lust & hunger
For the longest time, I have wondered the nature of true hunger. The sharp and sudden urge prompts possibly to consume for sustenance. Or could it more often just as the Japanese describes it, kuchi samishii—that the mouth is feeling a bit, lonely? Lately, I have come to distinguish these innate sensations by my mental and somatic natures. And so the frequency of eating thrice a day has also become unnecessary to me. Frankly, for all that humanity has forced nature (or environment) to adapt to us, many have failed to see the human body as the most immediate environment to be conquered. For one has control over its vessel, the mind can be freed from absolute control.
This notion surfaced as I examined eating habits and accompanying behaviours which in retrospect, are mostly done for the sake of pleasure rather than survival. Moderate indulgence is certainly essential but such thing being normalised as hedonism is not rarely observed either. By feeling hungry, it refers to the de facto desire to pleasure-seek. Pleasure-seeking at its peak is the lost of imperium when facing external stimulants; and to lose control is to lose one’s true self. True hunger should instead be, the the slow yet steadily burning will to survive, and stay feeling alive. Staying fulfilled indefinitely is the antithesis of living as all that the mind would be saturated is nil. Therefore, one can introduce a little vacuum for the benefit of generating spaciousness through intentionally staying hungry. Because once true depletion is felt and yet you have miraculously survived, you will be eating not because you have sensed the need to but on contrary, the will to do so.
The art of staying hungry is concordantly, not to sustain it by suppression but to have hunger become concomitant. By reducing the desire to the purpose of survival grants possibilities in redirecting it elsewhere, such as conquest. By creating vacancy, new information and ideas can be accepted in larger quantity and greater varieties. By having one be pre-occupied, the person can hence move onto conquering by letting others conquer oneself.
Two types of ownership exist in the general. One is to perfect a circle by piecing back lost fragments. This kind of perfection is rigid and finite by allowing presets in mindsets. Its maintenance of statue quo is futile because the entity must previously be complete, therefore be a perfect idea before its perfection, leading to self-contradiction and stagnation in progress. The other form of ownership is expansionism by absorption. Yet, this is by no mean pure imperialism and the best form of absorption require digesting and refining it into one’s use in lieu of merely inclusion. Just like how the Romans have conquered the lands and seas of Greece, Hellenic cultures and wisdom have also captured and influence the empire by being an asset. The true battle for superiority ended when the captor started being pragmatic in creating domains for the new before encompassing it through dominion. The willingness of creating a vacuum for integration is far from being vacuous for it is essentially the art of crafting a framework for magnitude. If true hunger is the state of availability, then true lust is the state of readiness.
Bloodlust, wanderlust, or just the common lust are manifestations of emptiness. They are also pivotal factors in over-indulgence. As the void can be filled easily as it can be overfilled to the exacerbation of an even bigger void, licentiousness is the all-sucking blackhole swallowing desires along with the soul. Complementing aimless hunger, lust can push boundaries to the extreme or it can expands like wildfire in torching all in contact into barrenness. Unlike hunger, lust exhibits with a sense of false happiness, at least temporarily. It is akin to prompting solution by instigating problems, which strays one further from objective truth. In truth, veritable happiness can only be generated intrinsically. To be contented far exceeds being patched constantly with wine and roses, because contentment is not simply having the needs fulfilled but being in sync with one’s purpose. Needless to say, this is just me with the hunger and lust for meaning in an empty world.
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