Does Greed Affect Your Life?
by José Stevens, Ph.D.
The impact of greed on your
health is obvious. Consuming too much is the scourge of modern Western culture.
Anything consumed beyond moderation becomes a destructive force, and Westerners
consume too much of everything. A great percentage of medical problems have
their source in food and drink disorders as well as in the inappropriate
consumption of drugs. Both anorexia and bulimia have serious health consequences
that often lead to death.
Eating disorders involve
rejection of yourself, anger, and a cycle of deprivation and self-gratification.
When you starve yourself in anorexia, you are saying, "I am undesirable at
any weight. I must not eat so I can lose weight and get what I want: Love and
attention. There is no weight that is acceptable. Therefore, I will starve until
I die and then I won't have a problem."
If you are bulimic, you experience
a cycle of eating and purging. The eating is gratifying, it temporarily relieves
tension, and it is often a release for a great amount of anger and frustration.
You may say, "I hate being deprived. I can't stand it. I'm going to have as
much as I want of anything." Immediately after splurging, you experience
remorse as well as self-rejection: "I'll lose love. I better lose weight. I
am unacceptable." Your purging begins with vomiting and then the cycle
moves on to rebellion and eating again.
However, food is not the only
thing you may over-consume. Greed causes you to risk everything for the sake of
acquisition. This acquisitiveness destroys the health of society and culture as
well as your own life. Cultures that consume more than their share of Earth's
resources doom themselves and other cultures to natural disasters and
eco-destruction. Greed on a national scale ruins the health of smaller economies
around the world. A small country that gives up its diversity, to provide a
single cash crop to meet the needs of a developed nation, is courting disaster.
Whose greed is this? The small country's or the developed nation's? Perhaps
both.
The impact on your creativity
The greed dragon waylays your
creativity by making your acquisition goals more desirable than your expression
goals. In their times, the great masters might never have produced their great
masterpieces had they been more concerned with greed.
Greed fixates you on acquiring
substitutes rather than on releasing your true self-expression. If you are a
greedy creative artist, you are going to go for the big ticket items when it
comes to your artistic expression. Hollywood has been fixated on
creating sequels to known successes rather than striking out into the unknown
territory where true creative expression lies. In the arts, the tried and true
is the death knell of creativity.
The hallmark of greed is the
substitute of artifice for something with true artistic value. If you are a
greedy seascape artist, you may churn out variations on a theme, day after day,
to lure the pocketbooks of tourists at the seashore. If you are a pulp fiction
writer, you may pump out formula look-alike novels in lieu of real literature.
Currently, greed is rampant in the creative arts, and satisfaction is at a low
point.
Perhaps the most dismal of all
results of greed in the arts is the inflation of masterpieces for their
investment value. The world's outstanding artistic masterpieces are often under
extreme protection and hidden in vaults where no one can see them because they
are worth too much to their owners.
Greed and Sexuality
Sexuality is intimately
associated with creativity. If your greed fixates on sexuality, it tends to
divorce it from its creative qualities and drive it toward obsession. Under
these conditions, your sexual fantasy life fixates on a narrow focus, like body
parts or related objects such as
articles of clothing. Sometimes your fantasies revolve around a specific
scenario or series of steps -- like a dominant mistress with black boots who
methodically spanks you. You are then driven to acquire the object of your greed
until you can experience it over and over again, like a pigeon at a feeding
station. If you are sexually obsessed, you may collect or hoard objects that are
fantasy related, to the exclusion of real relationships. The problem is that
your hunger for satisfaction is never satisfied and your obsession gets stronger
and stronger until it drives you into a frenzy.
The impact on your presence
If you are under the influence
of greed, you may not be able to be truly present with others. Your attention is
somewhere else rather than with those you are relating with. You are concerned
with acquiring someone else's attention because you have already acquired the
attention of those with you. Imagine trying to talk in a satisfying way to
someone who has not eaten in a week or is extremely thirsty. His or her thoughts
are on the next meal or oasis. Imagine trying to be intimate with someone who is
already planning the strategy of the next sexual conquest, since he or she has
obviously already conquered you. The alcoholic is not present and neither is the
drug taker. If you are not present, you have little presence either. Presence is
the result of focusing your attention on what is immediate, not elsewhere.
The impact on relationships
If you are a greedy person, your
demands in a relationship are great but your willingness to satisfy the needs of
others is limited. You want everything from your partner, including affection,
attention, understanding, and sympathy. You resent the slightest inattentiveness
or insensitivity demonstrated by your partner or mate. You desperately need the
love of your mate but are resentful and hostile toward her or him for not always
delivering what you need. Your resentment undermines the relationship while your
greed drives your partner away.
In more committed relationships,
you may become unfaithful in order to punish your partner for failing to
deliver, or you may be unfaithful out of your greed to find a more attentive
partner. Your spouse may then become unfaithful just to get away from you.
Relationships cannot tolerate greed for long. Greed is designed by its very
nature to ambush relationships and destroy them. The two are by nature
incompatible.
The impact on your spiritual
life
The paradox introduced by the
greed dragon is at times most obvious in the spiritual realm. Greed and all of
the other dragons infiltrate all areas of life, and religion and spirituality
are no exceptions.
