In our greed for the roses we are already wedded to the thorns.

In our greed to end or transcend greed, we don’t recognize that in the very pulse of its desperation coils the pure and primal heart of our real need.

Excessive appetite is best approached not with the tyranny of repressive regimes, dietary and otherwise, nor with the permissiveness of myopic tolerance, but rather with a compassion capable of diving so deep into the dark of greed that it finds therein the pearl of bare need.

Shrinking from the thorns, burying them in numb flesh, or storing them in cognitive waste dumps not only strands us from their teachings, their messages, their pointers, but also exaggerates our craving for the roses. Trying to bypass pain simply tightens greed’s grasp on us, partially because we’re then not sufficiently present to truly face our greed.

Greed is all about having to have something so strongly that it has us, owns us, runs us. The repulsion that greed ultimately feels toward its object -- and itself too -- as it enters satiation often gets defused through the activation of guilt, wherein self-indulgence and self-castigation coexist in a stalemate that permits the “transgression” to continue. One hand grabs the goodies, while the other wields a parental whip. No discipline -- just a knee-jerk punishment ensuring that guilt will continue. Greed has no conscience, other than guilt.

There’s something grubby about greed, something dirty, swollen, redly suctorial. Orality in extremis. Just as fear has a certain smell, so does greed. Sweaty and dense. Greed stinks -- and how could it not, when it is so full of shit? Of course, greed can also get all dressed up, including in spiritual robes, and it can also greedily gargle greed-disguising products, so that it appears respectable -- a little driven perhaps, but what’s so wrong with wanting to get ahead? When an entire culture makes a virtue out of greed, it’s easy to confuse greed with need. We may talk, in a pseudo-spiritual context, of “having it all” -- without noticing that we are then simply sacralizing our greed.

Still, there is a pressure to get rid of the more unattractive manifestations of greed, like addictiveness, and this drive toward “cleanliness” -- polluted with puritanical, just-say-no zeal -- rubs us the wrong way, inflaming our rebelliousness, healthy and otherwise, thereby just creating more garbage, more filth, more addiction, more desperation, more neurotic compartmentalization, and, of course, more guilt. Garbage -- there’s such an accelerating abundance of it, an outcast piecemeal archipelago munching away at the fringes of suburbia and our manufactured sanity, piling up and up, spilling out of our dreams -- toilet bowls overflowing, sewers surfacing, plumbing malfunctioning -- and poisoning our streams, squatting with increasing immensity in our headquarters, towering over the latest remedies for the mess we have made and are making. From tool-maker to garbage-maker -- an epitaph already half-downloaded.

We waste that to which we won’t cease clinging, if only by squeezing and sucking the vitality out of it. In our compulsion to hang on to and own what we love, we destroy it, crushing it in our well-meaning grip until it’s just more garbage, however nostalgically or romantically framed. It is easy to get caught up in rearranging and redecorating our junkyard, diligently deodorizing or ignoring the mounting rot, instead of digging out its diamonds and letting the entire load of it be fertilizer for the roses, both outer and inner. Truly an unshitty thing to do with shit. And is not much of contemporary culture little more than compost waiting to be discovered, running from its worms?

Have what you have lightly, or else it will likely have you, and not so lightly. At the same time, however, don’t make a problem out of attachment -- getting attached to being nonattached is the dirty underwear of spiritual finery. Excessive distance from our appetites maroons us from their teachings. The prudish are not able to illuminate the must in lust because of their fear of getting in that close -- the thorns just might prick them!

We may pride ourselves on not being prudish, but are not just about all of us spiritual prudes, shying away from our innate lust for the Divine, our hard-wired hunger for the Holy, our greed for the Supremely Edible?

There is nothing necessarily polite or neatly ordered about ecstasy, love of Life, or real spirituality; there is nothing necessarily sexless or passionless about awakening from our psychospiritual slumber. Awakening thus is the greatest and the most consuming of passions, the most succulently engaging and nakedly alive -- and nourishingly difficult -- of passions, finding its optimal flowering in the unabashed presence of attachment, need, and intimacy. Full-blooded Awaring.

So dive in, for God’s Sake. Through doing so you will soon enough know what to keep and what to release. The less the luggage, the easier the travelling. But easier said than done. We cannot truly let go of something unless we have already had it, really had it -- or been intimate with it -- in the first place. And to get thus intimate, we have to dive in, get involved, get messy, get attached, hooked, greedy, and all the rest of it -- otherwise, we won’t develop the needed ripeness for letting go. In short, we have to flesh it out before it can give up the ghost. Homesteading on the Edge.

Our task is not to create our destiny, but rather to live in a manner that reveals it.

So dive in before paralysis again seizes the reins -- better to have jumped in and gotten hurt than to have withered all safe and bleached and brittle in logjams of shore-hugging prevarication. We have a date with greed, both our own and our collective greed, and it’s a date we’d do better to deliberately show up for than to skip or cancel. However repulsive our greed is to us, it is there to be known, and we cannot fully do so from a distance. Instead of recoiling from its touch, take it by the hand and introduce it to a different land, where Being is more central than having.

The estrangement from Being that characterizes contemporary culture breeds greed, its wannahaves and gottahaves giving consumption a bad name. Even the most pleasing satiation is not enough, being haunted by a craving for -- and a subterranean doubting of -- its repetition; even the most sophisticated technical advances retreat before the loneliness moaning in the wake of their latest upgrades; even religious rituals do little more than spoon out some release from the very distress they have helped create through, among other things, reducing God to a superparental pinup. With such an abundance of dissatisfaction, is it any wonder that we are so hungry, so greedy, so fixated on “more” as our core mantra?

The good news is that dissatisfaction can catalyze a hunger for more than more -- a hunger to discover the root of suffering and the root of true satisfaction. A quality quest. Dissatisfaction, however, far more commonly inspires not Awakening, but only a craving to be successfully distracted from our suffering, preferably as pleasurably as possible. So long as we adopt a problematic orientation to dissatisfaction, we remain seducible by whatever best reassures and entertains us -- and such entertainment includes the “horror” stories of the news, the threatening implications of which necessitate even greater doses of cultural and personal anesthesia.

The tremendous chaos of our era, with its crazily accelerating changes, avalanching stress, and time-obsessed social mycelia, provides extremely fecund conditions for cutting through the infectious case of mistaken identity of which dissatisfaction -- the mother of greed -- is an inevitable byproduct. This may be the Kali Yuga -- the age of darkness -- but it also is a time of unparalleled opportunity. It’s all here all at once, not just metaphysically or archetypically, but literally -- different traditions, different times and styles, almost all uprooted and thrown together in a dreamlike bazaar, a global supermarket between the vast walls of which ricochets the feeding frenzy of runaway consumerism, glazed with hope and sticky with greed, swinging between dilettantism and obsession. It’s as if the whole planet is now just one gigantic garage sale, inviting us to shop until we drop, beneath the plastic skies of good buys.

But instead of complaining about all the insanity -- and such complaining is itself just more insanity -- or glossing it over with “new paradigm” babblings, we can use it and its fertile chaos, its hybrid vitality, its bewildering turbulence, its underground hunger, to help real sanity take firm root. This means going without pacifiers and alibis, taking a stand in which crisis is not bombed, defoliated, drugged, or jailed, but rather is taken as a gift.

We won’t get any real satisfaction until we befriend our dissatisfaction.

How can we be fulfilled -- filled full -- when we are already stuffed, crammed, filled up with what we take to be ourselves? Thank God for the thorns, as they prick the bubble of our gotta-have-it identity and its resident greed, leaving us sufficiently spacious to truly appreciate the roses.