Sex, Power, Money, Fame
The four hungers that run the world are one energy stalled at its lowest gates. Why a force that cannot rise must discharge as ruin, and what becomes possible when it climbs.
Sex, power, money, fame. Say the four words to anyone and they nod, because between them the four words explain almost every headline, every war, every betrayal, every fortune built and every life wrecked in the building. We treat them as four separate appetites, four different problems to be managed by four different sets of rules. They are not four problems. They are four masks worn by a single force, and the force is the same one that, directed the other way, has produced every saint, every genius, and every act of grace the species has ever managed. The difference between a civilisation that tears itself apart and one that does not is not which appetites it has. It is where the energy behind them is allowed to go.
These are not four hungers. They are one current, stalled at the bottom of the body, looking for the only exits a low gate allows.
I have written elsewhere about the mechanics of that current, what rises through the spine when the deepest drive in the body is conserved and directed upward, in the essay on sexual transmutation. This essay sits on top of that one and asks a larger question. If the current can rise, what happens to a person, and to a whole world, when it cannot? My claim is simple and, I think, exact. The horrors of the world are not a moral failure that better preaching could fix. They are a hydraulic fact. A force that is generated and cannot climb does not disappear. It has to come out somewhere, and the somewheres it has are sex, power, money, and fame, taken in their distorted forms. The only real solution, the only one that has ever worked at the level of an individual and the only one that could ever work at the level of a species, is to move the energy up.
One current, one ladder
Begin with the architecture, briefly, because everything rests on it. The yogic tradition holds that there is a single creative energy seated at the base of the spine, the , and a single channel it travels, the , that runs from that base to the crown of the head. Along the channel sit seven gates, the , each one a centre in the body and a set of faculties in the mind. The current either rises through these gates or it stalls at one of them and discharges through it. That is the whole drama.
You do not have to take the map on faith from the East, because the West drew the same ladder in the language of the brain. The neuroanatomist Paul MacLean spent his career on what he called the , the observation that the human skull holds three brains stacked in the order evolution built them. At the base sits the reptilian complex, the brainstem, concerned with one thing only: survival, territory, the reflex to fight, flee, or seize. Wrapped around it is the limbic system, the seat of raw emotion and appetite, of pleasure and rage and the drive to mate and to dominate. And over both sits the neocortex, and at its front the prefrontal cortex, the late and fragile organ of reason, foresight, empathy, and self-restraint, the part that can hold a longer horizon than the next reward. Higher still, deep in the geometric centre of the head, sits the pineal, the organ the inner traditions always pointed to as the seat of the highest seeing, which I have written about in full in the pineal gland essay.
The two maps are the same map. The lower gates are the lower brain. To say the energy is pinned at the base is to say, in the other vocabulary, that a human being is running on the brainstem and the limbic system with the higher centres dark. When people speak of energy reaching the higher centres of the brain, they are not being poetic. They are describing the literal migration of a person's operating centre of gravity from the reptilian and limbic floors up into the cortex and beyond.
The law of the dammed river
Here is the part almost everyone misses, and it is the load-bearing wall of the whole argument.
The energy is generated whether you like it or not. It is the basic charge of being alive, the same charge that fills the body at the base of the spine and rises as pressure looking for a path. You do not get to choose whether the river flows. You get to choose, within limits, where it goes. And a river that is dammed does not stop being a river. The water keeps arriving. The pressure keeps building. And water under pressure, denied the channel upward, does not sit politely behind the wall. It finds the cracks. It bursts the weakest seam. It comes out, with force, wherever it can.
This is why moralising never works on any of the four hungers. You can tell a man not to be greedy, not to be lustful, not to be cruel, not to crave the eyes of the crowd, and you will change nothing, because you have addressed the outlet and left the pressure untouched. The energy that was going to discharge as greed will discharge as something else. Prohibition reliably produces not virtue but a new and often uglier symptom, because the dam was never the problem. The problem was that the river had nowhere to climb.
Energy that cannot rise does not rest. It ferments. And the four hungers are simply the four shapes fermentation takes in a body that has forgotten the way up.
