How is it that people like David Koresch, or Jim Jones, or saints and popes, and even Mother Theresa, can all hook people into believing what they are selling? Easy: they hook people on the drug of their own desires. But any desire to fulfill one's desires - including and perhaps especially the desire to fulfill a desire "that nothing in this world can possibly satisfy" - is simply an outright rejection of a willingness to "die to self."
ISIS, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, fill their ranks with willing "believers" and even terrorists the same way, with war, misery, and abject poverty only helping to increase that desire by robbing people of the most basic of life's necessities, including any hope for a better future (at least here on earth).
But from the Catholic Church to the cults of Charlie Manson and David Koresch, people's addiction to always wanting "more" is not only the drug that hooks consumers to the need for ever more fashionable consumption, but fills the pews of churches around the world every Sunday with "believers" seeking "the desire that nothing in this world can possibly satisfy," as C.S. Lewis once described God and heaven.
That "desire" for more not only cost Adam & Eve the garden of Eden, but it also cost Lucifer his position at the head of God's army of angels. In fact, it even lead the Sanhedrin to crucify Christ, since Jesus was certainly not as much of a "messiah" as the Sanhedrin clearly "desired." Indeed, the Catholic Church condemns envy as one of the seven deadly sins, even as our "desire" to live forever in Heaven with a God amounts to the fulfillment of the culmination of every envy a person could ever have.
In contrast to using and encouraging our "desire" for ever more, the way Christianity does so shamelessly when it defends its "God" with the "argument from desire," Eastern philosophies take the opposite approach. Rather than promising people that their deepest desires will all be fulfilled by God in heaven, which only encourages the covetous nature that serves as the engine of consumer Capitalism, the philosophies from the east like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, preach that paradise can only be reached by learning to let go of all of our desires.
Our desires, after all, are the soul of selfishness, even if that desire is for God, or heaven, or certainly for eternal life. And perhaps one of our most selfish desires is that our identity exist eternally, even if that identity must do so in another body, or with no body at all. Yet all such desires are simply a refusal to accept the obliteration of our existence, our identity, and perhaps most of all, our ego. It is a desire, in other words, to be like God, just as much as it is a refusal to stop being purely human.
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