Hunger for spiritual truth
sometimes becomes a voracious consumption of religious teachings. If you are
bitten by the dragon of greed, you may collect gurus and spiritual teachers like
so many butterflies. Yet, no one teacher is ever the right one, and you may keep
searching and searching but never finding. Every other week you convert to
something else.
If you are in a spiritual
community, you may be greedy to be in the presence of the guru at all times. You
may compete fiercely to see if you can be closest to the guru or the favorite of
the cardinal, bishop, or pope. I was once nearly trampled by people rushing to
get the choicest seats to see a visiting guru. This did not appear to me to be
enlightened behavior.
There are historical examples
aplenty of those who climbed the ladders of power and influence within their
spiritual communities. Their greed was fixated on power, and these people made
sure they sat at the right hand of the guru or in the seat of greatest
influence.
Spiritual materialism has been
around at least as long as religion. The idea that you can collect brownie
points for heaven or buy forgiveness through donations and contributions to a
church or temple has greed at its source. If you are a greedy soul, you may
believe that a more expensive ritual sacrifice insures salvation.
The notion that you get to heaven by demonstrating material success is another
distortion based on greed.
Yet greed has another form that
is harder to see. If you are controlled by greed, you may try to handle it by
repressing it or denying it. Greed has a self-depriving aspect to it. Therefore,
you may try to control or hide your greed by joining a religious order, taking a
vow of poverty or chastity, choosing to live as an ascetic, or eschewing the
pleasures of the world. You may sermonize and preach against "filthy money
and sex" and extol the virtues of living without them. Yet a closer
inspection may reveal that greed is actively present in your everyday affairs.
You may profess to be a servant of this god or that, but you enjoy hobnobbing
with the rich and famous, generously sampling their sumptuous feasts and
parties. You may be a professed pauper who ends up with a weight problem and an
ample girth.
Many priests of the
Catholic Church have been accused of both child sexual abuse and having sex with
members of their congregations. This is a classic example of the greed dragon at
work. These individuals promised society to do something that was beyond them,
which was to remain chaste. Their deprivation led to a hunger for sex that undid
them in the end. Perhaps the promise to be without gratification is simply
unrealistic for these people.
While individuals within
religious organizations take vows of poverty, the organizations often grow rich
and are at times obviously greedy. The people of a small, poor village may give
everything they have to help build an opulent temple or cathedral. Icons and
vestments are gilded in gold and the stout priest is finely arrayed while the
people dress in rags and go to bed hungry.
Many a church has turned its
greedy organizational eyes covetously on the government treasury and has warred
with kings over the control of power and wealth. A greedy organization is simply
an organization controlled by individuals within whom the greed dragon has
gained control.
Although the greed dragon has
corrupted religions and clergies, and infiltrated itself into individual
spiritual development, there are, of course, many people with spiritual
convictions untainted by greed. These people often come into conflict with those
who are run by it. This makes for great drama.
How to Transform the Greed
Dragon
As with all the dragons, there
is a way to "starve" the dragon of greed. If you do not starve it out
of your life, it will feed on your vitality and life energy until you die of
starvation. There are good examples of those who did not fight greed but allowed
it to run rampant in their lives: Howard Hughes, Adolph Hitler, Jim and Tammy
Bakker, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and Leona Helmsley, to name a few. Scrooge
from Dickens' A Christmas Carol was saved because he made the choice to
transform. This story contains valuable clues to the overthrow of greed.
You can choose addiction,
sadness, and endless suffering, or, happiness, productivity, and serenity. Not
everyone chooses the latter because the dragon of greed is so seductive and
hypnotic that many choose to follow it and become ensnared in its lies. Some
sense the danger and have the insight to fight back. Fighting back involves
recognizing that there is a way out and becoming committed to that disciplined
but liberating process.
Your arsenal to combat greed is
diverse and at times may seem paradoxical or contradictory. It takes a great
deal of maturity to understand the nature of these paradoxes and to avoid losing
your way.
Affirmations to Beat the Greed
Dragon
-
* I have everything I need or
want in order to be happy.
-
* I love to share what I have
with others.
-
* The more I give, the more I
get.
-
* I thoroughly enjoy
everything I have.
-
* I am confident enough to
face my sadness.
-
* I no longer feel the
cravings I used to have.
-
* I am powerful and no longer
need to blame others for anything.
-
* I am completely satisfied
with what I have.
Conclusion
The greed dragon works with the
self-destruction dragon. Together they can deliver a one-two punch that can
knock the vitality and life completely out of you. If you struggle with the
greed dragon, then you are fighting with the self-destruction dragon as well.
The best way to approach this is to tackle self-destructiveness first, because
it is so life threatening. When you have succeeded at this, you will develop an
appetite for life and everything it has to offer. This appetite can cause
problems, too, because it can so easily be taken over by the greed dragon. Then
you are stuck again. That is why you have to work on eliminating both dragons.
This
article is excerpted from the book:
 Transforming
Your Dragons: Turning Personality Fear Patterns into Personal Power
by
José Stevens, Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher Bear &
Co./Inner Traditions, www.innertraditions.com.
For more info or to order book.
More books by this author.
About The
Author
Jose
Stevens, Ph.D., is the founder of Essence Psychology and lectures
internationally on essence and personality, shamanism, and prosperity.
He is the author of Earth to Tao and Transforming
Your Dragons, and co-author of The
Michael Handbook and Secrets
of Shamanism. The author's website is at www.pivres.com.
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