I made a related point in the essay on the gold of the philosophers: the whole promise of the inner work is to lower the resistance of the human instrument so that it carries its own energy without loss, the way a superconductor carries a current without leaking it as heat. The four hungers are the heat. They are what the current dissipates into when the channel up is blocked and the system has to shed its charge as friction. A life run on the lower gates is a life leaking its entire energy budget into survival panic, appetite, the will to dominate, and the craving to be seen. There is nothing left over to rise.
So there are only ever two destinies for the force. Up, through the gates, into the faculties that the upper centres govern. Or out, through whichever of the lower gates is weakest, as one of the four distortions. Every human being is living one of these two lives at every moment, and so is every civilisation, because a civilisation is only the sum of where its people's energy is allowed to go.
The four hungers, gate by gate
Now walk the lower gates and watch each hunger appear as the shadow that gate throws when the current stalls there.
Money is the root in fear
The first gate, , is the centre of survival. Its faculty is security and grounding. Its shadow, when the gate is closed and the energy is pinned at the floor, is fear, the oldest and most primitive signal the body carries, the reptilian alarm that says: you might not make it.
Money is what that fear builds when it cannot rise. Strip away the abstractions and money is crystallised survival fear, the attempt to convert the terror of scarcity into a number large enough to silence it. The number never is large enough, because the fear was never really about the number. A man with ten million who cannot stop accumulating is not solving a material problem; he is feeding a root gate that has no off switch. The hoarding, the scarcity mindset, the inability to feel safe no matter the balance, the conviction that there is never enough, these are not personality flaws. They are the signature of survival energy that has nowhere to go but in circles at the bottom of the body.
Scale this to a civilisation and you get the economy we have, an entire machine engineered to keep the root gate in alarm, because a frightened animal consumes. You get debt as a way of life, the strip-mining of the living world to feed quarterly numbers, the reduction of every relationship to a transaction, and a billion people working themselves sick chasing a security that the structure is designed never to deliver. None of this is a failure of economics. It is the root chakra of the species, stuck open and bleeding fear, organised into an institution.
Sex is the sacral spilling
The second gate, , is the centre of pleasure and of the creative drive, and it is the gate at which the modern world deliberately traps almost everyone. Its proper function is generative, the same energy that makes new life and, raised, makes new work. Its shadow is the leak: appetite untethered from meaning, pleasure pursued as an end until it consumes the one pursuing it.
This is the hunger our era has industrialised more thoroughly than any before it. The pornographic feed, the engineered image, the algorithm tuned to fire the second gate a thousand times a day, the entire attention economy is a mechanism for keeping the energy pinned exactly here, spent before it can climb. The cost is not only personal, the dulled mornings and the silenced higher faculties I described in the transmutation essay. At scale it is the commodification of the body, the reduction of other human beings to objects of appetite, the trade in flesh, the slow death of intimacy in a culture that has confused stimulation with connection. A society spilling its creative force out the second gate produces a great deal of stimulation and almost no creation, a great deal of contact and almost no love.
Power is the fire turned to domination
The third gate, , is the centre of will and personal power, the fire of agency, the force that lets a person act in the world and hold a discipline across years. There is nothing wrong with the fire. The fire is necessary. The distortion appears when the gate above it, the heart, stays shut, so the will has nothing to serve but itself. Then power stops meaning the capacity to do and starts meaning the capacity to dominate, to make others small in order to feel large.
This is the hunger that writes the worst of history. War, tyranny, cruelty for its own sake, the whole apparatus of one human being or one nation bending others to its will, is manipura with the heart closed above it. David Hawkins drew the distinction precisely in his work on the levels of consciousness: force and power are opposites, not synonyms. Force is the lower thing, domination, coercion, the fist, and it always requires more force to sustain because it generates resistance. Real power, the kind that does not need to coerce, lives higher up and asks nothing of the people near it. The tyrant has force and no power, which is why he is always afraid, and why his empire always, eventually, costs more to hold than it yields.
