That person. You know that person, the one who craves spiritual knowledge. They read all the ancient books in the library and pick your brain about what they read. They’re always picking the wrong organ even after reading instructions on shutting off the brain. That person? That person needs spiritual knowledge like adolescent Jeremy needed Star Wars action figures. “I want thaaaaat!” I’d scream at the TV every time a toy commercial came on. I’d waggle my finger at the television. I’m sure it was cute. Or alarming. One of the two.
But at least adolescent Jeremy knew enough to say “want” and not “need.” Or perhaps didn’t know enough. Perhaps I did need those things, because… lightsabers!
In any event, when toy commercials interrupted my daily cartoon binging, my appetite for all things play-worthy came surging up my gut and out my throat with the rapidity of a starving vampire flying into a ballroom full of throbbing, open-collared necks. “I want thaaaaat!” Especially Star Wars. Above and beyond all else, Star Wars. I craved every insignificant figure, every last play set. It was more than an appetite, it was an insecurity. I needed to own it all in order to complete the picture. I needed the new, the latest plastic thing. And I needed the old, too, by reenacting scenes from the movies. I also needed the ability to show off to my friends who might not have the latest, the greatest, the best.
Craving toys was more than an appetite, more than an insecurity. Craving was fear. Fear that I did not own, did not have, was not enough, was incomplete. These toys would complete me, I thought. Except they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Because there were always more of them to come.
When I outgrew my desire for toys I transferred that lust onto more mature things. Career moves, at first. Spiritual knowledge, eventually. Same fear behind it all. Only the forms changed.
That person. I was that person, once.
We’ve all been that person in one form or another and most of us still are. Still are craving. Still are craving satiation from the appetite of a hole we cannot feed. And we’re cunning about it now, many of us, because we know what we are. Consciously know. We are fear in recognition of itself as a hole and as denial of wholeness. We say, “I really want to be awake” as a means to not wake up. We read spiritual tomes to keep being the person who reads spiritual tomes. In other words, the preoccupation with spiritual awakening—the craving it—is one way that the mind, self-aware of its own fears, disowns them. As Yoda might caution: Awaken… you shall not.
The hole will never be whole no matter what the self commands. If you’re that person, then be that. Don’t run from you. Observe you in action. See if allowing yourself to watch yourself without judging has a magical undoing of its own.