# The Physics of Desire #Well-Being *Last Updated: October 2025* *tl;dr We’ve taken the world outside us and put it under instrumentation so powerful that we can forecast eclipses to the second and simulate storms before the clouds even gather. We have barely scratched the surface for doing the same for the world within us.* The theory that every choice you make forks the universe is a fun plot device. Useful for the movies, not for living. We don't say "the universe forked" when a seed becomes a sapling, or when an apple drops, or when the waves grind down the rocks, or when rain bursts over a ridge. We call it nature taking its course using patterns so well-studied that a decent computer can model them with boring reliability. > **That's the beauty of the science. The burden of the science is that most of us have excluded the inner workings of our mind from its purview.** We do not know the "atoms" of the mind. We do not have a vocabulary for its "microscopic" cause-and-effects. So we improvise. We assume we author every thought. We treat our senses as perfect instruments. We pretend to be objective, ignoring the dents our past leaves on our lenses. Best case, we are a pilot attempting to control a plane in a storm using instruments designed to fail. Worst case, we’re a pilot under "influence" of the ego insisting that transient perceptions, emotions, and memories are the whole truth. Part of this is a policy choice we made without noticing: science prefers what can be observed cleanly; [[Well-Being - Freedom from the mind|the mind can’t step outside itself to inspect its own gears]] . We go on with our lives assuming that we cannot examine the inner workings of our mind with the same rigor as we expose the physical world around us. This is unnatural. Nature doesn't know such boundaries to discriminate [[Well-Being - Tat Tvam Asi|between the world within us and without us]]. If the outside world can be described in the language of math, there’s no reason the inside world can’t using another language. It’s not that the inner life is un-model-able; it’s that our vocabulary is young. And yet, not everything compresses neatly into language. People who came before us understood this and still left us hints. The [[Well-Being - Building Destiny|Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (IV.4.5)]]  sketches a causal chain we can work with: अथो खल्वाहुः काममय एवायं पुरुष इति स यथाकामो भवति तत्क्रतुर्भवति यत्क्रतुर्भवति तत्कर्म कुरुते यत्कर्म कुरुते तदभिसम्पद्यते > **"And here they say that a person consists of desires. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap."** That’s a model. Not physics, but still a model: desire → intention → action → outcome. If you can sit in silence long enough to observe your desires at microscopic resolution, its triggers, its disguises, its half-truths, you begin to tune your instruments. From there, you can shape will, shape action, and slowly, predictably, shape life. Call it prediction if you like. We usually call them dreams. The difference is that dreams without instrumentation are wishes. Dreams with instrumentation become forecasts you can train toward.