René Girard saw the engine underneath it. We do not desire things directly; we desire them because others desire them, and that mimetic rivalry escalates, two hands reaching for the same object until the reaching becomes the point and the object is forgotten. Rivalry breeds violence, violence breeds more, and societies discharge the accumulated pressure onto a victim, the scapegoat, a temporary peace bought with blood. That is the third gate at civilisational scale: the will to power, multiplied across millions, periodically released as war. It is the oldest pattern we have, and it is precisely the pattern of energy that cannot rise.
Fame is the crown counterfeited
The fourth hunger is the subtle one, and once you see it the whole picture locks into place.
Notice that fame does not fit cleanly onto a lower gate the way money, sex, and power do. That is because fame is not a lower hunger at all. It is the highest longing in the human being, wearing a disguise. The crown, , is the gate of union, the place where the separate self dissolves back into the whole and is, in the language of every tradition, known by everything and at one with everything and no longer afraid of death because it is no longer only itself. That is the deepest desire a person carries, underneath all the others: to be reunited with the source, to be held by the totality, to not be alone, to not end.
Now take that infinite longing for union with God and pin it at the bottom of the body, where it cannot reach its true object. It does not disappear. By the law of the dammed river, it has to come out. And the nearest counterfeit of being one with all, available to a self that cannot rise, is being seen by all. The hunger to be known by everything becomes the hunger to be known by everyone. The longing to dissolve into the whole becomes the longing to be adored by the crowd. The craving for the eternal becomes the craving to be remembered, to leave a name, to not be forgotten. Fame is the ego's forgery of transcendence. It is the crown chakra's homesickness, misrouted into the lowest possible mirror.
Ernest Becker named the mechanism without the chakra language. The human animal, uniquely aware that it will die, spends its life on what he called the immortality project, some symbolic achievement that will outlast the body and cheat death of its finality. Fame is the purest immortality project there is, the bid to purchase a kind of deathlessness in the memory of others. But the memory of others is not eternity, and the crowd is not God, and so the hunger is never satisfied, because the famous person has reached for union with the whole and closed their hand around the regard of strangers. They have everything except the only thing they actually wanted.
Fame is the crown's homesickness pointed at the wrong mirror. The soul wants to be one with everything; the stalled self settles for being watched by everyone.
This is why our age, which has democratised fame and made the small immortality project available to everyone with a phone, is so visibly anguished. We have built a machine that takes the deepest spiritual longing in the species, the longing for God, and converts it into a metric of attention, then sells the pursuit of that metric back to us as a life. The cult of being seen, the influencer as the era's defining figure, the vanity and the comparison and the quiet despair underneath the curated image, is the counterfeit crown running at planetary scale. It is the saddest of the four hungers, because it is the holiest one, inverted.
A world made of stalled current
Step back now and look at the whole. Hold the four hungers in mind and read any day's news. The war is the third gate. The predatory economy and the strip-mined planet are the first. The trade in bodies and the collapse of intimacy are the second. The vanity culture, the desperate pursuit of the eyes of the crowd, is the counterfeit crown. There is almost nothing in the catalogue of human misery that does not resolve, on inspection, into one of these four, which is to say into the single current discharging through one of the lower gates because it cannot rise.
And here is the part that should genuinely alarm us. We have built, for the first time in history, a technology whose entire business model is to keep the current at the bottom. The feed is engineered to fire the second gate so the energy never climbs, to inflame the first gate's scarcity so we consume, to stoke the third gate's rivalry so we stay enraged and engaged, and to dangle the fourth gate's counterfeit immortality so we keep performing for the crowd. The machine does not profit from a human being whose energy has risen to the heart, because such a person wants very little, fears very little, dominates no one, and does not need to be seen. The entire apparatus is, whether anyone designed it this way or not, a dam built across the human spine at industrial scale.
We did not just fail to raise the current. We built a machine whose profit depends on keeping it at the floor.
This is why the problems compound rather than resolve, no matter how much wealth or law or technology we throw at them. You cannot fix a hydraulic problem with a moral lecture, and you cannot fix it with a better dam. As long as the energy of billions of people is held at the lower three gates and milked there, the distortions are not bugs in the system. They are the system, running exactly as a system pinned to the floor must run.
