In Scripture, the term “Lust of the Eye” (see The Nature of Sin and Temptation) refers to a particular weakness in human nature. In this modern age, it manifests most often as entertainment-seeking. At a fundamental level, it’s an appetite for sensory stimulation. Think broadly on this, because it’s what fuels drug and alcohol abuse, porn, gaming obsessions, TV and movies, all the adrenaline inducing rides, etc. It manifests in a whole range of human behavior that may not in itself be harmful, but becomes the human excuse to defy God’s moral character.
Awakening your heart-mind doesn’t solve the problem, but it does empower the means God placed in each of us to overcome, to reorder our internal processes so that we can focus on the drive to serve and glorify God. For this were we created and nothing else can take its place.
What most people fail to realize is how quickly the Lust of the Eyes can become the main problem with absorbing what passes for news reporting. The Three Lusts typically work together. For example, reading so-called insider reports appeals to your “Pride of Life” in making you imagine that you hold some advantage over the poor benighted souls around you. It teaches you to take yourself too seriously. This is what sells these days, particularly on the Internet. This is where we get the vast horde of Keyboard Commandos, trading in all their so-called “alternative news” reports that cater to all flavors of political persuasion.
You shouldn’t imagine that this is entirely the domain of right-wingers. The lefties (“progressives”) do it, too, with their own unique flavoring. Each side whines about how the opposition owns the system and engages in unjustified persecution and censorship. They refuse to admit how the various outlets are all owned by the same small group of folks. While the Internet itself has escaped direct ownership and control of the sort we have seen with print, radio and TV, you won’t have to search hard to discover a heavy layer of filtration between data and people. It’s a filtration that consists of software and even hardware specifications that serve to keep us from discovering things the media moguls want to hide from us.
Thus, you should understand that when someone like Rush Limbaugh stays on air, it’s because there is a market for his particular form of entertainment. He’s not interested in actual truth, but making a buck. He, at least, has admitted it quietly. The media moguls allow it because it’s harmless misdirection, herding a dangerous element into “safe” obsessions, while allowing the moguls to take their cut of the advertising proceeds. The same goes with every popular info-huckster all over the political spectrum. So long as everyone believes in working through the system, battling for political leverage, the people who are actually in power face no real threat.
There are plenty of info-consumers who shift around on the spectrum. So long as everything rests on the Three Lusts, it hardly matters what you claim as logical and reality-based. As previously noted, the existence of reason as a mythological “objective standard” becomes an excuse for ignoring how we are driven so easily by non-intellectual forces. The elevation of human reason is pure mythology, idolatry of a false god. Nobody seems to notice that every theoretical construct has logical holes that others can identify while standing within an opposing theoretical construct. In the end, the only reason you can give for choosing one over another is that it answers some non-intellectual call in your fallen nature. So long as you insist that intellectual reason and logic are the final arbiter of all things, you will never escape; you will never come up with a solidly satisfying moral system.
Instead, the cravings continue and you find no peace. Peace is not possible on that level. Not because there is no peace, but because it’s simply not available there. Peace of that sort is actually a cry for meaning, for moral significance. Morality can never rest on mere logic, and certainly not mere sentiment. So long as you cannot break out of that logical construct, you are doomed.
The only possible escape is to awaken your heart-mind awareness. It’s then you realize that the only change possible is in yourself. People cannot truly change on any other basis. All your hopes of convincing or forcing people to do whatever you imagine is good, right and moral can never work for more than a few minutes in this world anyway. That’s the nature of our fallen human existence. Any system you could devise to disable or inhibit what you consider immoral (whether in thought or deed) will be perverted and hijacked before you even get it in place. There will always be contextual psychopaths, people who cannot be made to care about what’s good, right and moral. And there will always be someone among those moral black holes smarter than you, because the nature of psychopathy makes them more creative. For all intents and purposes, psychopaths have no heart that can be awakened. The link between mind and heart that God made in us might as well not exist in them.
The system on this level cannot be fixed. The one system God revealed is anathema to virtually the whole world, so we are unlikely to ever see it again, except on some moral level alone in the hearts of just a few folks in any given context. But if there is any hope in sharing your heart-led existence with anyone, you’ll have to break a wealth of bad habits. Do you ever get the feeling you’d sometimes be better off simply not knowing about events outside your own community? So long as you rest on the power of your mind, that’s generally true. Once you rest your awareness in your heart, it’s pretty easy to decide a lot of global news doesn’t matter much. It’s not that God’s Word promotes blind ignorance, or that it forbids such topics as “foreign policy.” Rather, divine revelation has such a radically different approach to human relations as a whole that you cannot trust anything that tends to fall under the label of “foreign policy,” any more than you could trust anything cooked up as “domestic policy.”
Recognize that most of it is mere entertainment, a means to capture your attention by obsessions to things that you could never change. The system is herding us, and it’s an illusion that we can influence it beyond more than the most superficial features. For example, voting has been perverted, stood on its head to make you imagine you have a choice. No one gets on the ballot without being owned by the system. It was a lie almost from the first election. You don’t have any real choice; all you can do is be herded into giving consent to whatever the system allows.
Escape the addiction so you can see what indescribable peace God has for you.
