Natural and Unnatural Hungers
It’s been a hell of a weekend for any number of reasons, with a repeating theme—the difference between types of hunger.
As a sect, we don’t do the bizarre purity dynamics of Abrahamic religions. The sacred and the profane exist side by side, running through each other as they weave through life. The decaying corpse lies beside the rose, and in fact the decay drives the rose to bloom. The boundaries between them are blurry at best.
Much of what people consider to be problematic hungers are deeply natural hungers. The body needs food. The body needs rest. The body needs touch and intimacy. These things are inherent to existing as a person, and while you may be able to get away with refusing to provide some portion of those needs—intimacy is particularly popular for people to skip, often in part motivated by weird ideas about purity enmeshed in the Abrahamic religions—their existence is a part of the natural cycle. It is possible to get ‘full’, if temporarily (though if you’ve been putting it off for awhile, you may need to get good and tired of it first, so bring your Gatorade.)
The hunger goes through natural cycles of need and satiation.
If you lift the hood on the way Abrahamic religions treat those natural hungers, however, you start to run into a bunch of ideas about hunger that do not have that sort of safeguard. Religions of the book treat intimacy, in particular, as if it could never be satisfied.
In doing this, in taking something that is a natural hunger and investing it with the enormous energy of avoidance, sublimation, and pouring something very like hatred into it, the natural hunger distorts. It becomes something that cannot be satisfied, because the root of the hunger (that is the need for intimacy) is never acknowledged, treated, and allowed to be sated.
If you're paying attention, you’ll notice that some people have hungers that can never quite be sated. A popular way to avoid feeding a natural hunger (again, picking on intimacy) is to sublimate that into a desire for success—to take the natural yearning for intimacy and to deny that it exists, to deny it’s worth feeding, to deny that you might have a need in the first place, and to try and replace it with whatever satisfaction someone might get from an award at work. Other popular targets are the desire for money or even one of the other natural desires, leading to people overeating (say) to make themselves feel better about a lack of sleep or intimacy.
The hunger festers, and nothing satisfies. They drive themselves over and over to exhaustion chasing something that they resent for its inability to sate their hungers, but they will still do it because what else do they have.
Their hunger could be sated… if they were willing to do what it takes to acknowledge it.
Be very wary of people whose hunger cannot be sated, people who cannot acknowledge their hungers. They are always a skipped meal, metaphorically speaking, from eating you.
