Joy Philosophy
	Desire The Creator <  Previous Contents Next  >

Hunger has built the universe. Hunger is desire. Desire is love. Love is God.

Of course we agree that God built the universe.

But it was not a God on a great throne outside the universe— one at whose behest angels and devils picked up handfuls of world-stuff and fashioned things, which were then set running.

It was God, or desire, in the universe, which has grown it up to its present state, and which will keep on growing it through all eternity.

Find desire in your own self—good or bad desire, it is all off one piece—find desire in yourself and you find God. Study the motions and results of desire in yourself and you will understand how God works to create worlds and peoples.

Note how a desire for food affects you. Does it cause you to sit still and sigh? Not until you have first tried every ingenuity you can think of to gratify your hunger.

Desire impels you first to effort.

You go first to all the places where you have been accustomed to find food. We will suppose that you find nothing in the pantry, and of course that discovery whets your hunger. You again go over all the shelves, hoping to run across something. Nothing there.

Now note that up to this point your hunger has impelled you to do just what you have been in the habit of doing. Of course this effort has done nothing further than fix a habit of looking in certain places for food.

But now: You have failed to find the food and hunger urges you a bit farther. You begin to think. You keep moaning inwardly, “Where can I find food?“ Your wits grow a little keener as hunger sharpens. You begin to think. Mentally you recall all the places you have ever heard others speak of as abounding in food. Your sharpening hunger impels you to an entirely new kind of effort—for you. You go prowling about in search of places you have heard others speak of. Your hunger is now impelling you to follow race habits of thought.

But you still fail to find food. Your hunger grows sharper and sharper and your wits follow suit. YOU try everything you ever heard of and still no food. There is famine in the land. You have exhausted your personal resources and the race resources, and still hunger grows and urges you.

Then at last you begin really to think. Your wits go feeling out beyond all the realms you ever heard of before, or they go roaming with a new intelligence and questioning over the same old ground. Sticks and stones and all sorts of things nobody ever dreamed of eating are now with new eves examined and tested, and by and by you discover food and satisfaction where nobody ever before dreamed of finding it. At last hunger has made you think—it has made you in this particular thing wiser than the whole race. It has differentiated you from the rest of your kind. It has impelled you to a little higher mark of intelligence than has even before been reached.

Now the rest of your race gazes at you and calls you “so original, you know.” And it straightway adopts your new food and is differentiated as you are.

This is the way desire has created the world as it is, and this is the way desire is every moment changing it.

We evolve by the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.

Desire impels us to the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.

Can you see why a too prosperous nation or individual begins immediately to degenerate? All his hungers being readily gratified his wits are dulled and he ceases to gain intelligence. Soon the sameness of that in which he lives grows irksome and he loses his desire to live. Disintegration sets in. He is tired ot the same old thing, even though that thing is beautiful and comfortable.

When a nation or a man gets into this state of satisfied stupor, it takes the Goths and Vandals to keep him from dying completely.

It takes necessity to keep evolution going. Or else it takes an overweening ambition, which is after all the same thing.

And underneath and in it all is Desire, the great God, creating after his own image and likeness.

The more desire a man has the greater god is he, and the faster he evolves consciousness of his god-ship.

For thousands of years the race has been trying to crush out its desire, and the result was a paralyzed and half-dead race, with only here and there a live spot.

The “new thought” is really the thought that desire is God and should be encouraged to express. And this new encouraging of desire has already resulted in wonderful growth and lengthening of individual life.

“Oh,” exclaims the Orthodox One, “how can all desire be good—how can desire be God and yet impel people to such terrible misdeeds—surely there are devil desires as well as God desires” And yet this same Orthodox One has read many times how “God hardened the heart of Pharaoh” to resist God’s own commandments about letting “his children go.”

Now harken: When you found no food in the pantry, and none in all the land, and still hunger grew, you went out without chart or compass into strange places, and you tried many queer things. Some of these things proved bitter and unprofitable and you left them and went on and on. And at last you found the New and Good thing. But it was the very same old desire that made you try the bitter and unprofitable things, and the New and Good thing. You did not try the bitter things because you desired bitter things, did you? Of course not. All the time you hungered, hungered for the Good thing; and kept seeking it; and as soon as you knew the bitterness of the bitter thing you left it and went on, still seeking.

You see, you were in a Strange Land. You had never been that way before. How could you know what was bitter and what Good, except by trying them? Of course there were people who told you of the bitterness, but there were still others who scoffed at the warning—who told you they had tried it and knew better. And they pointed out to you many personages who used the bitter things and yet looked sleek and prosperous. And you were hungry, hungry. So you tried the bitter things, and found them unsatisfying. And hunger kept urging you until you found the New and Good.

Now was hunger any more “evil” when you tasted the bitter things than when you ate of the Good? Of course not. It was simply blind, and had to abide by your wisdom.

It impelled you to try bitter and Good alike, and each trial increased your wisdom.

So is it with the good and evil of this world. The one good Desire is the life-urge of us all. Whether it urges us to heaven or hell it is still good—and it still urges. When in answer to its impulse we taste the bitter we learn the lesson and go on. When we find the good we return to it again and again.

But whatever we taste we are taught something; and that is what all Desire urges us to—to learn.

In answer to the impulse of desire we grow in wisdom and knowledge—the only growth there is.

This Desire-God which works in us to will and to do of its good pleasure, is a good God. It must be as good in me as in you; as good in the worst sinner as in the sweetest saint. The only difference between saint and sinner is a difference in wisdom, not in desire.

Since desire urges us to grow in wisdom and knowledge it is evidently only a question of time when we shall all know enough to turn from the bitter and find the New and Good. Is not the One Desire urging us irresistibly on for its own satisfaction.? God in us, not only the hope of glory, but the absolute certainty of success.