Step 6: Satiation

“Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.”

― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

The party's over

It's time to call it a day

They've burst your

Pretty balloon

And taken the moon away

--Shirley Bassey, The Party’s Over

• Everything comes to an end. Every experience, happening, gathering, all encounters, all end. Regardless of how satisfying or disappointing, sooner or later, Contact ebbs and we must begin the process of letting go and withdrawing.

• What did we get? What did we learn? What was accomplished? Was the itch scratched? Are our bellies full? Was it worth it?

• How does it feel to say goodbye? What do we feel about becoming alone again?

• Some of us just never seem to get enough. Although we are programmed by evolution to maintain homeostatic balance, some of us have, let us say, faulty thermostats.

• As the Gestalt Cycle indicates, a healthy system detects, through Sensation and Awareness, when there is an imbalance, hunger, or need, Mobilizes Energy to take Action, makes Contact with the needed substance or experience, and then becomes Satiated and Withdraws until a new need arises.

• Satiation is generally signaled by a reduction of interest or sensation, the diminishment of all that Action-Energy, and the pleasure of the subsiding of the pressing need, as we shift into a more-neutral state and withdraw. All fine and dandy, an elegant system of homeostatic regulation. Except for Ego…

• Ego thinks like an unfettered capitalist (and, in a sense, our collective Ego is the core of our worst capitalist excesses; more about that below in the Deep Dive). It enlarges itself by taking in more and more, as if, by doing so, it will make itself bigger than any threat or challenge, ward-off any future sense of scarcity, and, thereby, conquer the inevitability of limitation, loss, aging, vulnerability, and mortality.

• This basic greed is the core of our challenges with Satiation, and it can focus on any pleasurable experience. That includes not just the tasty appetitive experiences like food, sex, and intoxication, but also the experiences that we associate with pride or self-esteem, like good grades, weight-loss, high salaries, big-ass houses, and fancy clothes. So, the addictions that arise from the lack of Satiation can extend not just to the familiar ones, but also to the ones that masquerade as upstanding, socially-approved behavior, like workaholism, overachievement, and ruthless competition.

• The hard work is to notice when “enough” happens, and to let the experience end, rather than stubbornly-clinging to Contact. The work of Satiation is to integrate the Contact experience, to appreciate it and learn from it, and to face the letting-go that is inevitable.

Some Satiation Stucknesses:

Pleasure-Addiction vs. Pleasure-Denial:

“This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow…In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying.”…If there was any ‘sin’, it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever…

--Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

The story is told of a student of philosopher and spiritualist George Gurdjieff, who approached him one day with wonderful news. “I’ve stopped smoking!” he exclaimed. “Great,” it’s said Gurdjieff replied, offering him one of his own long, thin, Russian cigarettes. “But, have you stopped NOT smoking too?”

--Robert R. George

• Our entire biological fight/flight system evolved to maximize survival, so that we could reproduce and be among the select of natural selection. One aspect of this is that we are drawn to certain experiences because they are inherently pleasurable, or, they remove unpleasurable sensations. Thus, what Freud called, “the pleasure principle”, the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.

• Whether you are an amoeba, an ant, or an antelope, you will usually move towards what pleases and flee from what hurts. That includes moving towards those substances or activities that tend to feel good.

• Like humans, animals become drawn to tasty things, things that make them feel high, and activities that are inherently pleasurable. And, like humans, under the right conditions, animals can become quite over-attached to such pleasures.

• These universal tendencies towards maximizing pleasure are curbed in the wild by limited supply, and, perhaps, by natural selection.

• Humans, because of our big, hard-partying Ids, have invented a boatload of very-available, super-fun pleasurable substances and activities. Our brains evolved to facilitate tool-making, scientific understanding, and complex language, but, due to the pleasure principle, those same evolved brains have given us gravity-bongs, Courvoisier, sex dolls, and World of Warcraft. And, arguably, our internal feedback mechanisms have not adapted quickly enough to tell us when too much of any of these might not be wise for our survival, our well-being, or our marriages. As a result, we are prone to overdo the fun-times and suffer the consequences.

• Moreover, because we are emotionally-complex, psychologically-sophisticated organisms, we face a variety of painful challenges that other animals do not. These include guilt, shame, complex grief, regret, trauma flashbacks, obsessive worry, and the big one, knowledge of our own mortality. And what do we do to cope with these complex challenges and sufferings? Well, often, we do multiple gravity-bong hits, guzzle gallons of brandy, and engage in exhausting marathons of real or mechanical sex, Falstaffian feasts, and weeklong binges of videogames and West Wing reruns. We eat, drink, drug, cyber, and watch like there’s no tomorrow.

• And so, we find ourselves running on that wonderful piece of exercise equipment called, by social scientists, Phillip Brickman and Donald Campbell, “the hedonic treadmill”. The harder we peddle, the more pleasure we squeeze out of our experiences, only to find that we eventually return to a state of disappointingly-normal mood. So, geniuses of determination and will, we hop back on the treadmill and peddle harder and harder, certain that if we reach higher and higher states of ecstasy, be they intoxication, wealth, achievement, orgasm, conquest, or power, we can finally be happier than happy. And on, and on, and on, until the treadmill wears out and sometimes even breaks.

