Desire in the context of Nekkhamma

Venus (/ˈviːnəs/; Classical Latin: [ˈwɛnʊs]) is a Roman goddess whose functions encompass love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. In Roman mythology, she was the ancestor of the Roman people through her son, Aeneas, who survived the fall of Troy and fled to Italy. Julius Caesar claimed her as his ancestor. Venus was central to many religious festivals, and was revered in Roman religion under numerous cult titles.

The Romans adapted the myths and iconography of her Greek counterpart Aphrodite for Roman art and Latin literature. In the later classical tradition of the West, Venus became one of the most widely referenced deities of Greco-Roman mythology as the embodiment of love and sexuality. As such, she is usually depicted nude.

Curiosity (from Latin cūriōsitās, from cūriōsus "careful, diligent, curious", akin to cura "care") is a quality related to inquisitive thinking, such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident in humans and other animals. Curiosity helps human development, from which derives the process of learning and desire to acquire knowledge and skill.

The term curiosity can also denote the behavior, characteristic, or emotion of being curious, in regard to the desire to gain knowledge or information. Curiosity as a behavior and emotion is the driving force behind human development, such as progress in science, language, and industry.

In psychoanalytic theory, fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery. Fantasies are generally associated with scenarios that are impossible or unlikely to happen.

Sexual fantasies are a common type of fantasy.

A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.

Mental states are usually contrasted with physical or material aspects. For (non-eliminative) physicalists, they are a kind of high-level property that can be understood in terms of fine-grained neural activity. Property dualists, on the other hand, claim that no such reductive explanation is possible. Eliminativists may reject the existence of mental properties, or at least of those corresponding to folk psychological categories such as thought and memory. Mental states play an important role in various fields, including philosophy of mind, epistemology and cognitive science. In psychology, the term is used not just to refer to the individual mental states listed above but also to a more global assessment of a person's mental health.

Brainwashing is the systematic effort to get someone to adopt a particular deception, loyalty, instruction, or doctrine without their will or awareness. Brainwashing is also a colloquial term that refers in general to psychological techniques that manipulate action or thought against a person's will, desire, or knowledge. It attempts to damage individual or group attitudes, frames of reference, beliefs, values or loyalties by demonstrating that current thinking patterns and attitudes are wrong and need change. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds.

The term "brainwashing" was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government appeared to make people cooperate with them during the Korean War. Research into the concept also looked at Nazi Germany and present-day North Korea, at some criminal cases in the United States, and at the actions of human traffickers. Scientific and legal debate followed, as well as media attention, about the possibility of brainwashing being a factor when lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was used, or in the induction of people into groups which are considered to be cults.

The idea of want can be examined from many perspectives. In secular societies want might be considered similar to the emotion desire, which can be studied scientifically through the disciplines of psychology or sociology. Alternatively want can be studied in a non-secular, spiritual, moralistic or religious way, particularly by Buddhism but also Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

In philosophy it corresponds to appetition or concupiscence.

In the philosophy of self, self-awareness is the awareness and reflection of one's own personality or individuality, including traits, feelings, and behaviors. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness. Self-awareness is how an individual experiences and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. Because the term is used in both philosophical and psychological contexts, researchers distinguish between different forms of self-awareness, ranging from awareness of consciousness itself to awareness of oneself within social situations.

Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing.

Some psychologists believe that positive thinking is able to positively influence behavior and so bring about better results. This is called the "Pygmalion effect". Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will have unrealistic optimism and predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. Research also suggests that under certain circumstances, such as when threat increases, a reverse phenomenon occurs.

Belongingness is the human emotional need to be an accepted member of a group. Whether it is family, friends, co-workers, a religion, or something else, some people tend to have an 'inherent' desire to belong and be an important part of something greater than themselves. This implies a relationship that is greater than simple acquaintance or familiarity.

Belonging is a strong feeling that exists in human nature. To belong or not to belong is a subjective experience that can be influenced by a number of factors within people and their surrounding environment. A person's sense of belonging can greatly impact the physical, psychological, and spiritual emotions within themselves.

Lust is an intense desire for something. Lust can take any form such as the lust for sexual activity (see libido), money, or power; but it can also take such mundane forms as the lust for food (see gluttony; as distinct from the need for food) or the lust for redolence (when one is lusting for a particular smell that brings back memories). Lust is similar to, but distinguished from, passion, in that properly ordered passion propels individuals to achieve benevolent goals whilst lust does not.

Taṇhā (from Pāli; Sanskrit: तृष्णा, romanized: tṛ́ṣṇā Sanskrit pronunciation: [tr̩ʂɳaː]) is an important concept in Buddhism, referring to "thirst, desire, longing, greed", either physical or mental. It is typically translated as craving, and is of three types: kāma-taṇhā (craving for sensual pleasures), bhava-taṇhā (craving for existence), and vibhava-taṇhā (craving for non-existence).

Taṇhā appears in the Four Noble Truths, wherein taṇhā arises with, or exists together with, dukkha (dissatisfaction, "standing unstable") and the cycle of repeated birth, becoming and death (saṃsāra).

A wish is a hope or desire for something. In fiction, wishes can be used as plot devices. In folklore, opportunities for "making a wish" or for wishes to "come true" or "be granted" are themes that are sometimes used.

The libido (/lɪˈbiːdoʊ/ lih-BEE-doh; from Latin libīdō) refers to a psychological energy that, in common parlance, encompasses all forms of sexual desire, but is sometimes also regarded as the driving force behind other needs, such as a mother's love for her infant. The term was originally developed by Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis. Initially it referred only to specific sexual needs, but he later expanded the concept to a universal desire, with the id being its "great reservoir". As driving energy behind all life processes, libido became the source of the social engagement (maternal love instinct, for example), sexual behaviour, pursuit for nutrition, skin pleasure, knowledge and victory in all areas of self- and species preservation.

Equating the libido with the Eros of Platonic philosophy, Freud further differentiated two inherent operators: the life drive and the death drive. Both aspects are working complementary to each other: While the death drive, also called Destrudo or Thanatos, embodies the principle of 'analytical' decomposition of complex phenomenon, the effect of life drive (Greek Bios) is to reassemble or synthesise the parts of the decomposition in a way that serves the organisms regeneration and reproduction. Freud's most abstract description of libido represents an energetic potential that begins like a bow to tense up unpleasantly (noticeable 'hunger') in order to pleasantly relax again (noticeable satisfaction); its nature is both physical and psychological. Starting from the id in the fertilised egg, libido initiates also the emergence of two further instances: the ego (function of conscious perception), and the superego, which specialises in retrievable storage of experiences (long-term memory). Together with libido as their source, these three instances represent the common core of all branches of psychoanalysis.

In ethics, welfarism is a theory that well-being, what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value. In its most general sense, it can be defined as descriptive theory about what has value but some philosophers also understand welfarism as a moral theory, that what one should do is ultimately determined by considerations of well-being. The right action, policy or rule is the one leading to the maximal amount of well-being. In this sense, it is often seen as a type of consequentialism, and can take the form of utilitarianism.

It is important for various discussions and arguments about welfarism how the nature of well-being is understood. Pure welfarists hold that this value is directly determined by the individual degrees of well-being of each entity. Impure welfarists, on the other hand, include other factors related to well-being, like whether the well-being is equally distributed among sentient entities. Hedonists try to give a more substantial account of well-being by holding that all and only experiences of pleasure and pain constitute someone's well-being. This view is rejected by desire theorists, who equate well-being with desire fulfillment. Objective list theories, on the other hand, also include objective or mind-independent factors as constituents of well-being.