This quip is sometimes attributed to early 20th-century comedian W. C. Fields:
It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.
I quit smoking in my 20’s and had some of W. C. Field’s experience, having tried to quit many times before. There came a point where I simply dropped it and did something else. It was that simple.
I tell people who are wrestling with smoking, Just take up aerobic exercise. You will curse every cigarette you’ve ever smoked. That was my experience.
Here’s what I think goes on for smokers. There’s a natural hunger in the body. Yes, a hunger for food. But the body has a hunger for more than that. It is hungry for air, and thirsty for water in a healthy balance throughout the body.
The body is also hungry for the stimulation of life current. That can happen through aerobic exercise and in other ways. The body wants to live, move in space, and do physical things. It desires to be an active part of the natural world and to thrive.
For a smoker, that natural hunger in the body can be turned towards nicotine and the experience of that long drag on a cigarette. So the person feels hungry for a smoke. And one cigarette doesn’t do it. How many will it take? Ingesting nicotine is ultimately unsatisfying. So the person can become a chain smoker, hungry for the fulfillment they look for in a cigarette, but never fulfilled.
A person can wrestle with that, as many do, and as I did at times, long ago. But until the natural hunger of the body is turned toward what satisfies—to something healthy, which is life itself—the person is fighting the hunger of the body when they attempt to quit smoking. They are denying the hunger instead of turning it toward something life-giving, and ultimately to life itself.
How much sense does that make? They end up fighting with themselves. So somehow, a person has to take that hunger and turn it toward what stimulates the body in a life-giving way, in a way that is in accordance with how the body is designed.
I’m not criticizing anybody for smoking. I’m not even attempting to convince anyone not to smoke, though I know it is an unhealthy habit. In fact, I would say that if you are a person who smokes, please enjoy it as much as possible. If you are going to smoke, enjoy smoking! And if you do that, you might have the best chance of stopping smoking.
As long as you are fighting with yourself—smoking, criticizing yourself for smoking, trying not to, but still hungering for it, and not turning that hunger to something else, you end up being divided inside.
The goal of this Pulse of Spirit isn’t focused on assisting people with a smoking addiction. But these issues highlight dynamics that run all through the human experience. There is a hunger in us all. It is ultimately a hunger for the forces of Creation that lie within us—the animation of life, the power of Love, and the light of Being.
Jesus said this is the Beatitudes:
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Matthew 5:6
Something gets lost in translation because it can sound like we should be hungering and thirsting after being good. But what is the spiritual hunger that can be filled? It is the right use of our human capacity as a vessel for the activating powers of Creation that are within us.
These lyrics are from the wildly popular Christian song The Blessing. They are from the Book of Numbers.
The Lord bless you and keep you,
Make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you,
The Lord turn His face toward you
And give you peace.
These words give the idea that blessing comes when the Lord chooses to turn toward us and shine his beneficence upon us. It’s understandable that it might seem that way. But is that really how this works?
If these lyrics allude to the sun as a metaphor for the radiant Love of the Creator, that’s not how the sun works. If we don’t feel the sunshine, perhaps it is nighttime and we are on the side of our planet that is turned away from the sun. Or perhaps there are clouds in the way. But the sun is always shining.
It is a beautiful song, one of my favorites. But the Lord doesn’t need to make his face shine upon us. It already is. It always is. We may have to turn around and face him to receive his blessing and to receive his peace.
It’s like smoking. We can hunger after things that don’t satisfy us. We can find ourselves facing those things in a way that takes us away from being available to feel Love shining down upon us. And it’s a subtle issue, isn’t it? There are practical activities that you might engage in to turn your face to the Highest Love—prayer, meditation, worship, or whatever it might be. Ultimately, the issue isn’t a practical one. It might have practical dimensions, but it is something far more essential than that. It is about something spiritual. And it involves a change of heart so that the heart itself opens to the source of Higher Love that’s constantly available to us. When we turn, our hunger and our thirsting are for that Love, and we are fulfilled.
