Constant Cravings

Feature, By jimjazz, 23rd July, 2008

This month on Same Same, we’re putting religion and faith under the microscope. This week James Forbes takes a look at addiction and consumption and how constant cravings and capitalism have become our new spirituality.

Who are you? What do you do? Where do you live? What do you wear? Which brand are you?

In short, in this modern age of mindless consumption, you are at the mercy of a new and powerful god. This deity has its claws in your mind, your heart and your soul. It stalks you from the moment you wake until you drop at night. Throughout the day there are endless opportunities to pay homage to this force and relieve your self of anxiety and uncertainty by again taking consumptive communion.

Eckhart Tolle in his excellent tome, A New Earth describes it as the ultimate addiction, a paradox – “what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn’t work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.”

Today, in the West at least, Consumption is the new Christianity and beating at its heart is the Stock Exchange, a kind of financial Cathedral where numbers in companies are traded, called on, bought and sold, in a mad conflagration of disciples seduced by its voice, its possibility and its power.

At the same time traditional churches are consumed with their dogmatic creeds. They place human created texts before spiritual divinity and drive unholy wedges among humanity. Homosexuality is just the latest in a long line of unacceptable human practices that will incur god’s wrath on the day of judgment – according to them. The Church is nothing more than a corrupted shell supposedly representing a spiritual force greater than ourselves.

It is more like a franchise store that has broken its contract and has written its own operating manual. In the process, the very force it is supposedly representing has been subsumed behind a front of flashy bullshit where its new contract has taken over and enabled it to chase down and persecute all manner of humanity to whom it disagreed: Witches, Indigenous People all over the World, Slaves, Black people, Homosexuals.

The interesting thing about the expansion of the Christian Church is that it directly coincided with the colonisation of other cultures and the implanting of a Western culture and a claim to territory. The Spanish, French, Germans, Dutch, Portugese and English built a global empire combining Christianity and Capitalism. The very justification for many claims to territory was the belief that these colonial powers were saving these poor indigenous “savages” from a fate worse than death.

More frightening than a long history of collusion is the misguided belief that Church and State are actually separate. All western powers create their legitimacy for power under the banner of a Christian god. Even the European monarchies like Denmark which have stood for a thousand years are still an extension of the Roman Empire’s quest for unfettered control under the name of a god who could effectively render fear into the hearts of the people.

Today, in Australia, the Church pays no taxes and is immune from a vast array of laws including, as we all know, anti-discrimination legislation. It is something of an oddity that we still arrange our social rituals around a god that has no more legitimacy to being the “true” god – whatever that means – than Zeus or Apollo.

The teachings of Jesus Christ that tap into the true meaning of spirituality have been successively misrepresented through the years, as one disciple or other has written their account of what Jesus said and what, therefore, God must really mean.

Tolle notes, for example, that the word “sin” is originally a Greek word which meant to miss the mark, “so to sin is to miss the point of human existence.”

At its core it is about ego, pure and simple. The traditional concept of human behaviour being good or bad and propagated by the Christian Church over 2,000 years taps into the ego driven way of thinking very effectively to render its believers inert, fearful and driven by conflict, be that internally or externally.

This ego state relates back to our current consumption addiction, Tolle says, “No ego can last long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego more alive than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.”

Gill Edwards, a psychologist describes it this way: “Trying to be good stems from a dualistic way of thinking. It is based upon judgment, or conditional love. It fuels self-righteousness, which means someone is “in the right” and someone else is “in the wrong” – some part of self is right (the judge within), and another part is bad or wrong (our feelings, thoughts and desires). This inner conflict will be mirrored in conflict with others.”

It is this inner conflict which drives addiction. We medicate ourselves from the pain emanating from within, caused by a collection of emotional, physical and, possibly, sexual abuse.

Edwards goes on to say that, “Splitting ourselves internally leads to projecting our shadow onto others. This is the root of wars, terrorism, genocide, racism, sexism, family feuds, religious factions, scapegoating and most relationship difficulties.”

It was Jung who said: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.”

In other words if you don’t reconcile your shadow self, a process usually denied by addiction, you will continue to act out of blame and defensiveness and you will, for example, wonder why you keep meeting and going out with arseholes.

Gandhi said, “we need to be change we want to see in the world” and this could be viewed as when you love yourself and let go of past resentments and traumas, you emanate an energy forward into the world that people respond to. When you deride yourself internally and further mask your pain or fear with addictions – whatever they are – you send forth that energy into the world.

The Church has failed. It has failed to understand that true spiritual salvation comes from surrendering to a force greater than us. Not a man that sits in heaven with a big white beard and bearing down on us with judgment. This force is that which gave the universe life and it exists in everyone’s heart now; today.

Tolle notes, “Being ‘spiritual’ has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness. This, in turn, determines how you act in the world and interact with others.”

Try letting go of your need for things, put down the addictions that mask your heart and the life force that is there already and let your true light shine.

Nelson Mandela said in his inauguration speech as President of South Africa in 1994:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the universe. Your playing small doesn’t serve this world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the glory that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Other articles in the religion series:
God Loves You.
The Burning Times Revisited.
Devil Or Delusion?

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