Why it cannot be legislated, only raised
Follow the logic to its conclusion and the usual solutions fall away one by one. More laws against greed leave the survival fear untouched and the greed reappears as a cleverer instrument. More shame around lust drives the appetite underground and intensifies it. More force against the tyrants breeds the next tyrant, because force is the third gate and answering it in kind only feeds the gate. More moralising about vanity in a culture starving for transcendence is simply noise to a soul that has confused being watched with being saved. Every approach that works on the outlet fails, because the outlet was never the cause.
There is exactly one move that addresses the cause, and it is the move the inner traditions have pointed at for three thousand years. You change where the energy goes. You open the channel up. As I put it in the transmutation essay, the drive that built every living thing is not yours to abolish, it is yours to direct, and the same is true of all four hungers at once, because they are the same drive. You do not defeat greed, lust, the will to dominate, and the craving for fame one at a time. You raise the single current that was discharging as all four, and as it rises, it stops arriving at the gates that were producing them. The lower gates do not have to be fought. They have to be passed.
What opens above the floor
So what is up there, that the current is trying to reach?
Above the third gate sits the heart, , and it is the hinge of the entire ascent, because the heart is the first gate where the separate self begins to dissolve. Below it, everything is about the self: my survival, my pleasure, my power, my name. At the heart, for the first time, the boundary between me and you starts to thin. Compassion is not a moral decoration added to a selfish animal. It is what the current feels like when it has climbed above the gates that only know the self. A person whose energy lives at the heart does not have to be told not to exploit others, because the others no longer feel fully separate from him. The commandment has become a perception.
Above the heart, the throat, , the gate of truth and authentic voice, where what a person says begins to carry weight because it is no longer in the service of the lower hungers. Above that, the third eye, , the seat of the pineal and of the seeing that looks into the structure of things rather than their surface, which is exactly why the calcified, sealed pineal of the modern adult matters so much and why I treat its decalcification as a prerequisite for any of this. And at the summit, the crown, where the longing that fame counterfeits finds its actual object, union, not with the crowd, but with the whole.
This is not unmeasurable mysticism. When researchers put long-term meditators in scanners, two things show up that map precisely onto this ascent. The first is that the brain's , the circuitry of the self-referential me, the part that runs the story of my survival and my standing and my image, goes notably quiet, which is the neural signature of exactly the self-dissolving the heart gate describes. The second is that adepts in deep practice generate high-amplitude gamma synchrony across the cortex, the brain's highest centres lighting up and binding together at a level rarely seen otherwise. The lower self goes quiet and the higher brain comes online. The current has reached, in the other vocabulary, the higher centres of the brain. The two maps, once again, are the same map.
God above all, as the actual mechanism
Now the heart of the matter, and the answer to the question of how a person actually opens the gate rather than merely admiring the idea of opening it.
Look at what the four lower hungers have in common. Money is the self defending its survival. Sex, in its distorted form, is the self consuming for its pleasure. Power is the self enlarging itself over others. Fame is the self seeking to be eternal. Every one of them is a movement of the separate self, asserting, defending, aggrandising, perpetuating the I that stands apart from everything else. The lower gates are not four different problems. They are four expressions of one underlying condition: the conviction that I am a separate thing, alone in a world of other separate things, and must therefore secure, satisfy, dominate, and immortalise myself before the dark closes in.
And the heart gate, the hinge of the whole ascent, is nothing other than the loosening of exactly that conviction. The current cannot pass the heart while the self insists on its separateness, because passing the heart is the dissolving of separateness. This is why no amount of effort aimed at the symptoms ever opens the gate. You cannot defend, satisfy, dominate, and immortalise the separate self all the way into the recognition that there is no separate self. The motion is in the wrong direction.
This is what it actually means, mechanically, to put God above all else. It is not a rule imposed on life from outside, a tax of obedience levied on an otherwise self-interested animal. It is the single act that dethrones the separate self and lets the current rise. To put God above all is to stop putting the self above all, and putting the self above all is the precise blockage that holds the energy at the lower three gates. The first commandment is not arbitrary. It is a description of the one move that opens the human being. And the recognition that follows it, that there is a single divinity present in all things and all people, is not a doctrine to be believed. It is simply what the world looks like from above the heart, once the wall of separateness has come down and the current is running through the upper gates as a matter of course.
