Spiritual version of lust and greed

[loostudent]

Lust (closely related also to gluttony) and greed (closely related also with pride/vanity and envy). The spiritual version of these seems to be entirely neglected in various studies of vices. They always connect vices with lack of spirituality, overbalance or perversion of something in the "garden of earthly delights" ...

I took me a lot of time to discern the spiritual version of lust and greed as spiritualism with lack of love and joy of union with the Creator. Lust is curiosly indulging in knowledge of supernatural/hidden and greed is yearning for the occult power. It seems to be a disease common among adepts.
It is also implied in some writings, for example:

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. (1 Cor 13)

This entity [Aleister Crowley] became, may we use the vibration sound complex, overstimulated with the true nature of things. This over-stimulation resulted in behavior that was beyond the conscious control of the entity. (Ra, 18.11)

Recently I've discovered more extensive insight into this in autobiographic book by C. S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy). He was introduced to the occult by Miss C. - his matron in school:

She was (as I should now put it) floundering in the mazes of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition /.../ I had loved to read of strange sights and other worlds and unknown modes of being, but never with the slightest belief /.../ But now, for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since--the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians /.../ The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread /.../ Dear Miss C. had been the occasion of much good to me as well as of evil. For one thing, by awakening my affections, she had done something to defeat that anti-sentimental inhibition which my early experience had bred in me. Nor would I deny that in all her "Higher Thought", disastrous though its main effect on me was, there were elements of real and disinterested spirituality by which I benefited. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, the good effects withered and the bad ones remained.

He then abandoned Christian faith and later he became atheist and materialst. This lasted until his materialist view was shaken by some occult writers and reawakened his old passion:

I must do myself the justice of saying that I did not give my assent categorically. But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism. It was merely a "Perhaps". Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all, "something else"; and (oh reassurance!) perhaps it had nothing to do with Christian Theology. And as soon as I paused on that "Perhaps", inevitably all the old Occultist lore, and all the old excitement which the Matron at Chartres had innocently aroused in me, rose out of the past.

Now the fat was in the fire with a vengeance. Two things hitherto widely separated in my mind rushed together: the imaginative longing for Joy, or rather the longing which was Joy, and the ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the Occult, the Preternatural as such /.../ If there had been in the neighbourhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac.

In actual fact I was wonderfully protected, and this spiritual debauch had in the end one rather good result. I was protected, first, by ignorance and incapacity. Whether Magic were possible or not, I at any rate had no teacher to start me on the path. I was protected also by cowardice; the reawakened terrors of childhood might add a spice to my greed and curiosity as long as it was daylight. Alone, and in darkness, I used my best endeavours to become a strict Materialist again; not always with success. A "Perhaps" is quite enough for the nerves to work upon. But my best protection was the known nature of Joy. This ravenous desire to break the bounds, to tear the curtain, to be in the secret, revealed itself, more and more clearly the longer I indulged it, to be quite different from the longing that is Joy. Its coarse strength betrayed it. Slowly, and with many relapses, I came to see that the magical conclusion was just as irrelevant to Joy as the erotic conclusion had been. Once again one had changed scents. If circles and pentangles and the Tetragrammaton had been tried and had in fact raised, or seemed to raise, a spirit, that might have been--if a man's nerves could stand it--extremely interesting; but the real Desirable would have evaded one, the real Desire would have been left saying, "What is this to me?"

[AnthroHeart]

Lust and any temptation I learned is caused by the Limbic system, which releases dopamine, which causes arousal and temptation, but no reward on its own.

It is held at bay by the Prefrontal Cortex, which provides reasoning and forward-thinking. The Limbic system, which includes the amygdala is where emotions come from. It provides a fight or flight response, which can be triggered quite easily depending on how large the Limbic system has grown. To grow spiritually one needs to work on their prefrontal cortex. The Limbic system has no clue about consequences. It is primitive compared to the prefrontal cortex.

[xise]

What's your definition of lust?

[Stranger]

This is not my original idea, but it makes sense to me that lust, greed, and other distortions of love are attempts by the incarnated, veiled soul to recapture in some form the blessings it enjoyed when it was One with the Creator. But we live in a world of shadows, so unless we rediscover our spiritual selves, we can only end up grasping at shadows and think it's the best we can get.

Lust can then be understood as a shadow of Love - whereas Love is a deep connection and harmonious union with another-self, lust without love is superficial, shallow, unsatisfying - like eating a cardboard cutout of a hamburger instead of the real thing, and this probably why the hunger known as lust generates more of the same, instead of satisfying, when a green-ray transfer is not present.

Along the same lines, lust is also a powerful expression of feeling incomplete without something external. Within Illusion, the self appears to need all kinds of things from external reality - our natural tendency is to look for most solutions "out there." In Reality, of course, everything we need is within, and our real work is to identify and remove the blockages inside ourselves which prevent us from receiving or accessing it.

Greed can be seen as missing and craving the effortless abundance of Creation as it exists beyond the veil -- an abundance which also provides the sense of security of always having everything you need.

[rva_jeremy]

What a wonderful passage! That is probably the best testament I've ever read to what I've seen described as spiritual materialism -- the fixation on the phenomenon of spirituality rather than the substance. I find it strange to describe it as "lust" since lust seems so overwhelmingly physical and visceral, but if one had natural talent to perceive the metaphysical it could easily be like that, I'm sure.

For what it's worth, there might be no more central question on the spiritual path than "what is this to me?" The discovery of true desire is always what the Confederation returns to in their messages.