Planet of Desire

How the circles of Hell can become a map of earthly experience, and what different traditions say about freedom amid desire

“Therefore the sufficiency of contentment is an enduring and unchanging sufficiency.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 46. James Legge’s translation. Chapter text.

What This Article Explores

Imagine taking the circles of Hell from the Divine Comedy and, as a separate exercise, laying them over the sequence of planets. Earth comes third, alongside the third circle: gluttony. This is our own symbolic model. It invites us to see earthly life as an encounter with desire: to learn to enjoy its gifts, live with its limits, and gradually loosen the hold of insatiability. As we bring Dante, Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gita, the Abrahamic traditions, Taoism, and Stoicism into conversation, we will look for real points of contact while preserving their differences. The central question is simple: how can we desire, enjoy, and act while keeping the freedom to choose?

When Good Still Does Not Feel Like Enough

Imagine an ordinary evening. You have had dinner, the day’s work is done, and someone you love is beside you. You could spend a little time simply inhabiting this life. But your hand is already reaching for your phone. A few messages, someone else’s trip, a new car, another story about a person who has accomplished more. A moment ago, the evening was good enough. Now something is missing.

You are not necessarily envious, nor do you necessarily want to buy what you see. Sometimes a less definite feeling arises: real life is happening somewhere beyond this one. You need to catch up with it, receive one more confirmation, open one more window. There is pleasure, but it is difficult to rest in it. Each new acquisition quickly becomes the starting point for the next demand.

This scene has many variations. One person cannot end the working day, even though they are already tired. Another asks their partner again whether they are loved, and feels reassured only briefly. A third buys another course on inner freedom, leaving the previous one unopened. A fourth turns even a holiday into a competition: experience more, take better pictures, come home as someone with something to show.

These imagined examples do not allow us to diagnose anyone. They make a familiar shift visible: what we desire ceases to be part of life and begins to promise us the right to live it at last. Until the next achievement, we seem to be sitting in the waiting room of our own existence.

This is where the image of Earth as a planet of desire emerges. We live among things, bodies, tastes, relationships, possibilities, and losses. All of these can nourish us. All can become the object of a demand that can no longer be answered once and for all. The question is whether we can notice the difference between a need that has been met and the promise of an endless “more.”

Trying the Circles Against the Planets

The proposed model takes the order of celestial bodies outward from the Sun as its starting point. If we extend the familiar sequence of eight planets by adding Pluto, we have nine positions for nine circles. Pluto is included here provisionally: modern astronomy classifies it as a dwarf planet. Earth holds the third position in the planetary sequence. NASA’s astronomical overview.

In Dante, the third circle is associated with gluttony. The other circles have their own principles and structures: they include Limbo, avarice and prodigality, violence, fraud, and treachery. We are therefore not looking at nine equivalent stages of appetite. The structure of Hell in Danteworlds.

The table below presents our own correspondence, following that order. We have added the questions in the final column for reflection; they neither restate Dante’s teaching nor describe the influence of planets.

Position in the provisional sequence	Dante’s circle	A question about human experience
Mercury	I — Limbo	Where am I close to life without feeling that I am taking part in it?
Venus	II — lust	When does attraction begin to determine all my decisions?
Earth	III — gluttony	What is enough for me, and why do I keep demanding more?
Mars	IV — avarice and prodigality	How do possessing and spending become ways of holding myself together?
Jupiter	V — wrath and sullenness	How do I deal with a feeling that has taken hold of me?
Saturn	VI — heresy	Where does my certainty cease to allow itself to be examined?
Uranus	VII — violence	When does the pursuit of what I want violate someone else’s life?
Neptune	VIII — fraud	How do I distort reality to achieve a result?
Pluto, provisionally	IX — treachery	What am I willing to sacrifice to hold on to what is mine?

The correspondences outside the third position remain tentative. The planets’ names give the map a spatial form, but they do not establish a moral hierarchy of the cosmos. It is especially important to remember that Dante’s Limbo belongs to a particular Christian understanding of salvation, and his heresy to a theological judgment. Placing our questions beside them substantially changes their field of application. The map can serve as an invitation to explore experience; a literal reading would require an entirely different basis.

