Excessive Desires

Excessive Desires

Excessive desire for fame, riches, or pleasure can be the cause of many of our negative emotions if these emotions are not under our restraint. For example, if our hopes, dreams, and ambitions for fame, or wealth are not coming our way, we are overcome with sadness and depression. We have feelings of rejection, not being good enough; we wallow in self-pity and deep feelings of inferiority. All this takes up a lot of our mental, physical and emotional time. We get stuck in depression, and isolation for months at a time. Some of us can take prescribed medication, illegal drugs or alcohol to off set these feelings and it works temporarily.

The emotions of fear, hope, desire, envy, anger, hatred, all work in us when we focus on the temporal things that we believe will give us happiness. If we take any person in the music or movie businesses that have come to the level of fame, will find it very difficulty to have a private and normal life. Many are controlled by their fame, so they will do what ever is necessary to keep their image in the lime light.

Why is fame so wanted by all of us? What is underneath this desire? I believe what we are reaching for is approval. The desire for approval and fear of rejection operates in all of us. As children we are applauded for taking our first step, our first successful potty experience, tying our shoe laces is a big event. In time we learn that all of our approval comes from outside of us, which is good and important in our early development; however, as we grow older this desire for external approval never stops. All the negative emotions stem from this ambitious desire for approval.

True self-approval is innate in most of us, it’s written in our spiritual DNA: unfortunately, we don’t know how to find it or apply it. Fortunately, there is a way and the way is through the ideas of Spinoza and Gurdjieff. So seek it!