Kama
Kama — usually translated as desire — is in the lineage’s deeper reading the primordial creative impulse from which the world itself arises. The Rig Veda’s Nasadiya Sukta names kama as the first thing to stir in the seed of mind, before the universe was made — the spark by which the One willed to become Many. At the cosmic scale, kama is creation. At the individual scale, it is the engine that propels every life forward, drives every action, and shapes every relationship. The popular Vedantic frame lists kama as the first of the shadripus (six enemies of the spiritual aspirant) — and there is truth in that warning. But the deeper teaching the Bihar School of Yoga carries is that kama is not an enemy to be defeated. It is the primordial force that, when understood and channelled, becomes the very ground on which a life can be built. To suppress kama is to deny life itself. To transform kama is the work of yoga. This page sets out the lineage’s structural map of kama — the four eshanas, the four instincts, the vasana-kamna distinction — and bridges it with the contemporary neuroscience of desire, in which the same mechanism the rishis named is being mapped today through brain imaging, dopamine science, and the neurobiology of reward.
This page is part of the Shadripus cluster on the OMJOOMSUH wiki — the first of six concept pages treating the so-called six enemies of the spiritual aspirant (kama, krodha, lobha, moha, mada, matsarya). It is the structural foundation on which the other five rest, because in the lineage’s reading every one of the other ripus is ultimately a derivative or distortion of kama itself.
Two registers: shadripus and transforming kama
Before entering the teaching, it is honest to name that two traditional registers approach kama differently, and the OMJOOMSUH frame holds both.
The Vedantic shadripus register. The classical list of six enemies (shad-ripu) — kama (desire), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (delusion), mada (pride), matsarya (envy) — describes the inner adversaries the spiritual seeker must overcome. In this register kama is the first enemy because every other ripu follows from it. The teaching is renunciative: starve the desire, weaken the enemy, free the self.
The Bihar School transformative register. The teaching that Transforming Kama by Swami Ratnashakti Saraswati lays out — written under the guidance of Paramahamsa Swami Satyananda Saraswati — treats kama not as an enemy but as the primordial force of creation itself. Kama is the spark by which Brahman became the universe. To be born is to inherit kama. To suppress it is to deny the very impulse by which life exists. The teaching is transformative: understand the desire, channel its energy, let it serve the larger work of becoming.
Both registers have textual authority and both serve genuine purposes. A renunciate on the path of pure jnana may need the shadripus framing to hold the discipline. A householder building a life within the world needs the transformative framing to make sense of why desire keeps arising even after years of practice. The OMJOOMSUH frame, oriented to the householder, proceeds in the Satyananda transformative register — while acknowledging that the shadripus warning remains a true warning. Kama untransformed is genuinely destructive. Kama transformed is the engine of a meaningful life.
The cosmic origin — the Nasadiya Sukta
The single oldest reference to kama as a creative principle sits in the Rig Veda’s Nasadiya Sukta (the Hymn of Creation, RV 10.129):
कामस्तदग्रे समवर्तताधि मनसो रेतः प्रथमं यदासीत् । सतो बन्धुमसति निरविन्दन् हृदि प्रतीष्या कवयो मनीषा ॥
Transliteration: kāmas tad agre samavartatādhi manaso retaḥ prathamaṃ yad āsīt; sato bandhum asati nir avindan hṛdi pratīṣyā kavayo manīṣā.
Translation: Thereafter rose kama in the beginning — kama the primal seed and potency of mind. Sages who searched with their heart’s thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent.
In this verse, kama is not a sin and not even a human attribute. It is the first thing that arose — before the world, before time, before any being existed to desire anything. Kama is the principle by which something arose at all. The single seed of mind. The will-to-become.
The Upanishads name the same impulse in different language. Brahman, the all-pervasive consciousness, sat alone — and the impulse arose: eko ‘ham bahu syām — “I am one; may I become many.” This sankalpa, this resolve at the heart of Brahman, is the cosmic kama. From it the universe unfolded.
In the lineage’s reading, every desire that arises in a human being is a downstream expression of this primordial cosmic impulse. The hunger of an infant, the wish for a child, the drive of the artist, the urge to build, to know, to love — all are kama. To be alive is to participate in kama. The question is not whether to have desires. The question is how to hold them.
