What you crave, whatever you crave, is not your problem. I crave food, you crave drugs, she craves risk, he craves power...it's all the same, really. Money, love, sex, shopping, gaming, gambling, alcohol, religious salvation, guidance from a "guru".... Just fill in the blank with your craving and let's move on.
Not sure whether you have a craving or what it is? Look at your check register and see how you spend your discretionary income. Better yet, look at how you spend income that you are choosing not to spend on food, shelter and other basic needs. There's your craving, swimming in a sea of your cash.
Whatever it is, this object of your addicted desire is just a substitute. If you are lucky or strong enough to, first, begin to see it as something in need of change and, then, manage to overcome your craving for it, you will likely just find an alternative to serve in its place. It's the blank that's our problem, not the substance with which we each fill it.
That blank -- that perception of yearning, yawning empty space within -- is the real, root problem.
My good friend, dictionary.com, tells me that the word emptiness means "containing nothing; destitute of some quality or qualities; devoid." That may seem like stating the obvious but it's that second phrase that grabs me by my psychological shirt-front and shakes me into awareness.
That image of being destitute of some qualities reveals to me that no amount of external stuff -- from food to salvation -- will fill this kind of emptiness. Qualities fairly shouts at me, "Look within!" Qualities opens its own personal thesaurus and shows me: attributes, traits, characteristics, values.
Surprise! That empty space is meant to be "empty," in the sense that it lacks nothing I can provide from the outside. It's a spring-fed well from which can pour the qualities of kindness, fairness, empathy, love, and grace. Every moment that I strive to fill it from without, I am simply dumping dirt into the source of that which could slake me, sate me, satisfy me beyond my imagining. All my effort to find what will fill me simply dams up the flow of that which would fill me effortlessly. I muddy my own waters and then have only sludge to spew into the world.
What was the moment in which I first lost my awareness of that inner flow of divine attributes? When did I first feel that there was an empty space to be filled? I'm certain it was within my earliest years. When did I begin silting this glorious well within?
When did you?
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