• So, Addiction represents both a clinging to the rewards of some sort of Contact, as well as an avoidance of the pain that comes when the Contact ends. It might be the pain of saying goodbye to the person or experience, or it might be the pain that arises when the goodness of the Contact ebbs and we are left with all the other sufferings in life that we had hoped the Contact would numb or even banish.

• If Addiction, that gluttonous beast that refuses to admit the party’s over, is on one end of this Satiation polarity, Pleasure-Denial anchors the other. For every one of us who parties too hard, eats too much, or works too much, there is someone who denies these pleasures and engagements. This person fears taking in or engaging deeply or filling themselves up. Why?

• Our culture has a very conflicted relationship with pleasure. On the one hand, we have this multiplicity of avenues of enjoyment, food, drugs, sex, travel, adventure, entertainment, literature, music, and achievement. On the other hand, we have a spiritual legacy that is, well, pretty pleasure-hating.

• Every spiritual tradition has a thread that is pleasure-hating or, at least, suspicious of the lures of pleasure. In the Christian tradition, this arises from the doctrine of Original Sin. In that telling, Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s warning not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and, in this act, sought to make themselves gods. This disobedience was met with God’s expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden, and the punishment of all the sufferings of the flesh, which would afflict not just them, but all their descendants.

• Although this doctrine of Original Sin goes through many permutations, developments, and interpretations, it comes down to us via our cultural denigration of bodily pleasures and of desire. It perversely over-focuses on the downsides and limitations of these pleasures and interprets them as divine punishments. It emphasizes a dualistic split between body and spirit, and exhorts us to reject body in favor of spirit. Hence, we believe worldly-pleasures are somehow suspect, while spiritual advancement is good.

• There’s another corollary of the doctrine of Original Sin that makes Pleasure-Denial the stuckness at the other end of this polarity. In boosting the goodness of spiritual advancement over bodily pleasure, the Calvinists gave a hearty endorsement to hard-work, self-denial, and even steely pain-tolerance. This translates into the sneakier of our modern addictions, like workaholism, chronic dieting and other sources of eating disorders, celibacy, and macho forms of asceticism and abstemiousness.

• In some ways, these sneaky addictions are, arguably, more-pernicious than the pleasure addictions, because they are given the societal stamp of approval. It’s easy to point the shame-finger at a junkie or overeater, but those who overwork, undereat, and abstain from pleasure are generally-lauded by those around them, unless they are hip to the hidden dangers of such behaviors.

• All this to say that, as with the polarity issues in other stages, the danger is not pleasure-enjoyment or pleasure-denial, it is being stuck at one end or the other of the polarity. Balance or range is how we develop peak Menschitude, not adherence to any particular ideal or extreme. To paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, “The Mensch avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency”.

Control vs. Letting Go:

“Student: Teacher, I was meditating and meditating, and I reached Nirvana!!!

Teacher: That’s nice. Go sit down, it’ll go away.”

--Zen Funny

I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself.

---Louis C. K.

• How much is enough? When is it time to let go? Can we leave well-enough alone?

• The challenge of the Satiation stage is that, often, there is no clear indication that it’s time to let go of Contact. If we are talking about eating, our body doesn’t always give us the clearest signals that we have eaten enough (and yes, some of us, even when we do get signals, treat them like unsolicited advice from nosy relatives). To make matters worse, if we’re talking about Contact that doesn’t involve organic needs like hunger, Enough is, often, entirely subjective and individual.

• If the Contact is interpersonal, how much is enough is kind of up-for-grabs, because the participants might each have different Contact thermostats.

• Furthermore, often the end of a Contact is not governed by any of the participants, but by the many arbitrary time constraints that are built into our modern lives.

• Sometimes, therefore, Satiation is not organically-driven, but circumstance-driven. That is, any particular Contact will have to end, or another begin, whether we feel done with one and ready for another.

• This raises the whole issue of Control vs. Letting Go, and the immense specter of the Egoic Will.

• We have talked of Ego as the sum total of our learned habits of mind, feeling, and action, and how we create a story about ourselves that we identify as “I”. Just as this “I” is cobbled together from stories we tell ourselves, this “I” is also associated with our agency, our ability to make choices and act on them. This agency is the Egoic Will.

• The Egoic Will begins in our toddler years, as we develop a separate Identity. Will’s birth begins with the magic moment when we not only learn a name that is all our own, but also that we can choose to act. While we first learn to act when we obey or follow the directives of our elders, the full power of our Will is truly born when we begin to act contrary to the wishes of our elders. That’s why the essential words of our toddler years are “Me”, “Mine”, and “No”.

• Thus, is born not just a separate Self, but a Will of our own. This Will finds its development fueled by every plan we make and execute, and it is at its most muscular when it is exercised against resistance and challenge. That challenge can be the difficulty of a task or plan execution, or it can be the challenge of pushing against others’ wills.

