Confession time: a few nights ago I caught myself doing something I’m sure you’ve done too... I was on my phone, scrolling. Now, I wasn’t looking for anything specific. I wasn't shopping or trying to be entertained. In fact, most of what showed up in my feed wasn’t really interesting at all.

But I kept scrolling anyway.

At some point, I snapped out of it and finally put my phone down. That's when I had this sudden moment of insight:

What exactly am I looking for?

I wasn’t bored.... but I wasn’t deeply content either.

I was just, and here's the best word I can think of to describe that feeling... hungry.

Then that word reminded me of this old Buddhist concept: the Hungry Ghost. And I started thinking about those a lot. Hungry Ghosts are beings with an enormous appetite, but not matter how much they eat, they're never satisfied. They just consume and consume without ever getting full. And the more I considered them, the more they seemed like a really good metaphor for a lot of modern life.

Think about this... we have practically instant access to almost everything we could possibly want: food, entertainment, shopping, sex, information, spiritual teachings, self-improvement, etc. Everywhere we go, there is endless novelty. Everywhere we turn, there are endless opinions to participate in, or endless people to compare ourselves to.

The world out there is constantly consuming our attention. It's designed to. And despite all that, a lot of us are still hungry.

You can scroll for 45 minutes and come away feeling like you got absolutely nothing from it. You're just... hungry. You can binge-watch one show and immediately start looking for another. You can buy something you were excited about for weeks and then, possibly the next day, you find yourself wanting something else.

You can read a great book, listen to a powerful podcast, have a genuine spiritual insight, attend an amazing retreat... and still wake up the next morning living pretty much the same way you did before.

That’s the part I’m really interested in.

I don't think any of these things I've listed are bad. And I'm certainly not arguing against pleasure here or the benefits of modern life. The answer is definitely not to become more ascetic, delete everything fun, throw away our phones, eat lentils in silence, and congratulate ourselves for being spiritually pure.

Because here's the truth... a great meal can nourish you. So can sex. Or a night out with friends, a ridiculous dessert that your diet definitely wouldn't approve of, a long swim, an entire evening sitting around the fire doing nothing, rewatching a movie you love, a bottle of wine, or a conversation that keeps going two hours longer than you meant it to.

So the question isn’t whether something is pleasurable or fun. We absolutely need that in our lives.

The real question is what happens to you after.

Do you feel fuller? More present? More yourself? More interested in and excited about your own life?

Or do you immediately need another hit? (That distinction right there feels like everything.)

We live in a world that is extremely good at keeping desire activated without actually making you feel content. There is always another thing to click. Another notification. Another person to compare yourself to. Another product. Another episode. Another piece of information you supposedly need. And another version of yourself you should probably become.

Scientists and marketers have studied this dopamine-fueled hunger in-depth. They've engineered the world around it because it’s a very profitable kind of hunger.

But how did we get here in the first place? I’m starting to wonder if some of the things we call bad habits are really symptoms of something much deeper...

Maybe you’re not just addicted to your phone. Maybe you’re hungry.

Maybe you’re not just procrastinating. Maybe some part of you has lost contact with what you actually want. Maybe you keep giving yourself tiny doses of stimulation because you don’t know how to answer the bigger question:

What would actually nourish me?

Try out that question right now. I find that it can get a little uncomfortable.

Maybe you want to call the person you’ve been missing instead of watching strangers talk online.

Maybe you want to make something and let another person see it.

Maybe you want a relationship with more honesty in it.

Maybe you want more sex. Maybe you want less sex, but for it to mean more.

Maybe you want to disappear into the woods for a day and remember what your own mind sounds like.

Maybe you’re exhausted and what you really want is to just stop everything for a while.

Maybe you want to let go of something that you’ve been telling yourself is “just fine.”

Maybe there’s something you’ve wanted for years that you’ve gotten very good at pretending you don’t care about.

A lot of these hit me. And I think a lot of us have become very good at feeding the hunger instead of finding out what it's really about.

Scroll a little. Buy something. Watch something. Eat something. Learn something. Distract yourself long enough that the deeper wanting goes quiet again.

Then repeat.

That’s the famine of modern life. We don't suffer from a lack of things to consume. We suffer from a lack of things that actually feed us.