The structural map
The book Transforming Kama lays out a precise architecture, moving from the primordial cosmic seed through the layers of the human being down to the felt experience of desire in daily life. Here is the map in its essential structure:
KAMA — eko 'ham bahu syām
(the primordial seed)
│
┌────────────┬────────────┴────────────┬────────────┐
│ │ │ │
Putreshana Dareshana Vitteshana Lokeshana
(progeny) (relationship) (wealth) (fame)
│ │ │ │
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
Maithuna Maithuna Ahara Ahara
Nidra Ahara Bhaya Bhaya
Bhaya Bhaya
│ │ │ │
└────────────┴───────────┬─────────────┴────────────┘
↓
VASANA
(unmanifest deep impression)
↓
KAMNA
(manifest desire in the mind)
↓
┌────────────────────┴────────────────────┐
│ │
Tamasic Sattvic
↓ ↓
Pleasure Happiness
↓ ↓
Adharma Dharma
The three vertical bands map to the three bodies of yogic anatomy: Karana sharira (the causal body) — where the eshanas live Sukshma sharira (the subtle body) — where the instincts express, where vasana sits, where kamna arises Sthula sharira (the gross body) — where the desire is acted out, and where its consequence (dharma or adharma) is reaped
This is the architecture the rest of the page works through, level by level.
The four eshanas
Eshana is the first evolute of the primordial cosmic kama at the level of the individual being. The Upanishads classify four eshanas, each representing a fundamental direction in which the desire-to-become-many expresses itself:
Putreshana (पुत्रेषणा) — the desire for progeny. The drive to procreate, to continue the line, to leave a part of oneself in the world after the body ends. Putreshana is the most universal eshana — it is present in every life-form, including the single-celled amoeba that divides to become two. In humans it expresses both as sexual desire and as the larger longing for the continuation of one’s name, lineage, work, and influence. Putreshana is woven into the biology of life itself.
Dareshana (दारेषणा) — the desire for relationship. The drive for companionship, partnership, intimacy. Dareshana underlies the human need to be in relationship not only with a sexual partner but also with parents, children, siblings, friends, community. It is from dareshana that the entire architecture of human social life is built — and from its frustrations come the most painful emotional experiences: jealousy, insecurity, dependency, obsession, abandonment.
Vitteshana (वित्तेषणा) — the desire for wealth and material possession. The drive to accumulate, to own, to secure resources against future scarcity. Vitteshana is the impulse behind both the genuine work of provisioning a household and the distorted modern phenomenon of consumerism. The belief that the next purchase will bring happiness is vitteshana operating below conscious awareness.
Lokeshana (लोकेषणा) — the desire for fame, recognition, status. The drive to be seen, appreciated, honoured. Lokeshana underlies the human need for social standing, for the approval of others, for the projection of self into the world’s awareness. The contemporary attention economy — social media, follower counts, public profile — is lokeshana made industrial.
The four eshanas are not separate boxes. They overlap, support each other, and combine in different proportions in different human beings. A person’s particular psychological signature can often be read as a particular weighting of the four eshanas. The eshanas live at the karana sharira — the causal body, the deepest layer of being. They cannot be uprooted. They can only be understood and channelled.
The four instincts
From the four eshanas arise four primary instincts that express in the sukshma sharira (subtle body) — the layer of mind, emotion, and pranic flow. The four instincts are the reactive surface through which the deeper eshanas appear in daily experience:
Maithuna (मैथुन) — the sexual instinct. Comes primarily from putreshana (the procreative drive) but is supported by dareshana (relationship). The yogic scriptures recognise three objectives the sexual act can serve: progeny, pleasure, or spiritual enlightenment. The energy is the same; the level and frequency of the mind determines the purpose. At the sensorial level, the experience is limited to the temporary external pleasure. When the mind, awareness, and prana are channelled toward internal union, the same act opens onto a continuous internal bliss. This distinction is the foundation of tantric practice.
Ahara (आहार) — the craving instinct. The instinctive state of craving present in all life-forms — even a single-celled amoeba moves toward sugar and away from acid. In humans, ahara expresses at physical, mental, emotional, and psychic levels. It is the craving for food, but also the craving for emotional sustenance (from dareshana), for material objects (from vitteshana), for recognition (from lokeshana). The contemporary disorders of compulsive eating, compulsive shopping, compulsive social media use are all expressions of ahara operating without containment.
