..续本文上一页owest microbes up to those sublime spheres free from coarse materiality. Craving is threefold: craving for sensuality, for continued existence, and for annihilation or destruction.

　　Sensuous craving (kama-tanha) within that mighty river of which our verse speaks, is a powerful whirlpool dragging everything into its depth. The infinity of all craving appears here as the bottomless abyss which vainly longs for fullness and fulfillment. But though it ceaselessly sucks into itself the objects of desire, it can never find safety and peace. For like the hunger for food, this perpetual hunger of the senses daily craves afresh for gratification: "The senses are greedy eaters." The habit of daily sense gratification produces in us a horror vacui. We fear being left empty of sense experience, and this fear, an expression of the fear of death, stands dark and threatening behind each sensual craving as an additional driving force. We see starkly the partnership of fear and desire in the pathological avarice, the hectic grasping and clinging, of those old people so masterly described by Moliere and Balzac.

　　Driven by the burning sensation of a void within, by a feeling of constant lack and neediness, we try to suppress that painful sensation by swelling our ego. We strive to absorb into our ego what is non- ego or "alien"; we chase hectically and insatiably after sense enjoyment, possessions or power; we yearn to be loved, envied or feared. In short, we try to build up our "personality" — a persona, a hollow mask. But such attempts to satisfy sensual craving must fail. If the supposed ego expands its imagined boundaries, then, by the extension of its periphery, its points of contact with a hostile or tempting world also grow, inevitably bringing along a growth of both irritation and neediness.

　　One believes that by the mere gratification of lust what has been "appropriated" from the outside world of objects or persons becomes a part of the ego or its property, becomes "I" and "mine." But what the ego thus appropriates from outside it can never fully assimilate. There remains an undissolved alien residue which accumulates and slowly but deeply alters the structure of body and mind. This process will finally end in the disruption of the organism — in death. To some extent, this is normal, an ever-present process as it is also a formula for the intake and assimilation[9] of food. But if sensory craving grows excessive and becomes an uncontested, or only weakly contested, master, it may well happen that "the food devours the eater": that the craving and search for sensual nourishment becomes so dominant that it weakens other functions of the human mind, and just those which are most refined and distinctively human.

　　Unrestrained sensual craving makes a personality "featureless" and "impersonal"; it reduces human inpiduation and thus brings us into dangerous proximity to the animal level which is bare or poor of inpiduation. Specific sensual enjoyment may easily become habit-forming and even compulsive, again pulling us down to the animal level of instinctive behavior at the cost of conscious control. A life dominated by sensual craving may turn into a monotonous automaton of sense-stimulus, craving, and sense gratification. Uninhibited sensuality reduces our relative freedom of choice and may drag us, by way of rebirth, into subhuman realms of existence. We say this, not to moralize but to emphasize the psychological effects of sensual craving and to show its implications for our progress towards true human freedom, that is, towards an increase of our mindfully responsible moral choices.

　　In the threatening effacement of inpiduation, in the rapturous submergence of inpiduality at moments of highest passion — in these features sensual craving appro…

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