Ashtavakra Gita

Desires arise and vanish in the mind, like waves upon the ocean of the self; let them come and go without disturbance

Applies the earlier ocean-and-waves image specifically to desire, reframing individual cravings as temporary surface activity rather than threats to be managed.

Chapter 14 returns to the ocean metaphor introduced earlier in the text, but narrows its focus to the mind's moment-to-moment traffic of wants. Desires, in this framing, are waves — they have a beginning, a crest, and a natural subsidence, and none of that activity changes the ocean beneath them. The instruction to let them come and go without disturbance is notably not a call to suppress or fight desire, a strategy the text treats as still giving desire too much reality and power. Instead it asks for something closer to disinterested observation, trusting that a wave which is not resisted simply completes its own motion and passes.

Ashtavakra Gita

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• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about desire

  Desires are compared to waves: they rise, crest and subside on their own. The instruction is not to manage them but to stop treating their arrival as a problem.