Bhaya (भय) — the fear instinct. The primal state of fear and insecurity in all beings. Bhaya stems directly from putreshana: the moment desire propels one out of the unitary state of Brahman and into the multiplicity of the world, fear arises — because where there is multiplicity, there are others, and where there are others, there is the possibility of loss. Where there is only one principle there is no fear. Bhaya manifests as anxiety, dread, doubt, suppression, shame, guilt, and (in extreme distortion) as phobias and perversions. It also shows up as the fear of losing what one has — wealthy people who live behind alarm systems, parents who will not let children play outside.
Nidra (निद्रा) — the sleep instinct, the instinctive desire to disconnect. Nidra is the body’s discipline of withdrawing from sensory input to repair and renew. It is also, in the deeper reading, the desire to dissolve the strain of separation and return — even briefly — to a state of unity. Nidra is putreshana’s mirror: the desire to escape the multiplicity into which putreshana propelled us. The contemporary phenomena of compulsive sleep, dissociation, escapist consumption (binge-watching, scrolling for hours) are all distortions of nidra operating outside discipline.
The four instincts, like the four eshanas, are not separable. They support and undercut each other across a life. They live in the sukshma sharira — the subtle body — and they are the layer where most practitioners first become aware that desire is shaping their experience.
Vasana and kamna — the unmanifest and the manifest
Beneath all the eshanas and instincts sits the deepest layer of the lineage’s psychology of desire: the distinction between vasana and kamna.
Vasana (वासना) — the unmanifest, deep-rooted desire. Vasana is the latent tendency of the mind, the impression left by countless past experiences, sitting beneath conscious awareness like the ink of a stain beneath a washed cloth. The Upanishads describe vasana as a wave in the mind-lake — its seat is the karana sharira (the causal body), and it persists across lifetimes in the lineage’s reading. Vasanas are like the roots of a tree, invisible underground. They cannot be reached by introspection alone. They surface only when something in the external world activates them.
Kamna (कामना) — the manifest desire, the felt experience of wanting in the moment. When a vasana is activated — by a sight, a smell, a memory, a person — it rises through the layers of the mind and presents itself as a specific, named want. I want that car. I want that person to call me. I want this argument to be over. This is kamna. Kamna is what the practitioner experiences and what most of psychology and contemporary self-help addresses.
The relationship between the two is structural. Vasana is the seed; kamna is the flower. Vasana lives in the depths of the karana sharira; kamna manifests on the surface of the sukshma sharira and acts through the sthula sharira. You cannot remove a kamna without addressing the vasana that produced it. This is why mere behavioural restraint — willpower applied to the surface — eventually fails. The kamna returns, in the same form or a new one, because the vasana beneath has not been touched.
The practical implication is humbling: most desires the practitioner experiences are not chosen. They are activated. The work of yoga is not the suppression of the kamna at the surface but the gradual exhaustion and re-orientation of the vasana below.
The Bhagavad Gita cascade — kama as the gateway
The single most consequential teaching about kama in the Indian tradition is the cascade Krishna lays out in the Bhagavad Gita 2.62–63, which traces what happens when kama is not held with awareness:
ध्यायतो विषयान्पुंसः सङ्गस्तेषूपजायते । सङ्गात्सञ्जायते कामः कामात्क्रोधोऽभिजायते ॥
क्रोधाद्भवति सम्मोहः सम्मोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रमः । स्मृतिभ्रंशाद् बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति ॥
Translation:
When one thinks repeatedly of the objects of the senses, attachment for them arises. From attachment, kama (desire) is born. From desire that goes unfulfilled, krodha (anger) arises.
From anger comes moha (delusion). From delusion, the loss of memory. From the loss of memory, the destruction of buddhi (discriminating intelligence). And from the destruction of buddhi, the person perishes.
This is not a moral teaching about being good. It is a structural diagnosis of how a human being collapses. The cascade has six steps:
- Contemplation of an external object
- Attachment (raga) forming through repeated thought
- Kama — the named desire arising
- Krodha — anger when the desire is frustrated (or even merely delayed)
- Moha — delusion, the loss of contact with reality
- Loss of buddhi — the destruction of discriminating intelligence
- Destruction of the person
Every one of the six Shadripus is named in this cascade. Kama is the gateway; krodha and moha follow directly; lobha (greed) and matsarya (envy) and mada (pride) all arise from the same root attachment to objects and outcomes. This is why the lineage teaches that kama is the first and structurally most important of the shadripus: the other five flow from it.
