Free Yourself from the Insatiable Hunger

This article is an excerpt from my talk Hunger!, presented in the Summer of 2021 on YouTube for the Center for Spiritual Awakening.

What are you really hungry for?

Because I was brought up with the American Dream, in a culture that values achievement, individuality, independence, competitiveness, and manifest destiny, I feel a hunger and desire that has nothing to do with food. This ideal teaches that to achieve greatness and happiness which is equivalent to wealth and success, one must stand out and rise out of the ordinary, be better than everyone else. Upward mobility requires one to stand on the shoulders of others. This hunger and also the sense of having been successful creates the very real sensation that I am somehow set apart, different from everyone else, separate, and alone. And what is interesting to me, is that it is a very ordinary thing, universally American even, to feel separate. Yet oddly, everyone who feels different are actually the same! The feeling of being alone creates a craving, and insatiable hunger to be acknowledged, witnessed and validated.

See me! My status. My achievement. My life. This is who I am. I exist.

Addiction

Social media feeds this need- the need to be seen, to feel connected, to be validated, to stand out- by creating addictive online platforms, a virtual world that is hard to escape, where the insatiable hunger for acknowledgment is fed, but not fulfilled. Not by mistake, the conversation streams are called “feeds.” We literally feed on the hearts and likes, continuously, ravenously. Of course, this hunger is not just limited to media, but can take any form of addiction: drugs, food, alcohol, work, anything.

It reminds me of a story of Finn McCool. Finn’s body is taken over by Famine, the insatiable, a revenge from Amara, the Goddess of the Sacred Grove. Listen to the story here. The story form of self-cannibalism is a common one and found universally. It is also related to stories and practices of self-mutilation that are quite common in religious context and history as an unfortunate result of the literal interpretation of metaphor that instructs to martyr the body, really a reminder to not identify with the body. Joseph Campbell does this topic full justice in all its gory detail in The Belly of the Whale, from Meeting the Shadow: the Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, eds.

Insatiable hunger only grows stronger

Constant striving to rise above, to set oneself against and apart from others and to be validated by social media in the end does not satisfy us but leads to increased hunger, loneliness and the feeling of separateness. This is like the insatiable hunger of Finn which only grows stronger the more he eats and inevitably leads from great wealth and power to poverty and loneliness.

King Solomon describes the problem with earthly existence eloquently in the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes which means “preacher” in Greek is so beautiful and poetic. Here in the words of Solomon, the teacher…

2“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?

4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.

5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.

6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.

7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.

8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.

9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

11 No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.

And it goes on in this way for many chapters describing all facets of life….

He who loves money is never satisfied by money, and he who loves wealth is never satisfied by income. This too is meaningless.

AND

When good things increase, so do those who consume them; what then is the profit to the owner, except to behold them with his eyes?

AND

All a man’s labor is for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied.

What satisfies this hunger?

The hunger drives us to find satisfaction.

Freedom from hunger is waking up from the spell like Finn, the meaninglessness of life of Solomon. and waking up to our true hero selves.

Jesus teaches

As history demonstrates, the striving for power and wealth must have been an unsatisfactory existence for most people, since a simple carpenter from the desert boonies of the Roman Empire teaching two simple things: 1. to love God with all your heart, soul and mind and 2. to love your neighbor as yourself led to a shift in consciousness that ultimately resulted in the fall of the Empire.

So first we must preserve the sacred grove of Amara and not only that, but reside in it. This is Jesus’ first commandment.

He who meditates on Me as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, his mind constantly engaged in remembering Me, undeviated from the path, he, O Partha, is sure to reach me.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 8 verse 8

If we can take note from mythology, we must also eat the self. And this does not mean literally. It means the second of Jesus’ commandments, to see and love everyone as yourself, as I. The insatiable hunger is met only when the separate “I” no longer exists.

In an anecdote from Africa:

An anthropologist showed a game to the children of an African tribe …

He placed a basket of delicious fruits near a tree trunk and told them: The first child to reach the tree will get the basket. When he gave them the start signal, he was surprised that they were walking together, holding hands until they reached the tree and shared the fruit! When he asked them why they did this, they answered with astonishment: Ubuntu. “That is, how can one of us be happy while the rest are miserable?”

Ubuntu means, “I am because we are.”

What happens when we eat our self? To devour our earthly identifications and strivings?

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If I am not I, who will be?” We all are here to play ourselves in our respective rolesand also to remember that it is just a role, and not the true self. The discontentment in identification with our earthly roles and our hunger leads us to this understanding.

And my question is “If I am not I, who will I be?”

Atem, also called Ra, neither male nor female, self-born from the primordial waters of Nun, removed his one eye at the beginning of time to search for his lost children Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), born when he sneezed them into being. Upon its return, the eye of Ra was jealous because he had grown a new one in her place. So Ra made her Wadget, the cobra goddess. She is also Hathor- gracious, loving mother and creator and Sekhmet, hungry and fierce, devouring everything in her path, insatiable hunger and plague on humankind.

Ra’s child sits on the crown of the pharaohs as the cobra, the uraeus, Greek for “she who rears up.”

She who Rears Up

She who rears up. This is not the true self, but the personas we wear on our crown. Hunger is the goddess Sekhmet, who fiercely protects us, heals us of delusion and leads us to God.

From the Egyptian book of the dead,

“My vision is cleared, my heart is in its proper place, my uraeus is with me everyday. I am Ra, who himself protects himself, and nothing can harm me.”

I like that -my heart is in its proper place, not identified with the roles I play, but as Jesus teaches- in the heart of God. What does that feel like?

In Nature and Selected Essays Ralph Waldo Emerson writes,

Standing on the bare ground,–my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,–all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

Treatment

Treatment, or affirmative prayer, releases us from our false perceptions and identifications. In the first step we identify God as that which is being all and in the second, we identify as God, and like Emerson, merge into the oneness.

There is only One.
This One is the supreme Godhead, Brahman, Universal Spirit, Universal Consciousness, the life force behind all creation.
It is the seen and the unseen. It is the primordial waters of Nun in which all potentialities exist.
It is the leading edge of thought.
There is nothing that it is not yet, as the Tao te ching tells us, it is also nothingness.

There is only One. This one is both everything and nothing. This one is being all things and it follows that it is being each one of us, living as us, part and parcel of us. Ubuntu I am because we are. It never leaves us. We are never separate from it.

The Tao also tells us to follow the nothingness, and be like it, not needing anything, then behold we become witness to great wonder and the root of everything.
We are fed and can never again feel hungry.
We are satisfied and full of the intoxicating elixir that is God, our cups overflow and with all our hearts, minds and soul we seek out and turn to face and bask in the ever-giving, all-seeing, all knowing sun, the light of God.
Like Rumi,
We are drunken without wine,
sated without meat,
rapturous, amazed
needing neither food nor sleep.
We are kings beneath a humble cloak.

And for this we say thank you God.
And so it is! Amen.

Related posts

Find great lessons related to this article in the posts below

Recommended Reading

The Green Hero: Early Adventures of Finn McCool by Bernard Evslin
Meeting the Shadow: the Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, eds.

Image credits

Images are free for commercial use and sourced from Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons.  Thank you to the following image artists

Man on phone
Finn McCool Comes to Aid the Fianna, Stephen Reid, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Children in Togo
Ralph Waldo Emerson, User:Scewingderivative work: 2009, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sponsor

Thank you to my sponsor, Center for Spiritual Awakening, for supporting this week’s lesson.