What Is More Powerful Than Pleasure?

On Desire, Its Grades, and What the Vedantic Tradition Knew Before the Neuroscientists Arrived

Author: Shashank Heda, MD

Location: Dallas, Texas

Raanan Group • February 2026

Written in response to: The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD & Michael E. Long (BenBella Books)

Who This Article Is For

• The person who has achieved something — and felt the strange flatness that arrived with it
• Anyone who has confused ambition with greed, restlessness with dissatisfaction, or pursuit with addiction
• The reader who senses that dopamine discourse has been weaponized into a self-management problem, and suspects the story is bigger than that
• People who live at the intersection of ideas — scientists who read philosophy, practitioners who think, believers who question
• Anyone who has ever been told their wanting is a flaw to be corrected rather than a force to be governed
• The leader, the builder, the thinker who has watched capable people leave comfortable environments — and never quite understood the mechanism until now

Why They Should Read It

• Because it reframes what you’ve half-understood — and shows what the other half actually means
• Because it builds a diagnostic taxonomy of desire — five grades, each with a different mechanism — that no English-language framework has ever offered
• Because it connects Lieberman’s molecule to the Vedantic anatomy of wanting without forcing either to serve the other
• Because it names something most readers have felt but never had language for: the difference between wanting that builds and wanting that consumes
• Because it asks a question it does not answer — and that refusal is itself the point
• Because it will change how you read your own restlessness

There is a word in Sanskrit that does not translate cleanly into English, and I have spent twenty years — off and on, never with full attention until recently — trying to work out why. The word is spriha. It sits alongside four other words that are all rendered as “desire” in translation: kama, iccha, trishna, lobha, spriha. But they are not the same word. They are not even the same phenomenon. They describe five different grades of the same root experience, the way a physician distinguishes between a bruise and a contusion and an ecchymosis — the same visible thing, differentiated by mechanism and depth.

Spriha is the one that matters most for what I want to say here. Not kama, which is appetite — the hunger that rises and is satisfied and rises again. Not lobha, which is avarice, the wanting that has turned cancerous and feeds only on itself. Spriha is something else. It is longing with direction. It is the wanting that knows, even without articulating it, that what it is reaching toward is larger than the self reaching.

I begin here because Daniel Lieberman’s book The Molecule of More gave me the neuroscientific vocabulary to say something I had been circling in Sanskrit for years. His argument, briefly: dopamine is not the molecule of pleasure. It is the molecule of anticipation of reward, the approach, the gap between what you have and what you could have. When the reward arrives — fully, on schedule — dopamine quiets. The cell stops firing. What we call pleasure is handled by an entirely different chemistry. Dopamine is the chemistry of not-yet. It is, structurally, the molecule of longing.

The Vedantic tradition mapped this territory — if I am not wrong — approximately four thousand years before Kathleen Montagu isolated the molecule at Runwell Hospital in 1957. What Lieberman describes in neurochemical terms, the tradition described in phenomenological ones. And the phenomenological description is richer. Because the tradition made a distinction that the neuroscience does not: it differentiated between grades of wanting, and understood that the grade determines everything — not the molecule, not the circuitry, but the orientation of the wanting itself.

I should confess here that I came to Vedantic scholarship late, and sideways. My earlier decades were spent reading molecular oncology literature, then management consulting frameworks, then pandemic epidemiology. The Gita came to me not through formal study but through the accumulation of inadequacy — realizing, in my fifties, that the frameworks I had built across domains kept running into the same wall: they could describe what was happening, could even prescribe what to do, but could not answer the prior question: toward what? That is where Vedanta entered. And it entered, I now understand, because it is the only system of thought I have encountered that takes the anatomy of desire seriously enough to differentiate it.

The tradition gives us, in effect, a taxonomy. Kama is appetite — the wanting of the body and the senses, necessary, cyclical, not in itself problematic. Iccha is wish or preference — wanting oriented toward an object, the ordinary currency of daily motivation. Trishna is craving — the wanting that has become sticky, that clings to its object past the point of fulfillment; the wanting the Buddha identified as the root of dukkha. Lobha is avarice — trishna that has calcified into a structural feature of the personality, wanting as a mode of being rather than a response to need. And then, separate from these four, standing in a different register entirely: spriha.

Spriha has no clean English equivalent because English has no clean concept for it. It is sometimes translated as “aspiration,” which is too tame. Sometimes as “yearning,” which is too passive. What it describes is an active, oriented longing — not for an object, not for a sensation, but for a state of being or understanding that the one longing cannot fully articulate. The stitaprajna of the Gita — the one of steady wisdom — does not extinguish spriha. He governs kama. He transcends trishna. But spriha, the tradition suggests, is what remains after everything else falls away. It is the wanting that points toward moksha without being able to name what moksha is.

THIS IS WHAT THE NEUROSCIENCE MISSES ENTIRELY. Lieberman’s dopamine circuit cannot distinguish between a rat pressing a lever for cocaine and Ramanujan filling notebooks with theorems alone in Madras with no audience and no reward. The molecule is identical. The mechanism is identical. But the wanting is not the same wanting. One is trishna. The other is spriha. And that difference — which no fMRI will ever capture — is the difference between a life consumed and a life completed.