Importantly, the Gita does not say “do not have desires.” It says: do not let desire run unwatched. The cascade can be interrupted at any of its six steps. The work of yoga is to interrupt it as early in the chain as possible — ideally at step 2, when attachment is just beginning to form, before it has hardened into named kama.
What the contemporary neuroscience finds
The book Transforming Kama itself bridges into the Western research, and a significant portion of Chapter 4 maps the lineage’s understanding of kama onto the contemporary neuroscience of desire. The convergence is striking. This section consolidates what the book lays out, and extends it with research that has emerged since.
The dopamine and the wanting
The contemporary neuroscience of desire is built around a single neurochemical: dopamine. Of the major neurotransmitters, dopamine is the one most directly involved in the experience of kama — but with a crucial nuance that the popular literature has flattened.
Dopamine is not the pleasure chemical. It is the anticipation chemical. The dopamine system in the brain — particularly the mesolimbic pathway, running from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum — is activated when the brain expects or pursues a reward, not when the reward is actually obtained. Dopamine fuels the wanting; a separate, much smaller neural circuit (involving opioids, endocannabinoids, and GABA-benzodiazepines) generates the actual liking.
This distinction was first rigorously named by the neuroscientist Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan in the late 1990s. Berridge showed in elegant animal studies that you can take an animal that strongly wants something (high dopamine response) without it liking the thing when received, and vice versa. The two systems are dissociable. Wanting is dopamine. Liking is something else.
This is the contemporary research equivalent of the lineage’s vasana-kamna distinction, but with a sharper edge. Kamna is dopaminergic. The actual experience of satisfaction is not. The brain is structurally wired to want more than it likes — because dopamine’s purpose, evolutionarily, is to drive the organism toward survival-relevant resources, not to reward it for arrival.
The brain regions involved
Specific brain regions implement this:
- The ventral tegmental area (VTA), in the midbrain, is the source of dopaminergic neurons that project upward
- The nucleus accumbens, in the ventral striatum, receives these projections and integrates them with input from
- The amygdala (emotional salience: is this important?)
- The hippocampus (memory: have I encountered this before?)
- And the prefrontal cortex (evaluation: should I pursue this?)
The output of this integration is then sent to the hypothalamus, which triggers action. The entire cycle — sensory contact → mental processing → desire formulation → action — takes a few seconds.
This is precisely the cycle the Gita 2.62 describes: contemplation → attachment → kama → action. The Vedic verse and the brain map describe the same circuit.
The novelty problem
The book Transforming Kama observes that dopamine fires especially strongly for novelty — for new and anticipated experiences — and that repetition gradually dulls the response. The first time you eat a new food, the dopamine surge is large. By the tenth time, the surge is much smaller. By the hundredth time, the same food may produce almost no dopamine response at all.
This is the neurochemistry of what Indian philosophy has long observed: kamna is satisfied only briefly. The new car brings happiness for a few weeks; then the brain adapts, and the same car becomes baseline. The promotion, the relationship, the achievement — each delivers a dopamine surge, then the adaptation. The vasana below is not touched. The next kamna will arise.
The lineage’s response to this — to direct attention to the vasana below, not to chase the next kamna — is now mirrored in the contemporary research on hedonic adaptation. The psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has shown that human happiness is largely independent of life circumstances over the long run; about 50% is genetic baseline, 10% is circumstances, and 40% is intentional activity. Chasing the next kamna falls into the 10% bucket and produces no durable effect on happiness.
Anna Lembke and the dopamine deficit
A more recent body of work — particularly Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation (Stanford, 2021) — has named the modern problem that the lineage was warning about millennia ago. In a world of unprecedented access to high-dopamine stimuli (social media, processed food, pornography, video games, online shopping, news feeds), the brain’s dopamine system gets pushed into a deficit state. The body’s homeostatic mechanism downregulates dopamine receptors to compensate for the constant high stimulation. The result: a chronic dopamine deficit in which baseline pleasure declines, and ever-stronger stimuli are needed even to feel normal.
