The Three Forces of Alienation: Fear, Greed and Desire
Where love rules there is no will to power and where power predominates there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
-Carl Gustaf Jung
The opposite of success is generosity; the opposite of recognition is service; the opposite of power and status are loving relationships. We have enough of greed and success. You become an adult when you realize you are not here to get, you’re here to give.
-Kenneth Blanchard, L.A. Times Oct. 16,2002
The Three Forces of Alienation
Whenever the negative ego rules the psyche, the three forces of alienation, desire, greed, and fear will dominate our emotional landscape and determine much of our behavior. We fall into fear when we fall out of the light. The price we pay for falling into fear is the increased separation of our conscious mind from our soul and spirit. In separating us from our soul and spirit, fear also separates us from unconditional love. When we lose our ability to love unconditionally, greed and desire become the dominant motivational forces in the psyche.
Unconditional Love
While the expression of unconditional love leads to inner fulfillment and joy, the chronic expression of greed and desire leads to frustration and an ever-deeper feeling of emptiness. Where unconditional love elevates and expands our consciousness, bringing us closer to our soul and spirit, greed and desire have the opposite effect. They contract our awareness and widen the gap between our conscious mind and our soul.
How We Become Inauthentic
Greed and desire are fear’s children. The more we pursue the objects of our greed and desire, the farther away from our true nature those pursuits will take us. The farther we travel from our true nature, the more inauthentic we become. As our disingenuousness increases, our fear proliferates. Fear is a closed circuit that leads through greed and desire and back again to fear. Every time we complete that circuit, our fear grows stronger and becomes more entrenched in our system. The stronger our fear becomes, the more powerful our attachment grows to greed and desire. As the three forces of alienation grow within us, we downgrade the importance of unconditional love and mock the reality of the soul and spirit. We then mistake our state of separation as our ultimate reality. When we buy into the belief of separation, we invest our energy in life’s great illusion.