To put God above all is not a commandment laid on top of life. It is the one act that takes the self off the throne, and the self on the throne is the dam.
This is the thread that runs identically through every contemplative tradition, the thing Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy, the single teaching that surfaces independently in the Vedanta, in Taoism, in the Christian mystics, in Sufism, in the Buddhist dharma: that there is a divine ground to all being, that the deepest self in a human being is one with it, and that the purpose of a life is to realise that unity in fact and not merely in theory. William James, studying the raw reports of religious experience as a scientist, found the same invariant underneath every culture's account: the sense of a wider self and a reconciliation with it, arriving as the lower, anxious, self-defending consciousness gives way. The Tao Te Ching describes the sage who does not contend and therefore cannot be contended with, the third gate dissolved into the heart. The Gita describes action offered up rather than grasped at, the will of the third gate surrendered to something above it. They are all, every one of them, descriptions of a current that has been allowed to rise by a self that finally got out of its own way.
The next cycle
So picture, finally, what the user of all this energy actually is when it runs the other direction, not in one rare adept, but as the ordinary condition of a population.
A human being whose current lives at the heart and above does not have to be told not to hoard, because the survival fear that drives hoarding has been passed. Does not have to be told not to exploit, because the others are no longer fully separate. Does not have to be told not to dominate, because domination has nothing left to feed. Does not have to be told not to chase the eyes of the crowd, because the longing that fame counterfeits has found its real object and gone quiet. For such a person, every virtue we currently have to teach, legislate, and enforce is simply the natural shape of their energy. Goodness is not effortful. It is what is left when the distortions stop being generated.
Now imagine that as the resting state of enough people that it becomes the texture of a civilisation. War would not have to be outlawed; it would become as unthinkable as it is pointless to a population whose current does not stall at the gate that produces it. Predatory economics would not have to be regulated into submission; the fear it runs on would no longer be there to exploit. The trade in bodies, the cult of vanity, the whole catalogue of distortions, would not be suppressed. They would simply lose their fuel. This is the next evolution, and it is not a fantasy of changing human nature. It is human nature with the current finally allowed up the channel it was always built to climb.
The age in which goodness must be taught is the age of the lower gates. The next one is the age in which it no longer needs to be spoken, because it has become the air.
And this is the deepest mark of the shift, the thing that tells you a cycle has actually turned rather than merely improved. Right now, all of this has to be taught. We need the scriptures, the sermons, the laws, the essays, the constant effortful reminding of a species that keeps forgetting, precisely because the natural resting state of a person stuck at the lower gates is the forgetting. A teaching is always a sign of a deficit; you only have to be told what you are not already living. The next cycle of humanity is the one in which the recognition of the unity and divinity in all things no longer has to be taught at all, because it has stopped being a teaching and become a fact of perception, the way you do not have to be taught that the sky is overhead. The end of the era of the lower gates is the era in which the highest things are finally silent, not because they have been forgotten, but because they have been so completely realised that there is nothing left to say about them. The teaching ends when the thing taught becomes the air everyone breathes.
That is the choice, and it is the same choice for one person and for the whole. The current is rising in you right now, as it always is, as the simple charge of being alive. It will go up, through the gates, into the faculties that build the human beings and the world we say we want. Or it will go out, through the floor, as one of the four hungers, multiplied across billions and amplified by a machine built to keep it there, into the world we already have. The seed is at the base. The path is up the spine. And the single move that opens the way is the oldest instruction there is, which turns out, when you finally understand the mechanism, to be not a moral demand at all but a piece of plain engineering: take the self off the throne, put God above all, and let the current climb.
Sources
- The Serpent Power, the Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga,
- Autobiography of a Yogi,
- Power vs. Force, the Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior,
- The Denial of Death,
- Violence and the Sacred,
- The Perennial Philosophy,
- The Varieties of Religious Experience,
- The Triune Brain in Evolution, Role in Paleocerebral Functions,
- Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity, . https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1112029108
- Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice, . https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
- Tao Te Ching,
- The Bhagavad Gita,
- Published
- Reading
- 18 min
- Sources
- 12