This is the neurochemical face of the addiction state the lineage names. In the state of addiction, kama itself becomes more powerful than any pleasure gained from the satisfaction of the desire. The book observes this directly. The mechanism — receptor downregulation in chronic high-stimulus environments — was not yet mapped when the lineage formed the teaching, but the experiential signature was. Two thousand years before Lembke, the rishis named the problem.
The fear-desire proximity
The book also notes a finding that has only recently been understood: dopamine plays a role in both desire and fear. The neural circuits for these two states are separated by only millimetres in the brain, and they share neurotransmitters. The book’s mapping of this onto the lineage’s bhaya-from-putreshana teaching is exact: running a train along the same tracks, flipping the switch and the train travels back in the same direction, the components of the fear response and the desire response are the same.
This is the contemporary research basis for one of the lineage’s strangest-seeming teachings: that bhaya (fear) is the flip side of kama. They are not opposite forces. They are the same neural circuit running in opposite directions.
Sexual desire as a special case
The book briefly notes — and recent research has confirmed — that sexual desire is neurochemically unique. The septal nucleus regulates the release of testosterone and oestrogen, which then stimulate dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and oxytocin in combination. This chemical cocktail is unusually potent and is one reason sexual desire (maithuna) is among the hardest of the kamna patterns to bring under deliberate awareness. Dopamine creates the arousal pull; serotonin generates the happiness; oxytocin creates bonding; norepinephrine adds energy. No other single experience activates this combination so completely.
The pleasure-happiness distinction
The final structural teaching of Chapter 4 — and one of the most clinically useful — is the distinction between pleasure and happiness.
Pleasure is an experience. It arises through contact between the senses and an external object. It is dopaminergic — fueled by anticipation, satisfied briefly, dissolved as the brain adapts. Pleasure depends on something external: food, drugs, sex, shopping, internet, mobile phone, movies. It strengthens the selfish and self-isolated identity, because each pleasure-experience requires the experiencer to be present and to claim the experience as theirs.
Happiness is a state. It arises in the mind, in the pranas, in the emotions, when they are balanced and the awareness rests in the present. Happiness is not dependent on anything external. It does not anticipate. It is not projected into the future. You are either happy or you are not. It is the experience of here and now. And — critically — happiness increases when it is shared. Pleasure does not.
The lineage’s diagnosis of contemporary life rests on this distinction: most modern unhappiness arises from a sustained category error. We chase pleasure and call it happiness. We expect that the next acquisition, the next relationship, the next achievement will bring lasting happiness — but pleasure cannot bring happiness, by structural design. The brain mechanism that delivers pleasure is the dopamine system, and that system is structurally incapable of producing the steady-state of happiness. The two run on different circuits. The pleasure circuit is much smaller, much more localised, and much harder to activate than the desire circuit. The brain is wired to experience desire more frequently and more easily than pleasure.
This is why a life organised around chasing kamna — chasing the next pleasure — produces a chronic shortfall of happiness even as it produces a constant churn of dopamine. The lineage’s prescription is not to renounce pleasure; pleasures of the world are part of the householder’s life. The prescription is to not mistake pleasure for happiness, and to undertake the daily practice that builds the conditions under which happiness can arise.
What the practice can do
The practical question for the contemporary householder reading this is small and clear: given that kama cannot be uprooted, what can the practice actually do?
The lineage’s answer, restated in the language of contemporary neuroscience, is fourfold.
One — interrupt the cascade earlier. Daily practice — pranayama, mantra, yoga nidra, silence — builds the capacity to observe a thought before it has hardened into attachment, and an attachment before it has hardened into named kamna. This is the contemporary research on mindfulness translating directly into the Gita’s prescription. The cascade can be interrupted at any point; the earlier the better.
Two — calm the underlying nervous system. The chronic stress load that elevates cortisol also pushes the dopamine system into the deficit state Lembke describes. Practices that tone the vagus nerve — slow breath, mantra recitation, pratyahara — lower the baseline arousal and reduce the desperate quality of kamna. A calm body is a body that wants less.
Three — reduce high-dopamine stimulation. The modern householder cannot reach the rishis’ baseline because the modern environment is engineered to harvest attention through dopamine spikes. The upavasa discipline — periods of voluntary abstinence — applied not only to food but to screens, news, social media, the constant low-grade stimulation of contemporary life, restores the dopamine system’s natural responsiveness. The lineage’s word for this discipline is the same as the word for daily fasting: upavasa, dwelling near.