Lieberman gestures at something about this, to his credit. He distinguishes what he calls “up-dopamine” personalities — the Rimbauds, the Newtons, the relentless horizon-seekers — from people who are simply addicted. He knows the molecule is doing different work in different lives. But his framework cannot explain the difference because it operates below the level where the difference lives. The difference lives at the level of what the Gita calls purushartha — the fourfold structure of human ends. Artha (material security), kama (pleasure), dharma (righteous conduct), moksha (liberation). These are not sequential stages. They are simultaneous orientations. A life oriented toward artha and kama at the base with dharma as the governing architecture and a thread of spriha pulling upward toward moksha — that life will use the dopamine circuit the way a musician uses breath: as the medium of something beyond itself.

A life oriented toward trishna and lobha — toward the wanting that feeds only on more wanting — will use the same circuit the way a fire uses oxygen. Consuming until there is nothing left to consume.

In 2020, seven physicians on a cross-continental webinar — UTSW’s infrastructure, my screen, 2 a.m. in Dallas — were trying to build an evidence discipline in the middle of an epistemic emergency. I remember the exact quality of the wanting in that room. Not the wanting for recognition, not the wanting for vindication, not even the wanting for the pandemic to end. Something different. The sense that what we were attempting — CovidRxExchange, eventually twenty thousand participants — mattered in a way that had nothing to do with any of us personally. That is the closest I have come, in professional life, to what the tradition means by spriha operating in the world. The wanting was not for anything we would personally receive. It was, if I may err slightly toward the language of the Gita, nishkama — without attachment to the fruit.

I am not claiming we achieved that. I am claiming we touched it briefly, and that the quality of the work in those moments was different from the quality of the work in every other moment. Whether that difference is neurochemical or metaphysical, I genuinely do not know. But it was real.

There is a concept in Advaita Vedanta — vivartavada — that describes the relationship between appearance and reality as one of superimposition rather than transformation. The rope appears to be a snake; the snake was never there; but the fear was real. I find myself wondering — and this is probably a misapplication of the concept, or at least a loose one — whether the attention-economy critique of dopamine is a vivartavada problem: we see the snake — addiction, compulsion, endless scrolling — and we legislate against snakes, when what we should be doing is improving our ability to see ropes. The problem is not the dopamine circuit. The problem is that most people in the modern world have never been given the Vedantic vocabulary to understand what grade of wanting they are operating from at any given moment.

Vairagya is another word that gets mistranslated as “detachment” or “dispassion” — but that translation creates the wrong picture entirely. Vairagya is not the absence of wanting. It is the purification of wanting. It is what happens when kama and trishna and lobha have been seen clearly enough that they lose their grip, and spriha — the deep, directed, transpersonal longing — is what remains. The stitaprajna is not a person who wants nothing. He is a person whose wanting has been refined to its essential grade.

Lieberman’s book is valuable. It describes the mechanism with clarity. But the mechanism is not the meaning. The molecule is not the question. The question — the only question that has ever mattered, in every tradition that has thought seriously about what a human life is for — is what grade of wanting you are living from. Kama will give you a full life. Trishna will give you a consuming one. Lobha will hollow you out from the inside, leaving the appearance of striving with none of its substance. And spriha — if you are fortunate enough to find it, to refuse to let the noise of the other grades drown it out — spriha will make you dangerous in the way my father meant.

The man who wants nothing. That was what he said. I spent twenty years misunderstanding it as a statement about asceticism. It is not. It is a statement about grade. The man who has moved through kama and trishna and lobha and arrived at spriha — at wanting that has shed its ego-structure, that no longer depends on outcomes for its energy — that man wants nothing in the sense that his wanting is no longer attached to objects. But the wanting itself is immense. It has simply changed what it is pointing at.

Whether a neuroscience of spriha is possible — whether fMRI will ever distinguish the wanting that builds civilizations from the wanting that merely consumes them — I do not know. I suspect the answer is no, not because the brain is not involved, but because the distinction lives at a level of analysis that neuroscience has not yet found the instruments for. The Vedantic tradition spent four thousand years developing those instruments. We have had access to that tradition, in translation, for two centuries. We have mostly used it to source quotations for motivational posters.

That, if I may say so, is a civilizational failure of nerve.

What is more powerful than pleasure? Spriha. Not the craving that feeds on itself. Not the appetite that rises and is satisfied and rises again. The longing that has found its direction — toward dharma, toward the real, toward whatever it is that makes a life feel, at its close, like it was spent on something worth the spending. The molecule does not care what you aim it at. The tradition insists that the aiming is everything.

With obeisance to the Almighty and to the Celestial Gurus in whose light these ideas were first made available to a mind like mine. If I have misread the tradition — and I have, certainly, in ways I cannot yet identify — I ask pardon of those who carry it more faithfully. I offer this reflection as a practitioner thinking aloud, not as a scholar making claims. I would welcome your corrections.

Author: Shashank Heda, MD

Location: Dallas, Texas

Raanan Group • February 2026