The article’s central connection is Earth and the third circle. It lets us ask: if embodied life inevitably involves consumption, what can we learn here? A simple coincidence of positions becomes a starting point for reflection. Everything that follows will be tested against human experience and specific texts, rather than deduced from the arrangement of celestial bodies.

What Remains of Dante

In the sixth canto of the Inferno, the gluttonous are met by cold rain, mud, and Cerberus. Ciacco names gluttony as the reason for his plight. This is a poetic portrayal of retribution after death within Dante’s Christian world. The third circle itself is not presented as a school whose inhabitants move on once they have learned balance. Inferno, Canto VI.

When we apply this image to a living person, we change its purpose. In our interpretation, the circle becomes a pattern of repetition: obtain something again, feel briefly reassured again, feel the lack again. The image of punishment becomes a question about how unfreedom works. This transfer belongs to this article, not to Ciacco or Dante.

Yet Dante himself offers an important distinction. In the seventeenth canto of the Purgatorio, Virgil explains that love can err in its object, in excess, or in insufficient strength, while also being the source of virtue. This is not a demand to destroy our capacity to strive. It concerns the direction and measure of that capacity within a Christian understanding of creation. Purgatorio, XVII, 91–105.

This turn matters for our reflection. If the capacity to desire participates both in destruction and in good action, banning it altogether would be too crude a response. People also love, care, build a home, seek knowledge, and protect those close to them because they aspire to something. Freedom must make room for this living force.

Earthly Hunger and Insatiability

A hungry person needs food. A person who is cold needs warmth. Someone who is lonely may need contact, and someone who has spent years without a stable income may need the means to pay for necessities. A refusal to acknowledge these circumstances can easily pass for elevated philosophy. In practice, it makes the conversation deaf to another person’s life.

Insatiability begins where a demand loses any recognizable boundary. Good food no longer simply satisfies hunger: it must undo a difficult day. Money must provide not only a certain degree of security, but the complete impossibility of anxiety. Someone who loves us must confirm our importance so often that doubt never returns.

These are possible explanations of particular situations, not the hidden cause of every appetite. Sometimes a person works long hours because they have no other option yet. Sometimes they check a message repeatedly because they are waiting for an important decision. Repetition by itself proves nothing. A distinction emerges when we consider circumstances and consequences, rather than assign meaning from the outside.

It can help to ask: what task is the desired thing supposed to accomplish, and can it accomplish it? One conversation can clarify a relationship. It is unlikely to remove every possibility of loss forever. A purchase can solve a practical problem. It does not have to give someone a final, settled sense of their own worth.

In this broader sense, which is our own interpretation, gluttony concerns treating life as a supply to be consumed without end. We can demand more attention, power, experiences, victories in arguments, even spiritual experiences. The objects differ. One possible shared feature is the inability to acknowledge that what we have received has already done what it reasonably could.

Why Wanting Strongly and Enjoying Are Not the Same

Neuropsychologists Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson distinguish the motivational appeal of a reward, which they call wanting, from the pleasurable experience of it, or liking. In their research model, these processes can diverge: a stronger pull does not necessarily mean greater pleasure. Wanting here is a technical term, not a synonym for every human goal. Their work primarily concerns the mechanisms of reward and addiction. Berridge and Robinson, 2016.

This distinction helps us frame an everyday question cautiously: am I still enjoying this, or am I continuing to pursue the next portion? One evening on a phone cannot establish a neural mechanism or an addiction. But we can notice our own experience. Pleasure, for instance, may already have ended, tiredness may be increasing, and the movement may still continue.

At such a moment, more of something may fail to meet the original need. Someone sought rest and found stimulation. Sought closeness and ended up in continuous monitoring. Sought confidence and gathered so much advice that their own decision became even harder to hear.

In our metaphor, this is precisely where the circle closes: a means promises a way out, yet repeating it brings us back to the same point. The planetary image gives us some distance from which to look. For a moment, we can see ourselves as part of a larger movement while returning our attention to a simple fact: what happens to me after the next “more”?

