weird because we have a slave mentality. But think about it. It is so fascinating to me that until I became a monk and learned from Asha Shinhoa, I was just too happy to slave for my desires. On the other hand, it's reasonable to slave up to a certain point. You're supposed to slave for your job, slave for your family. To me those are can be justified but if to if you do it your entire life to no end then is a problem. That's my point. Okay. if if you owe your Masters therefore you slave for them to repay your Masters I feel reasonable. Okay. But to do excessively then it's not. See it's so fascinating that we condemn slavery but we never condemn slaving for our desires. Never ever actually we glorify it you know we glorify the celebrities and the aspirations and and the fame and the power and we all slave for those things and we most of us die disappointed and bitter in this day and age most of us most of us have good education s. Okay. And we understand the concept of slavery. We condemn it. We don't condone it. And yet we condone slaving for our desires. That's what's so fascinating to me. How ignorant the world is. What's so great about slaving for your desires? Think about it. Look at all the people who are old, who dying. You ask them what did you do your entire life? Invariably 99.99999% infinite number of 0.9s. Okay, they all tell you I slave for my desires. And they say I had a good life. I'm a slave but a real good life. I'm so proud of it. I was an emperor. I was a loving mother. I'm—I'm trying to get you afflicted. Get you afflicted at yourself. How could you allow yourself to slave to be willing to slave for nonsense and people like spend entire lives working hard, you know. I remember when I was growing up, you know, when I was I came here in the US, you know, I—I—I went after success and then the one sign success is I will buy a Mercedes SL Roadster. That's the that's a sign that that's a proof that you made it. So you sacrifice your your your life and you work hard and sacrifice relationships and so forth, bend the rules cheat, steal, okay to get what you want. What's so great about it is actually glorified you know like the business like the Elon Musk you know they not the most moral people the most reasonable people but they're successful so so people like me we aspire to be like them we slave for them we're willing to slave for those illusions so the pure damodor again is y is that you should become so disenchanted, so fed up with what you have right now. Okay. The boundless suffering you look everywhere you look, if you really have some wisdom, you're smart enough, you see that it's so much suffering that you're undergoing. And there's nothing you can do about it except numb your body, numb your senses, and distract yourself from feeling the suffering. That's all you do. This is what that's what makes you ordinary. That's it. That's all you know. And the Chinese are saying you born in you die as if in a dream. You live confused. What's so great about it? Atom toe.