Four — direct the kama toward the work. This is the deepest of the four. Untransformed kama dissipates outward toward objects. Transformed kama is channelled into sadhana, into work, into Swadharma, into family, into service. The energy of putreshana, when held with awareness, becomes the love that builds a household. The energy of vitteshana, when held with awareness, becomes the provisioning of a family and the care of resources. The energy of lokeshana, when held with awareness, becomes the impulse to do work the world will benefit from. None of the energies is eliminated. All are redirected.
The work is not heroic. It is small and daily and returnable. Drop by drop on parched earth.
A closing distinction
The contemporary self-help culture has reduced the teaching about desire to two strategies: pursue your desires (the optimisation culture) or suppress your desires (the minimalism culture). The lineage’s reading is that both are wrong.
To pursue every kamna is to be ruled by the dopamine system — to mistake the wanting for the satisfaction, to chase what cannot in principle deliver what one is seeking.
To suppress every kamna is to deny life itself — to fight against the primordial creative force from which the universe arose.
The middle path the lineage teaches is transformation: to see kama clearly, to track the cascade as it begins, to interrupt it where one can, to channel its energy toward what one is actually trying to build with one’s life. This is the work of yoga in its deepest sense. And it is the work that the contemporary neuroscience, after centuries of separate development, is now beginning to confirm.
Related Concepts
- Shadripus — the six enemies; this page is the foundation of the cluster
- Krodha — anger, the second ripu, which arises when kama is frustrated (pending)
- Lobha — greed, the third ripu (pending)
- Moha — delusion, the fourth ripu, named in the Gita cascade (pending)
- Mada — pride, the fifth ripu (pending)
- Matsarya — envy, the sixth ripu (pending)
- Buddhi — the discriminating intelligence whose destruction is the final step in the Gita cascade
- Manas — the mind in which kamna manifests
- Chitta — the storehouse of memory through which vasanas surface
- Samskaras — the deeper impressions of which vasanas are the active expression
- Three Planes — the karana / sukshma / sthula sharira framework that structures the kama map
- Sadhana — the daily practice through which kama is transformed
- Pratyahara — the withdrawal of senses that interrupts the kama cascade at its sensory root
- Pranayama — the breath practice that calms the underlying arousal state
- Yoga Nidra — the deep relaxation practice through which vasanas can surface and be observed
- Cortisol Awakening Response — the contemporary frame for the underlying arousal state
- Vagus Nerve — the cranial nerve through which the practice calms the dopamine-driving stress response
- Upavasa — the discipline of dwelling near, applied to all high-stimulus inputs
- Sankalpa — the resolve through which kama is consciously directed
- Bihar School of Yoga — the lineage institution within which this teaching is held
- Swami Satyananda Saraswati — the guru under whose guidance Transforming Kama was written
Sources
Primary lineage source. Transforming Kama by Swami Ratnashakti Saraswati, under the guidance of Paramahamsa Swami Satyananda Saraswati, published by Yoga Publications Trust, Bihar School of Yoga, Munger. Chapter 4 (Identifying Kama) is the structural basis for the map laid out above.
Foundational Vedic and Upanishadic references.
- Rig Veda 10.129 (the Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation)
- The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad on Brahman as eko ‘ham bahu syām
- The Bhagavad Gita 2.62–63 on the cascade from contemplation to destruction
Contemporary neuroscience references.
- Berridge K. C. and Robinson T. E., “Parsing reward.” Trends in Neurosciences 26, no. 9 (2003): 507–513.
- Berridge K. C., “Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience and Psychology Laboratory.” Inquiry 52, no. 4 (2009): 378–398.
- Lembke A., Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, 2021).
- Lyubomirsky S., The How of Happiness (Penguin, 2007), on hedonic adaptation.
- Sapolsky R. M., Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Penguin, 2017), Chapter 3 on dopamine and anticipation.
- Schultz W., “Dopamine reward prediction-error signalling: a two-component response.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17 (2016): 183–195.
Cross-reference for the broader lineage psychology: Yoga Darshan by Paramahamsa Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati (Bihar School of Yoga, Yoga Publications Trust, Munger).