The structure of human will regarding satisfaction is a key to the process of healing. The human organism has a biological basis for satisfying hunger it’s also true that humans have a psychological pattern that links craving and hunger. There is a polarity between the biological necessity of hunger pangs and the psychological patterns around cravings. The psyche experiencing cravings keys off of hunger and due to freedom in the will in the soul, the biology of hunger becomes desire. Part of the soul life is free from the biological necessity of the organism. This freedom is the doorway to soul transformation. The soul is the source of the free forces that in turn can become the source of desire. In its root desire is the will to win or get something or have it and hold it. Desire and craving is what could be called the personal will to do or to have some thing rather than just to be. Hunger, as a biological necessity is about just being. So craving is something that goes beyond simply being into the realm of desire. So if we’re not getting what we need, then what’s built into the soul is this craving to be satisfied. However, at its root desire has a connection to hunger, and we can work on it that way.

We can move desire back into a lawfulness and away from a craving by paying attention to what the hunger is about. If we pay attention to what the hunger is about, the craving will be satisfied. Then we still have the hunger, which we must have, but the craving does not drive us into deeper and deeper dilemmas of dissatisfaction. So from one point of view the difficulty in the soul, is the desire in the will in the astral body. So in the astral body, will manifests as “I’m not getting what I need”, we could say. Or “I got what I need but now I want more of it”, whatever the variation. And the manifestation of that in the soul is “I will get it. And if I can’t get it, I will substitute something so that I get the feeling like I’m getting it, because I must have the satisfaction”. You know, like “I can’t get no” of yesteryear. So if we’re not satisfied, everyone else around us probably will also not be satisfied, and we will live in a world of dissatisfaction. We’ll live in a universe of dissatisfaction, because the only thing we will have in common with other beings is dissatisfaction.

Desire is a peculiar thing in the will, because it has a biological root that’s objectively given to humans by the hierarchies. But because of Lucifer and Ahriman and the intervention of physical forces with desire, the will force in the soul has been conditioned to just go out and overcome things and is tinged with personal desire. The will in the realm of life is just urge which has to do with “I’m hungry”. My urge is to eat. “I’m sleepy”. My urge is to go to sleep. “I’m thirsty”. My urge is to go get a drink. But then that urge gets connected to desire, then the will shifts away from simple hunger pangs to craving. And then in the craving, the hunger is not the issue anymore; because your hunger can be satisfied, but your desire is much more difficult to satisfy. This is, then, overeating or over drinking or over doing mostly anything. A basic biological fact becomes the monkey on the back, because the will that’s connected to the basic biology has been conditioned in the soul to craving.

Essentially we are engaged in the same acts of, for instance, eating. But instead of having the soul experience, I eat and then I’m satisfied; it’s I eat and I’m still not satisfied. And there’s a great esoteric mystery in that.