Famine, disease, terrorism, war, murder, suicide, storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, toxic rivers, poisoned food, dying trees—this planet is presenting us with numerous symptoms of serious imbalance. Yet despite the widespread physical suffering throughout the world today, ultimately the difficulties confronting us are not material, but spiritual. These problems reflect our failure to fulfill our deepest longings to love and be loved, and any solution will require more than just a sophisticated technological effort. We may have made great scientific progress, but as a culture we still have little understanding of love and even less appreciation for the spiritual dimensions of life. The strife and destruction that surround us point to an urgent need to remedy this situation. We must learn how to love ourselves and each other, and also how to love our home planet and the other living beings who reside here with us.
The resolute material orientation of industrial culture has led us down a blind alley. Consumer society has encouraged us to indulge our desires to the utmost and to seek their fulfillment at every opportunity. Instead of developing self-knowledge and self-mastery, we have learned to look outside ourselves in a never-ending quest for gratification, mistakenly believing that such a pursuit can ensure our happiness. Yet we are discovering that those who “have everything” can still be profoundly miserable and lead desperate, empty lives. Something has gone seriously wrong.
The problem is that we have dedicated ourselves to satisfying our lust rather than to expressing our love. Although all of us are inherently loving beings, we have forgotten our true nature and sacrificed our birthright for a seductive substitute that ultimately brings us pain rather than joy. Because our collective goal has become to gratify our physical senses above all else, we have developed a self-centered culture that condones competition, exploitation and “whatever it takes” to get us what we want. Our egocentric behavior is driven by lust and appears in countless forms. For example, we may engage in sexual activity without love, dominate others in order to feel powerful, destroy rainforests to create more profitable grazing land, manipulate financial markets for personal gain, lie and cheat to gain political prominence, take drugs to get high, or ignore our own children in favor of making more money.
Spiritual Warrior II: Transforming Lust into Love is an attempt to examine the topics of lust and love in depth. The book’s premise is that we must gain a spiritual understanding of lust and love if we are to live healthier, more productive and more fulfilled lives. In what follows, we will explore the meaning, manifestations and dangers of lust, suggest ways to overcome its power and describe in detail the progressive levels of love that culminate in love of and service to God.
The first chapter describes the world’s crisis in leadership—a situation that has a profound impact on all of us. The examples of our leaders filter down into the rest of society and set the tone for how we live. Now more than ever, we have a desperate need for leaders who have learned to conquer their lust and fulfill their responsibilities with love. All of us are leaders in one capacity or another, and we can all benefit from conquering our lust and becoming more loving in every aspect of our lives. The rest of the book shows how to accomplish this. Chapters 2 and 3 define lust and love in more detail and provide a basic understanding of how they operate. The fourth chapter looks at sense gratification and its various ramifications, while Chapter 5 specifically discusses the role of sexuality in our lives. Chapter 6 is dedicated to examining loving relationships between men and women, and the seventh chapter explains how to develop love in all our other relationships. Chapters 8 and 9 explore two more deeply spiritual aspects of love: compassion and love of God.
These challenging times require us to fortify ourselves with spiritual knowledge and, even more important, we must put our knowledge into practice. Only then can we call ourselves spiritual warriors capable of serving others. As spiritual warriors, we must never forget that our greatest ally is love and our most dangerous enemy is lust. We can be of genuine service only if we are free from selfish desires and available to become pure vehicles for God’s love.
May this book help you master the seductive illusions of lust and become a spiritual warrior radiating divine love to all you encounter.