I’m going to write more about this over the next few days because it connects to something we're doing inside The Opus.

But for now, I want to leave you with two questions:

What are you feeding that never seems to get full?

And underneath that...

what are you actually hungry for?

I wrote the other day about Hungry Ghosts and the modern experience we can have of constantly consuming without ever really being satisfied.

And it would be easy to conclude from that that maybe we want too much. Maybe we shouldn't want so much stimulation, food, pleasure, entertainment, sex, and all the latest things, devices, and STUFF.

You hear in spirituality all the time that you should just be content with what you have. So maybe the answer is to want less?

Maybe...

But I don’t think that’s it. In fact, I’m starting to think the exact opposite might be closer to the truth. What if we don't want ENOUGH? Someone commented on my post saying they intuitively feel that they want more, but they don't know what, and that maybe they shouldn't feel that. And my response was to ask your soul.

So let's do it. Right now, connect to that deepest part of you, and ask it: do you want MORE out of life... or LESS?

Wanting more isn't the problem. In fact, I think that most of us don't want nearly enough.

Not really.

It's easy to want what the ego wants. We're familiar with that. We *crave* plenty of things, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Craving usually has an urgency to it, it has the Hungry Ghost feeling tied to it. Craving asks you to check your phone, have some more chips, buy the thing now, see if they replied, open the app (just for a minute...), find something to watch, and above all, make that uncomfortable feeling go away.

Craving makes us contract. It tells us we need something right this moment so that the feeling we don't want to feel will go away... at least for a while.

But a REAL desire is different. When your soul says it desires more out of life, it's not coming from lack, it's not trying to numb you or distract you. A real desire might be subtler than a craving, it's probably more inconvenient, it might ask something of you, it might push you out of your comfort zone, out of autopilot. You might *crave* scrolling when you're tired, while actually *desiring* to make music again. You might crave attention from someone who hardly gives it to you, while desiring a relationship where you're seen, heard, and intimately known.

Or a little closer to home for a lot of us... you might crave another self-improvement book, course, or retreat, while desiring to finally do the thing you've been reading about or dreaming about for five years.

Or what's seduced millions now, maybe you might crave looking at others engaged in erotic acts, while actually desiring touch, intimacy, surrender, vulnerability, excitement, or deep connection.

You might crave a drink at the end of the day, while desiring a life that you don't have to unwind from or disappear from every night.

Craving and desire aren't always easy to separate, and I'm certainly not here to say which pleasures are good or okay and which ones are bad or unspiritual. That's not the point. A stupid show on Netflix could be genuinely nourishing one day, and completely numbing the next.

The more useful question for us is:

What am I hoping this will give me?

Because enormous amounts of money and some of the smartest minds in the world have gone into learning how to catch our desires before we’re even fully aware of them... and redirect them.

You feel a flicker of loneliness... there's an app for that. A flicker of boredom? Here's your feed. A flicker of sexuality? Here's endless novelty. A flicker of dissatisfaction? Here's another thing to buy.

Or the big one, a flicker of uncertainty about who you are? Here are 10,000 people telling you who you should become.

Your original desire might have been pointing somewhere real, toward that "more" that your soul wants out of life. Maybe it was calling you toward connection, or creation, adventure, deep rest, beauty, touch, challenge, a project you need to start, or a change you need to make. But before it had time to become clear, something hijacked it and offered you a pale substitute. And the substitute worked just well enough that you never had to find out what was underneath it.

And THAT is the trap. Not desire... But desire that is intercepted.

Your genuine, soul-felt desire gets intercepted and converted into consumption.

And the sad part about modern life is that when that happens often enough, you can start to lose the ability to tell the difference between:

“I desire this.”

and

“I have to satisfy this feeling inside me right now.”

Those are NOT the same thing. And that's one reason I’m suspicious of spiritual teachings that treat desire itself as the enemy. Yes, desire (as craving) can make a mess of your life. That's obvious. But desire is also the force that can get you off the couch.

Desire is the thing that makes you create, fall in love, begin, risk something, leave, build something, tell the truth, go somewhere new. It's what allows you to become someone you've never been before. It's the force that drives our spirituality and evolution.

