What We Feel We Cannot Do Without — The Energy of Addictive Cravings

The energy of craving attempts to fill an empty inner space with a false solution to the problem of emptiness and incompleteness. This feeling of emptiness at root arises from the perceived separation from our own Divine core. Such perceived separation can leave what feels like an energetic ‘hole’ in our being, one that feels like it must be filled. Nevertheless, this sense of inner necessity, based in pain, is a false perception. One can, in fact, wait in the emptiness and with the emptiness until the correct means to fill it appears. One can wait in trust.

What makes such waiting possible is the presence of the force of divine Love. Such Love intercepts the craving, making it bearable. It helps to separate us from the craving and the craving from us. Love is the balm that inserts itself between our conscious perception and the raw pain we may feel. It is a healing salve that soothes the burning ache where the absence of what feels most essential can be felt. In the presence of divine Love, we can wait for fulfillment.

The craving caused by the pain of emptiness leads to many different strategies. We use food to fill emptiness; drugs and alcohol to fill emptiness; sex, wealth, success, illusions of youth, and even destructive relationships to fill emptiness. All of these are efforts to cope with an inner pain which at times may feel unbearable.

One may ask how this experience of divine Love can be felt or acquired. The answer lies in all the routes that true spiritual activity may lead to, for any contact with the Divine that is of sufficient depth will lead to the experience of divine Love, even though it may be called by a different name. Therefore, the pursuit, in depth, of any spiritual path will lead to that which fills the inner emptiness in a true way, not a way that perpetuates the longing.

The healing of emptiness through the immediacy of Divine contact takes place as the longing self receives assurance that it is not alone and that it has always been loved. Such a powerful assurance can come from even the most momentary experience of the Divine, even from the briefest contact. This experience invisibly begins to fill the ‘hole’ that separation has created, lessening the terrible pain and reducing the craving.

An experience of the Divine can come in many ways and forms. Words are not necessary. Lightning bolts are not necessary. A revelation of other worlds is not necessary. Even an experience of happiness or joy is not necessary in a conscious way. For joy can exist unconsciously in the presence of the Divine. Joy can transform the self without the self knowing how it is being transformed or even that it is being transformed.

The healing of emptiness through the immediacy of Divine contact takes place as the longing self receives assurance that it is not alone and that it has always been loved.

What an experience of the Divine conveys is the awareness of truth, the truth of oneself and the truth of the Divine. Truth is the understanding of the perfection of what is amidst the frailty and imperfection of what is. It is the recognition of the eternal nature of our being in the presence of that which is temporal and only a surface aspect of who we are. It is the recognition that the universe was created in love and that we are part of that creation.

Such truth seeps into the heart and awakens it to itself. It unites the heart more completely with the soul. Truth brings relief from emptiness and eliminates cravings. Its joy lives in silence, the silence of the depth of one’s own being that is, at the same time, the being of All that Is.

Those who seek to fill emptiness with outer things, people, situations, or substances, must take from this the understanding that what the heart most deeply craves is unity with the rest of life. What it craves is a return to its spiritual origins. This is the truth of human experience based on our history of separation. It is longing for the path of return that begins the journey home.