Finding a Measure Between Indulgence and Self-Torment

It is easy to declare desire the culprit and begin a new struggle. We then try to earn freedom through impeccable renunciation: no pleasure, no weakness, no dependence on other people. But absolute demands on ourselves can also become insatiable. Now we need still more discipline, purification, and control.

The Buddhist text SN 56.11 rejects two extremes: indulgence in sensual pleasures and self-affliction. The Middle Way here has a precise content: the Noble Eightfold Path, encompassing understanding, intention, speech, action, and other aspects of practice. The second noble truth speaks of craving that leads to renewed becoming; this concept cannot simply be substituted for every kind of desire. SN 56.11, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

In the Bhagavad Gita, a different tradition arrives at a comparable practical distinction: yoga is incompatible both with overeating and with complete abstention from food; extremes of sleep are also named. The next verse speaks of moderation in nourishment, activity, recreation, sleep, and wakefulness. Here, measure belongs to the path of yoga, rather than being reduced to everyday comfort. Bhagavad Gita, 6.16, 6.17.

The point of contact is narrow and meaningful: destructive excess and destructive deprivation do not exhaust the possible paths. The differences remain. The Buddhist cessation of craving and the yoga of the Gita belong to different understandings of liberation. We do not need to erase those understandings to hear a useful question about measure.

On an ordinary evening, that measure can be very concrete: eat when hungry; let the body rest; end an activity when it no longer serves the chosen purpose. It changes with circumstances. One day calls for effort, another for recovery. Balance, understood as a fixed standard for an entire lifetime, becomes yet another demand that a living person must constantly meet.

Pleasure and What We Serve

The Gospel of Matthew frames the question through treasure, the heart, and service. The text sets serving God against serving wealth, then addresses anxiety about food and clothing. These needs are acknowledged; trust in the Father and the search for the Kingdom and righteousness become central. The connection with our theme is the possibility of noticing how possessions gain power over the direction of a life. The basis of the Christian response remains religious. Matthew, 6:19–34, NABRE.

The Quran permits eating and drinking, while requiring that people refrain from excess. Bodily goods and moral measure stand side by side. This is a requirement within a person’s relationship with Allah, not a claim that all pleasures are harmful. Quran, 7:31, translated by Mustafa Khattab.

In Pirkei Avot, Ben Zoma associates wealth with happiness in one’s portion, and strength with restraining the impulse to evil. This is rabbinic guidance on human dignity and conduct. It cannot be turned into an order for a poor person to be content with deprivation. Pirkei Avot, 4:1, AJWS translation.

These texts allow us to hold two aspects of experience together. We can receive good things: food, relationships, the fruits of work, the chance to live better. Yet something good can also assume a position from which it begins to govern the whole of life. Losing one thing then feels like losing the right to exist, and our own worth becomes dependent on someone else’s confirmation.

Imagine a hypothetical scene. Someone wants to buy a house. In one case, the desire has understandable reasons, a budget, limits, and room for reconsideration. In another, no house is ever enough, because it must prove success once and for all. The object is the same. The relationship to it differs. The question of freedom begins with that relationship, not the price tag.

Moderation therefore does not require everyone to live the same way. It invites us to examine whether the chosen good remains connected to the purpose for which we seek it. If the means takes away health, relationships, or honesty, it matters that we see the price already being paid, even when the acquisition looks prestigious.

Can We Recognize When There Is Already Enough?

Chapters 44 and 46 of the Tao Te Ching compare fame, possessions, and life, setting knowledge of what is enough and the ability to stop against destructive accumulation. In chapter 46, this theme appears alongside an image of war: insatiability has consequences for the shared world. In these chapters, measure connects a person’s relationship to fame and wealth with the wider world of war and peaceful work. Lao Tzu, chapters 44 and 46, translated by James Legge.

The word “enough” can sound unwelcome to someone who has lived with scarcity for a long time. It recalls a prohibition imposed by someone else: you are not entitled to any more. It can therefore help to restore the word’s own meaning. Enough is defined in relation to a particular need and a chosen task. It allows for growth. It also allows for completion.