Some spiritual traditions go even further and put desire somewhere near the beginning of creation itself. Take the opening of Genesis. God says, “Let there be light...” And there was light.

But I’ve always found the question underneath that fascinating: what moved the Divine to create at all?

You could call it Will. You could call it Love... Or maybe you could call it Desire.

There’s a lot of life hiding inside desire. It's not the enemy. The challenge is learning how to feel it without immediately obeying it, suppressing it, or handing it over to the nearest algorithm.

The challenge is to be able to stay with it long enough to ask:

What do I actually want here?

And maybe even harder:

What would this desire ask me to become if I stopped trying to satisfy it as quickly as possible?

Because there’s a kind of desire that doesn’t make you smaller or more dependent... It makes you more alive. And when you stop numbing it or rushing to satisfy it, you may begin to feel that desire has an intelligence of its own, that it can point you toward a life that wants to be lived, expressed, created, and loved through you.

That’s what I want to explore next.

At the end of my last email, I wrote about a kind of desire that doesn’t make you smaller or more dependent... It makes you more alive. It nourishes your soul, rather than depleting it.

And there’s an ancient symbol for this kind of desire that I’ve been thinking about recently because it’s not what you’d expect.

When you think of ancient symbols for desire, maybe you think of something sensual, maybe romantic, or maybe a naked deity. But what I'm talking about is none of those things...

It’s a stone. Just an uncarved block of stone.

In ancient Thespiae, the frequency or idea of Eros was associated with a simple, uncarved stone image. And this is so perfect and goes against everything modern society associates with desire because it highlights something we don't tend to think about... Desire before it has become a thing.

Before a desire expresses itself as, I want her, I want him, I want that job, I want that house, I want that car, I want that experience... before any of that, there is something underneath it all.

It's the thing that you could say drove God in Genesis to speak and use the words, "Let there be Light." That pull, that primordial movement itself, that leaning towards a new state, a new expression... It's the feeling we all have deep down in our soul that says, "I want MORE of life." 

Forget about sex for a moment. That universal movement toward a fuller experience of life, toward beauty, connection, creativity, discovery, and deeper participation in existence... that feels much closer to the ancient, bigger idea of Eros.

Sex can certainly be part of it, but Eros reaches far beyond that. It can show up as holy longing, attraction, devotion, courage, adventure, the impulse to create, the desire to become, the pull toward growth, and the sense that some larger, more vivid version of your life is waiting to be lived.

You probably know the feeling. You feel it when you hear a piece of music and suddenly want to make something. You taste a new fruit and want to cook a meal around it. You meet someone new and notice you feel more awake, more alive around them. Or maybe you see a picture of a place, and something tells you that you have to go there. 

Sometimes it's a crazy idea that won't go away. It doesn't make sense yet, you just have to do it. Or maybe it's a moment when your life suddenly feels too small, you feel bigger than it somehow, like you're ready to break out of an old mold and experience something more. You may not even know what that something is yet, or how to pursue it. You just know that something is stirring inside you, and you won't feel satisfied until you find out what it is.

These are life-shaping feelings, and they are incredibly important. But, as a whole, we're deeply confused about Eros right now. For a lot of people, that word has collapsed almost entirely into 'sex.' And centuries of religious and cultural suspicion around desire have made many of us distrust the whole thing.

So we rarely allow ourselves to experience desire in its pure, raw, unformed state. Instead, the second something stirs in us, the world is there to tell us what it means.

Lonely? Download this.

Bored? Watch this.

Turned on? Click this.

Dissatisfied? Buy this.

Uncertain who you are? Here are 10,000 people telling you who you should become.

Before you’ve had a chance to really follow the signal of that desire, something has already given it an object. And that's one of the most disempowering things about modern life... we're constantly being told WHAT to want before we've even learned how to FEEL wanting itself.

Now think about that stone we mentioned earlier.

It's Uncarved. It's not yet shaped into an object, not yet reduced to "I need that."

It's just pure potential. Just unexpressed movement. Just the raw current of wanting.

And this is where I start to wonder about the old mystery traditions. What did they understand about desire that we’ve lost? What if one of the first things to learn was not how to satisfy desire, or how to get rid of it, but how to remain with it long enough to discover what was actually there?

To stay with it in its uncarved form.

What happens if you do that?