• In Mobilization & Action, our Egoic Will is in its glory, exercising its powerful muscles towards getting our needs met, or meeting the needs of the world. In Contact, our Will often is challenged by the Others’ will, whether that be in the Dominance/Submission conflicts, the Goal-Directed/Improvisatory dances, or the ridiculous and catastrophic surprises of the Trickster experiences.

• In Satiation, Egoic Will conflicts with the limitations imposed by circumstance, whether the withdrawal of the Other, the fading of our own hunger, or the arbitrary limits that interrupt Contact. And, like a toddler who meets such frustrations, our Egoic Will can find such sudden limits very thwarting and angering indeed.

• For the Egoic Will, Control is an end in itself. This is particularly true for people who have grown up with trauma. When we have repeated experiences with danger, these leave an imprint on us, a sense of insecurity, chronic anxiety, and constant vigilance. Our Ego tries to reduce this insecurity and anxiety by gaining some sense of Control.

• The Egoic Will demands a certain sense of security that comes from controlling something, even if that something is disconnected from the original source of instability. When children have had too much anxiety, either due to inner constitutional genetic endowments, or to conditions of disorder, danger, and instability, they may develop compulsions, particularly to have things in a certain order or structure.

• When it comes to the Satiation stage, the Egoic Will may create false-needs for more Contact as a cover for its true wish to simply be in control. So, we get clinging or addictive attachments, whether to people, food, alcohol, drugs, work, shopping, sex, dieting, exercise, or anything else that makes us feel in control.

• When we are driven by the false-needs of Egoic Control, or when Contact is interrupted due to conditions out of our control, we are forced to find or accept only partial-Satiation, which is not so desirable to Ego.

• At these moments, we can try to hang on, our Egoic Will insisting on control & persevering against the removal of Contact, or we can Let Go, allowing the situation to separate us from Contact and send us wherever the flow carries us.

• There is value in determination, in stick-to-itiveness, trying to remain in Contact against all odds. How many of your most-important moments were when you hung in or hung on, even when the Other wanted you to let go, or when your ambitions were thwarted.

• The harder lesson for many of us is to give in to the larger Flow and to allow enough to be enough, even if it thwarts our Egoic Will and its powerful ambitions.

Satiation's Deeper Meanings:

Limitation, Mortality, Greed and the Collective Balance of Resources:

“Some men are born to live at ease, doing what they please,

richer than the bees are in honey,

Never growing old, never feeling cold

Pulling pots of gold from thin air

The best in every town, best at shaking down

Best at making mountains of money

They can't take it with them, but what do they care?”

--Stephen Schwartz, All For The Best, Godspell

“There is patience in the Earth, to allow us to go into her, and dig, and hurt with tunnels and shafts, and if we put back the flesh we have torn from her and so make good what we have weakened, she is content to let us bleed her. But when we take, and leave her weak where we have taken, she has a soreness, and an anger that we should be so cruel to her and so thoughtless of her comfort. So, she waits for us, and finding us, bears down, and bearing down, makes us a part of her, flesh of her flesh, with our clay in place of the clay we thoughtlessly have shovelled away.”

-- Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

• The Willful Ego believes that if it can enlarge itself through more control, acquisition, consumption, and contact, it will be bigger than any threat, ward off scarcity, and conquer limit, loss, vulnerability, and mortality. Naturally, this is a futile, delusional pursuit, because all of these are inevitable sooner or later.

• The Satiation stage, therefore, is the ground upon which we meet our individual and collective greed.

• On the individual level, that is our personal dependencies. On the collective level, that is our system of unfettered capitalism, a cultural mindset that exalts wealth, power, and fame, at the great expense of the non-wealthy.

• Both individual and collective insatiability are responsible for many of our personal and societal ills. When we practice Satiation, we begin to curb these excesses and to live more-easily within our means. For individuals, that means we don’t exhaust our personal resources to feed our addictions. For societies, it means we don’t deprive the majority of our population to feed the wealthy.

• Collective Satiation work is just as important as individual work. Learning to recycle, to curb our habits of consumption like addictive shopping, and living within our personal means can be accompanied by action to do this on the larger societal level.

• If we are to get our individual consciousnesses straight about satiation, we need to also get our collective consciousnesses straight about it as well.

• We can influence the Collective Consciousness by advocating for political, economic, educational, and social systems that meet the true needs of the many, rather than the false-needs of the privileged few. In doing so, we benefit not just the deprived poor, vulnerable, and needy, but also the exhausted Earth, whose generosity has been abused by our insatiable demands on its resources.

• All of us, the wealthy included, need to learn that no amount of consumption or wealth will stave off the inevitability of limitation, loss, vulnerability, and death.

• So, consider what you can do to help advocate for a change in our national policies to reverse the insane income equality that has been growing since the 1980s, so that the many can have enough and the wealthy few can be expected to learn the meaning of the word “Satiation”. Consider what you can do to influence your representatives in our government to take a hard line on climate change and income equity, rather than catering to the profit motives of the wealthy and the polluters of our planet. Be a Mensch For Moderation, Mutuality, and Mother Earth!