You may want more space, knowledge, income, or closeness. At the same time, you can identify in advance which result would change your life now and which would merely move the measure further away. Learning, for example, may be needed to acquire a particular skill. If the task keeps shifting into “become someone who never makes mistakes,” the activity loses its ending.

Sometimes enough is a matter of the quality of our participation, rather than quantity. Ten attentive minutes of conversation can offer more connection than an evening beside someone who is constantly distracted. One choice carried through may help more than dozens of new explanations left unused. These are examples to test, not universal standards of communication and productivity.

Enough does not place a ceiling on human life. It restores the ability to recognize what has been completed: this dinner happened, I finished this task, this conversation was real. Without that ability, achievements become invisible. We continually receive something new and have almost no time to acknowledge it as part of our experience.

Accepting Our Place and Continuing to Act

The original idea contains another powerful move: to stop addressing the Universe as a system obliged to ensure that we never feel pain. Earthly existence involves vulnerability, dependence on circumstances, and limited control. We may believe that this experience has a spiritual purpose. In the metaphysical reading proposed here, Earth becomes a place where we encounter desire and its consequences. This is a hypothesis about meaning, not an established cause of every event.

To acknowledge our place in such a picture is to see the conditions within which we must choose. The mere fact of having a need does not diminish a person. The mere fact of a limit does not make their life a mistake. We can acknowledge embodiment, finitude, and the possibility of loss while retaining the right to seek something better.

Epictetus begins the Enchiridion by distinguishing what depends on us from what lies outside our power. In the same work, he speaks of the duty to help a friend in danger. The Stoic acknowledgment of the limits of control is compatible with action and loyalty. It does not oblige us to deny real harm. Enchiridion, §§1 and 32, translated by Elizabeth Carter.

A similar tension appears in the Bhagavad Gita: verse 2.47 places a limit on attachment to the fruits of action while also warning against attachment to inaction. This is Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna within a specific religious and narrative context. What matters for our comparison is the possibility of acting without considering ourselves the complete owners of the outcome. Bhagavad Gita, 2.47.

In practical life, this may look more modest than a great spiritual decision. You acknowledge that a conversation has already happened, that another person responded in a particular way, that a loss cannot yet be undone. Then you consider an action that is available. It does not guarantee the desired result, but it no longer depends on the demand that reality first become something else.

Justice Does Not Disappear from the Picture

A dangerous substitution is easy to make here. If life is called a school, any harm inflicted can be declared a useful lesson. If Earth is a provisional circle, someone else’s suffering can be explained as the level appropriate to them. A beautiful system then allows an observer to do nothing and still feel wise.

This article does not infer that suffering is deserved from a person’s position on a symbolic map. We have no basis for asserting that they agreed in advance to a particular act of violence, betrayal, or deprivation. Accepting that an event is part of one’s history and judging it just are different decisions. Justice requires consideration in its own right.

Quran 4:135 requires people to stand for justice, even when their testimony is against themselves, their parents, or their relatives; the wealth or poverty of those involved does not remove the requirement. This direct moral duty helps us see the limits of a discussion about moderation. Inner calm cannot be used to justify a refusal to notice a violation. Quran, 4:135.

Acknowledging reality can be the beginning of protecting boundaries, seeking available help, or asking for harm to be repaired. These actions also contain desire: we want a different life. That desire does not have to become insatiability. It can have grounds, a proportionate aim, and responsibility for the means employed.

The original aspiration to “a more just existence from here on” is therefore worth preserving. Alongside it appears an aspiration to greater freedom. The first concerns the way relationships and living conditions are organized; the second concerns how we participate in them. Sometimes work is needed in both areas. An inner map does not replace a change in our external situation.

Freedom Amid Desire

In self-determination theory, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan distinguish autonomous from controlled motivation. Autonomy involves the experience of taking part in one’s own action and acting in accord with oneself; it does not require independence from every other person. Alongside competence and relatedness, it forms an important part of their model of psychological needs. This is a scientific theory of motivation, not confirmation of planetary metaphysics. Deci and Ryan, 2000, sections on autonomy and internalization.