If instead of immediately satisfying a desire, suppressing it, or distracting yourself from it, what happens if you actually feel it?

You might discover that the first thing you thought you wanted wasn’t really what you wanted at all. Maybe sexual desire is really a longing for intimacy or surrender. Maybe envy is showing you a life you haven’t admitted to yourself you want. Maybe restlessness is asking you to create some adventure. Maybe frustration with your work is just the first spark letting you know there's something you need to build.

This is where desire gets really interesting to me... because it stops being about only getting things. It becomes a signal you can listen to, connect to, work with. It becomes something that is trying to guide you toward more aliveness. 

So in the ancient mystery schools, maybe the first practices or teachings around Eros weren't, "How do I get what I want?"

Maybe they were more like... Can I feel desire before I rush in to satisfy it? Can I stay with the charge it's activating in me? Can I let it become clearer? Can I tell the difference between the object I’m reaching for and the deeper drive underneath it? Can I feel this wanting without immediately handing it over to the nearest algorithm?

That’s what I’ve been going deep into lately. And it has become the basis for a new Craft inside The Opus. It's called:

EROTIKOS.

It’s an exploration of Eros, desire, pleasure, anticipation, intimacy with existence, and what becomes possible when you stop treating desire as something you either have to obey or overcome.

I’ll tell you more about what we’re actually going to do inside it next time. But for now, try something simple:

The next time you notice yourself really wanting something, don’t immediately move toward it.

Pause.

Feel the wanting itself. Before the object, before the story, before the habit that wants to take over... Just notice what's there and alive within you.

You may be surprised by what you find.

With love,

Chris

P.S. - We talk a lot in modern spirituality about shadow work... exploring our fear, pain, wounds, triggers, and all the parts of ourselves we’ve buried. But there’s another side of us that gets far less attention:

What have you wanted that you stopped allowing yourself to want?

There's even a strange passage in "Autobiography of a Yogi" that most people miss, where a deeply buried desire has to be brought into the light and encountered before it can finally lose its hold.

I think there's something important in that. A lot of people are more willing to stare directly at their FEAR than at their desire. That door usually stays closed. And when it does, I think we can cut ourselves off from a huge amount of life. 

It may be time to open it.

If you’ve been in the spiritual or self-development world for any length of time, you probably have a pretty good idea of what you’re “supposed” to be doing.

Meditate more. Get off your phone. Exercise. Eat better. Journal. Heal your wounds. Stop procrastinating. Be present. Keep your commitments. Get up earlier. And finally do the thing you keep saying you’re going to do.

And if you’re anything like me, there are probably areas of your life where you already KNOW what would make things better... So why don’t we just do it already?

The usual answer is, "we need to be more disciplined" or something like that. We need to try harder, be more serious, build better habits, stop making excuses...

And sometimes that’s absolutely true.

But what I’ve been wondering lately is if there’s something deeper going on than just needing more discipline, especially for people like us who have already done a lot of inner work. What if you don’t need more discipline... What if what you actually need is more desire?

I'm not saying more "craving." We’ve talked plenty about that already. I'm talking about the kind of desire we’ve been exploring over these last few emails... the kind that makes you feel more alive. I'm referring to the thing underneath Eros before it gets hijacked by society or programming, and turned into another product, another distraction, or another quick way to make a feeling go away.

Here's the thing... discipline can help you do something you don’t feel like doing, but desire is what makes you WANT to do something in the first place.

And there’s a big difference.

Think about something you’ve really wanted in your life: a person you were falling in love with, a trip you couldn’t stop thinking about, a project that took over your imagination, a calling you couldn't ignore, or something you wanted to learn so badly that nobody needed to remind you to practice.

Did anyone have to teach you a morning routine so you’d remember to think about it?

Probably not.

The energy was already there.

You made time. You figured things out. You tolerated uncertainty. You stayed up too late researching it. You did things that would have felt like “discipline” if someone else had assigned them to you, but they didn’t feel that way because something in you was already pulling you forward.

That’s something I think we’ve largely lost.

A lot of spiritual people have gotten VERY good at watching themselves. We can observe our thoughts, we can analyze our patterns, we can work on our shadows, or regulate our nervous systems. We learn to accept what is... And these are all good things.