While this process involves our emotional capacity, it is governed by spiritual law, the One Law of cause and effect. This law begins with something that is not anything we do, as a human being. It begins with the radiation of Love. It’s the Lord’s face shining down upon us, as it does always. The next step is response. But for that to occur, our hearts have to turn to the source of Love’s radiation and receive it. We have to let it in. Because a Higher Love can radiate all it wants, but until we receive that Love it has no effect on us.
You can try to make yourself respond to Love. But if you haven’t received it, there’s nothing for you to respond to. You are not taking in what you are hungry for.
If you let Love in, I dare you to try not to respond! I think it would be hard. Isn’t that how it is when Love touches our hearts?
Radiation. Response. The next step is Attraction. If we have received that radiation of Love shining like the sun, we are drawn to it. We want to come closer to it.
Attraction moves to union. That’s what happens if that Love, shining like the sun, comes into you and you receive it. You come close to it. You have union with it, and you become it.
I am that sun in my world. I am the ordering power of Love.
That brings us to the last step, which is Unified Radiation. I am radiating with Love, as Love. I am co-creating with the Divine in my world. I have become that for my world.
Now this idea could be the subject of all kinds of pretense. I’m so spiritual. Or I am so good. So loving. I’m so this or that or whatever—all kinds of egoic things. Yes, we understand people go there. But just because it’s possible to take spirituality in an egoic way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t embrace it in a true way.
I heard a story yesterday of someone who was reflecting on their opportunity to express and embody the Divine. They took the attitude I’m imperfect, so how could I express God?
That’s not the attitude we take in the rest of life. If I didn’t take anything on that I couldn’t do perfectly, I wouldn’t get out of bed.
In the working of the One Law, we reach a threshold. Radiation. Response. Attraction. And then we cross the threshold to join with the radiation of a Higher Love. Union. And then, Unified Radiation.
Prior to crossing that threshold, we feel the hunger of our human soul to touch and know the Divine. As long as we are alive that hunger is present, whether or not it is fulfilled. But something happens to our hunger when we cross the threshold and know ourselves as an expression and embodiment of the Divine.
Do you think God has hunger? Does God have desire? If so, what would it be?
It is the desire to enter the world. It is the hunger to be let into the human heart and to know and love human beings all the way through. It is the desire to be allowed to bring peace to the world and to create happiness and joy for human beings. It is the desire to bring healing.
Do you ever feel that hunger on behalf of the Creator? That deep, deep desire for the people around you and the world in which you live?
This is another kind of hunger, not just the desire of the human soul. It is the hunger and desire of the Creator. Have you ever felt it? Perhaps as a deep wish for the well-being of the people close to you? Or as a profound desire for something far better for all humankind? That just might be the will of God that you have touched. It might have entered you, and you might have joined with it so you feel it too.
Have you ever been with another person and wanted peace and happiness for them so bad you didn’t know what to do? Or watched the morning news and thought, Oh my God, I do not want that for this world. I’m hungry for something different. Sometimes I experience that hunger as a power that wants to move through me into the world.
These are experiences we begin to have as we move over the threshold to an experience of Union and Unified Radiation. A different kind of hunger, will, and desire moves through us.
The lion is a symbol of the Christ Spirit. The lion’s presence, power, and majesty remind us of it. When Unified Radiation moves through us, perhaps we feel God’s hunger as the roar of a lion. The reverberation of the Christ Spirit moves through our being. This is the Cosmic Aum. Here is how Paramahansa Yogananda described it:
God manifests in creation as the Cosmic Vibration, which expresses itself as Cosmic Sound and Cosmic Light. The Cosmic Sound or Aum is the synthesis of all the sounds of the highly vibrating life forces…
The Cosmic Sound is spoken of in the Christian Bible as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1] The Word or Aum came from God; He manifests as the Cosmic Vibration in creation.
This is the roar of the Christ Spirit. Crossing the threshold, we speak with that roar, the reverberation of creative power resonating at many levels of our being. It is full of the Divine desire for peace for all people, all families, all nations, and for joy to the world.
Knowing the hunger for this, we know that nothing less than this will satisfy it. No cigarette, no food, no drink, or anything else other than this.
Peace on earth and goodwill for all.