For our theme, this offers another way to pose the question: am I choosing an action, or carrying out an inner demand with which I no longer know how to have a conversation? Working toward a meaningful goal and working out of a constant fear of losing worth in other people’s eyes may serve as examples. The same outward action can be experienced differently. The distinction should be examined in context, rather than decided on a person’s behalf.

Freedom amid desire becomes recognizable when several possibilities appear. I can want something. I can experience pleasure and notice it. I can discover the cost of continuing. I can change my decision, stop, or postpone it, if circumstances allow that choice. The absence of what we want can hurt, but pain does not necessarily have to be the sole authority over our next action.

This is not a picture of someone who is indifferent to everything. Such a person can love, pursue a goal, argue, and protect. Their involvement may be very strong. At the same time, they try to remain in touch with consequences and keep room for reconsideration. Their chosen path still has forks.

In the language of our model, leaving the circle means changing how we participate in earthly experience. The world of things and needs remains. We gain more opportunities to see what desire serves and to choose the measure of our action. Any spiritual continuation can be understood within one’s own faith; the observable part begins in our relationship to today.

What This Means in Practice

For a small experiment, choose one recurring episode with modest stakes: scrolling in the evening, another nonessential purchase, continuing to work beyond a time you have chosen. Take a situation in which a pause is available and does not deprive you of something necessary. There is no need to turn your whole life into a test of willpower.

First, reconstruct a short sequence. What happened before the impulse? What did you want? What did you do? What changed immediately afterward, and later? You can write a few sentences. The point of this record is to see the event and its consequences while keeping possible explanations open.

Next, ask what task the desire is meant to accomplish. For example: “Do I want to keep scrolling for entertainment, to rest, to feel connected, or to put off a difficult conversation?” The answer may be mixed. It can be refined by looking at what actually happens, rather than choosing the most appealing explanation.

Try to name in advance a result that would be enough for this episode. It could be a chosen period of rest, a completed task, or a clear request in a conversation. If no result can be specified at all—“I need to feel once and for all that I am worthy of love”—the object may be facing a demand too large for it to meet. This is a reason to explore that demand, not to blame yourself.

Choose one reversible turn: pause, end an activity at the agreed moment, state a need directly, postpone a nonessential decision. Then look at what happened. If clarity or choice appeared, that is already an intermediate benefit. Testing the consequences requires action and a return to observation. An unsuccessful experiment also offers material for reconsideration.

Sometimes you may discover that the issue involves a real shortage, an unsuitable environment, tiredness, or demands from other people. The next step may then concern those conditions. The map should help distinguish causes, rather than reduce them in advance to an insufficient inner sense of measure. The right to stop, decline the experiment, or choose another approach remains yours.

Returning to Earth

Let us return to that evening. The phone is still beside you. It contains enough of other people’s lives to make your own seem insufficient again. But now you can notice the moment when the familiar movement begins to repeat itself. Dinner has already happened. The person beside you exists. Today’s work was part of life, even if no one announced it to the world.

You can keep looking. You can put the phone down. You can discover that you really are missing a conversation and try to begin one. What matters is the fork that has appeared. Where the demand for “more” once seemed to be the only voice, your own possibility of taking part becomes audible.

Earth as the third circle is a provisional image of this difficult, richly textured life. It has meaning as long as it brings us back to experience: what we take joy in, what nourishes us, what we act for, and what price we are willing to pay. We may believe that this experience is part of a larger purpose. We may explore it without that belief. In either case, our relationship to desire today remains an available field of attention.

Life from here on becomes more just where we treat others with greater care, notice violations, and change the conditions we can. It becomes freer where desire gradually ceases to be the sole director of our choices. We do not need to leave Earth for this. We can begin with the possibility of living what is already happening here.

Key Quotation

“Who is rich? One who is happy with their portion”

Ben Zoma, Pirkei Avot, 4:1. AJWS translation. Text consulted on Sefaria.

In this article, the quotation concerns the ability to participate in the life we have. It does not establish an acceptable level of deprivation for someone else.

A Map of Connections Between Traditions

The similarities below concern specific passages that were read. This is an editorial comparison by UW, preserving the traditions’ different foundations and aims.