But somewhere along the way, it’s possible to become incredibly self-aware while also becoming incredibly stuck in the same life and the same routines.

You know yourself better than you ever have before. You understand why you do what you do. You've discovered your limiting beliefs and core wounds. You’ve healed things. You’ve had insights. You're learned your Human Design tendencies, birth charts, and Gene Keys formulations.

Maybe you’ve even had lots of experiences you’d call awakenings. And yet, you still have this little feeling that there should somehow be... more.

Not necessarily more possessions or achievements or stuff. No, you feel there should be more LIFE.

More freaking adventure, more creation, more play, more intimacy, more beauty, more free self-expression, more risk, and more of the feeling that you are actually HERE, participating in your own existence instead of endlessly preparing yourself to live all out "someday".

I know that feeling all too well, and I wonder how many times in the past I tried to satisfy it by adding another practice...

Or a new routine.

Another book.

Another healing modality.

Another certification.

Another thing to improve...

And while learning is great, maybe that isn’t always what the soul is asking us for. Maybe sometimes it’s saying: I’m ready to WANT again.

Because wanting is risky. It's opening the door to an unknown. It's inviting the Winds of Change to sweep through our lives. If you really let yourself want something, you could fail. You could be rejected. You might embarrass yourself. You might have to change your life. You might discover that something you’ve tolerated for years isn’t going to cut it anymore.

You might have to admit that the safe, sensible version of your life is NOT the one you actually want.

And one of the easiest ways to avoid ALL of that is to stop wanting very much in the first place....

So you tell yourself you’re content. (That's spiritual, right?) You tell yourself you should be grateful. You tell yourself you’ve transcended all that ego stuff. You don't need to put yourself out there any more. You don't need to stretch or grow beyond your comfort zone...

So you keep the deeper wanting quiet with little substitutes: scroll a little, buy yourself a little treat (you deserve it!), watch something, fantasize about something, learn something new...

We give ourselves just enough stimulation that the real desire goes back to sleep.

That’s the Hungry Ghost again.

But maybe the opposite of the Hungry Ghost isn’t the disciplined ascetic who needs nothing. Maybe it’s someone who has become capable of wanting deeply without being consumed by it. Someone who can feel a desire rise up from their soul... and stay with it, listen to it, let it gather strength, let it pull in clarity and intuition, let it fuel them, light them up, charge them up, and then actually allow it to cause their life to take off in a new direction.

That’s a big part of what I’m interested in with Erotikos.

Yes, we’ll explore pleasure and anticipation. We’ll explore what happens when you stop rushing to discharge every bit of desire the moment you feel it. But I’m much more interested in what happens after that. What happens when that soul energy starts becoming available to us again?

What if the desire you normally spend on fantasy becomes creativity? What if what you normally expend as sexual energy starts to wake up parts of you that have gone numb? What if envy points you toward a life you haven’t allowed yourself to even admit you want? What if the ache you’ve been trying to get rid of is actually the beginning of a calling?

What if you stop asking, “How do I make myself do this?” and start asking, “What would I have to want so deeply that I wouldn’t even need to force myself to act?”

Watch out, that question packs a punch. And I think it gets very close to the heart of what The Opus is all about.

The goal was never to turn yourself into a perfectly optimized spiritual robot who meditates, exercises, eats clean, checks every box, and never wastes a minute. The goal is to become more alive, to become someone who can actually hear what is calling them, let themselves FEEL it and want it, and then build enough capacity to follow that desire into the world.

That's the path of the Erotikos.

Maybe there’s something you’ve wanted for years that you’ve gotten very good at pretending you don’t care about any more. And maybe it's worth finding out what would happen if you stopped pretending.

Something to think about until next time...

With love,

Chris

PS - Here’s a question I’ve been playing with lately: if you woke up tomorrow with twice as much discipline, but no more desire than you have today, would your life actually become the life you wanted?

I think for a lot of us, the answer is... probably not. Maybe the missing ingredient isn’t another way to force ourselves forward. Maybe it’s recovering the part of us that actually wants to go there in the first place.

PPS - The 15-week EROTIKOS Craft is currently FREE to members of The Opus. We'll have an introductory experience this week, then we officially begin on September 19th. You're welcome to join us if you feel the call.