Spirituality is strongest in addressing emotional matters. When I am feeling bad, my reason does not dominate — I am yet to have a conversation like this:
Sad: “I feel terrible.”
Happy: “Cheer up, friend, don’t worry about it. There are so many other fish in the ocean.”
Sad: “You are correct — what was I thinking! Now I feel better.”
So when we are depressed, we seek something deeper, something warmer than cold logic. This is why listening is usually the soundest advice:
Sad: “I feel terrible.”
Happy: “Why do you feel terrible?”
Sad: “Well…” [and here begins a long introspective journey]
But what if there is no one else to address? What if the problem is so personal (i.e. embarrassing) that the warm feeling of interpersonal contact is just not possible?
Here, most people will either
- weep without any idea of where to go or
- turn to spirituality, whether as religious texts or self-improvement papers.
I will here focus on item (2), leaving item (1) to suicide hotlines and qualified professionals.
So we devour spiritual or self-help texts. Upon reading what we find, there is a brief upwelling of energy, and the friction sparks the inner fire again. Seven hours of invincibility. But then, that very evening, the fire dies out again, and frantically we search the texts we had read for that spark. It goes on like this until we learn to cope.
In the title of the blog post, I use the term crush because here in America it is the adolescent’s introduction to the dichotomy of misery and invincibility, and the basic idea can be extended to all of life, on a larger scale. We are attached, both to the avoidance of our misery (“she doesn’t even know I exist”), and to the irrational pursuit of our victories (“I think we made eye contact”). And once it’s all over, the obsession fades, we are a bit wiser, and we avoid this irrational pursuit because we know how nasty the whole thing is.
That is precisely how the sages, great renouncers that they are, feel about materialism. Life is a crush on material objects, and we spend all our days weeping about our losses and gloating about our victories. So just as we learned as adolescents to detach ourselves from the objects of our romantic obsession in order to escape misery, so must we take a step back and detach ourselves from our current crush on material satisfaction in order to find the truth we all seek. Then we can dive back into the world, confident that we no longer have a crush on it.
I thought it would hypocritical of me to write this article without being completely detached myself, but I decided to go ahead with it because it raises an important introspective point.
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