Comparison	Point of contact	An essential boundary
Dante and our planetary model	The third circle offers an image for discussing insatiability	Dante presents Christian retribution; we offer a provisional map of a living person’s experience
Buddhist SN 56.11 and the Gita, 6.16–17	A rejection of indulgence and destructive deprivation	The Eightfold Path and yoga belong to different teachings on liberation
Matthew 6 and Quran 7:31	Enjoying good things calls for moral orientation and measure	Trust in the Father and obedience to Allah have their own religious meanings
Pirkei Avot, 4:1, and the Tao Te Ching, 44/46	The ability to recognize enough changes our relationship to acquisition	Rabbinic ethics and following the Tao cannot be reduced to a single system
Epictetus and the Gita, 2.47	Limited power over an outcome is compatible with action	Stoic moral choice and Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna differ
Quran 4:135 and the proposed practical conclusion	Work on oneself is compatible with demands for justice	Our synthesis is not presented as a shared quotation from all traditions
The psychology of motivation and philosophical texts	It helps to distinguish the strength of an impulse, pleasure, and participation in choosing	Scientific models do not establish the structure of a spiritual cosmos

Sources

The passages and sections identified here were checked. Inclusion in the bibliography does not mean that every work was read in full. Ancient texts are used in the named translations and electronic editions; unquoted wording in the article is paraphrase. The planetary correspondence and hypothetical everyday scenes were created for this article.

NASA. About the Planets. The composition of the planetary sequence, Earth’s third position, and Pluto’s status. Page.
Danteworlds, University of Texas at Austin. Inferno Overview. An academic overview of the nine circles, used to check the table. Overview.
Danteworlds. Circle 3, Canto VI. The description of the third circle and its association with gluttony were checked; reading covered selected passages, not the entire Comedy. Page.
Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio XVII, 91–105. Princeton Dante Project. The Italian text and the English translation by Robert and Jean Hollander: love, its object, and its measure. Selected passage.
SN 56.11, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu; the sutta’s text was read. The Middle Way, extremes, and craving. Text.
Bhagavad Gita, 6.16–17. Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. Available excerpts of the Sanskrit and translations were read: for 6.16, including Swami Sivananda; for 6.17, the Sanskrit text, Shankara’s commentary, and the Hindi translation of that commentary by Sri Harikrishnadas Goenka. The complete work was not read. 6.16, 6.17.
Bhagavad Gita, 2.47. Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. The available passage was checked, including Swami Sivananda’s English translation: action, its fruits, and inaction. Verse.
Gospel of Matthew, 6:19–34. NABRE, USCCB. Chapter 6 was read; the article uses selected verses. Chapter.
Quran, 7:31. The Clear Quran, translated by Mustafa Khattab. Quran.com. Enjoying good things and excess. Verse.
Quran, 4:135. The Clear Quran, translated by Mustafa Khattab. Quran.com. The requirement of justice. Verse.
Pirkei Avot, 4:1. AJWS translation, reproduced in Sefaria Sheet 114872. Ben Zoma’s teachings and the quoted wording were checked; the work’s main entry was not available as readable text. Sheet consulted.
Lao-Tse. The Tao Teh King, or The Tao and Its Characteristics. Translated by James Legge, Project Gutenberg, eBook 216. Chapters 44 and 46 were read; chapter 46 §2 supplies the epigraph. Electronic edition.
Epictetus. The Enchiridion. Translated by Elizabeth Carter, Internet Classics Archive, MIT. §§1, 15, and 32 were checked; §§1 and 32 are used. Text.
Berridge, K. C., Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670–679. DOI: 10.1037/amp0000059. The introduction and definitions on pp. 670–671 were read; a limited distinction is used, without reproducing the paper or drawing conclusions about a particular reader. Author’s copy.
Deci, E. L., Ryan, R. M. (2000). The What and Why of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. DOI: 10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01. Selected definitions and sections on autonomy and internalization were checked; reading all 42 pages is not claimed. Copy on the theory’s website.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh is the author and founder of the United Wisdom project. He explores inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut is a co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside her research, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding work in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.