This is the place in the soul where there’s a deep lust that is very physical and very gross. It’s similar to a very primitive animal, but here it is a human soul, and when a human soul becomes animal, the animal instinct is exaggerated. Animals don’t actually behave the way humans do when we say they’re “behaving like animals”—for example animals generally eat what they need, and then that’s it, they leave it. They don’t keep accumulating more and more, far more than they need. But when the human soul becomes like an animal, it just keeps accumulating more and more of what the animal wants. It tries to hoard as many supplies as possible, regardless of need. And this is what Jabba the Hutt epitomizes, being big, fat, greedy, and full of lust. So when we’re caught by the illusion of the physical world and have the deep conviction that it can satisfy our needs, our soul becomes like Jabba—a fat, empty shell that lusts greedily for power, money, security, food, comfort, pleasure, and all the various goodies that people want from the physical world. Now, what do you call people who believe in physical reality and nothing else? Materialists. Empirical materialists. So in fact all empirical materialists are Jabba the Hutt in the depth of their identity.

This realization, and many others on this dimension, erode the soul’s attachment to worldly things. For the soul can clearly see that all richness belongs to the divine presence, and all abundance is of the very nature of truth. Attachment is based on the separateness of self, which is one side of a larger illusion, the belief that the world is composed of discrete objects. Not seeing the indivisible boundless ground of everything, the soul sees manifestation as composed of discrete objects. One can then possess or lose one object or another. And since this dismemberment reflects the absence of the unity of Being, with its richness and abundance, it is bound to be colored by a sense of impoverishment. Impoverishment becomes desire and greed, and possessiveness develops into grasping and attachment. Therefore, instead of the soul experiencing herself living in abundance and seeing richness everywhere, she inwardly feels, consciously or unconsciously, that she is deprived and empty. She ends up being ruled by desire, greed, possessiveness, and attachment. Instead of the beautiful and rich display of love, the world of dismembered objects becomes the promise of possessions, power, and objects of gratification. The boundless Good is dismembered into material goods, to be attained, possessed, and hoarded. The natural richness and its associated spontaneous generosity becomes an economy of scarcity, where each is for his own, each is looking out for himself, and each fights and competes with others for as big a piece of the pie as one can get through cunning or brute force. This worldview is the direct result of not seeing the unity of Being, and not recognizing the inherent richness of its nature. It is actually founded on the perception of reified reality, what we have become accustomed to calling the world, or physical reality. The physical world as we ordinarily see it is basically empty, and populated only by material objects. It is a material reduction of manifestation, with forms that are visible, but without their ground and true nature. This world produces the worldview of ego, the ground for greed and aggression, possessiveness of material objects, and adulation of power.

All ego-selves include this structure; human beings differ only in the degree to which it dominates their overall sense of self. It is the ego structure expressing exclusive cathexis of the physical world, where the soul is caught by the illusion of the world, believing the reified world can satisfy her needs. We can say that in some sense it is the ego’s counterpart of the divine being, the boundless richness and abundance of the dimension of divine love. It is an attempt to be rich and self-sufficient, to have abundance and plenitude but from within the materialistic worldview of the ego. An apt image for it is that of Jabba the Hutt, from the Star Wars film series created by George Lucas. Jabba is a ponderous, very fat semi-humanoid creature, having the body of a slithery worm-like animal with semi-human face and upper body. He is grossly fat, insatiable in his greed, and dangerous in his treachery. He likes to collect slave girls, dancing girls, and different kinds of aliens and animals to serve him, protect him, and satisfy his sensual desires. In the actual experience of this structure one feels like a shell made of fluffy fat, but empty and greedy. One is only interested in things of the world, and things of the spirit hold no interest. But the emptiness points to the inauthenticity and unreality of such form, revealing it as a psychic structure. Recognizing this, one may then see that the world one relates to from this perspective is itself empty and devoid of any real significance or substance. It lacks all the characteristics of divine love. It lacks richness, abundance, beauty, fullness, love, benevolence, softness, vividness, and color. This turns out to be the condition of the material world, for it is a world alienated from its true nature, and hence empty of all of its beautiful features. ……..We have discussed the issue of Jabba the Hutt only in order to highlight the fact that since divine love is the dimension of the richness and abundance of true nature it will spontaneously challenge sectors of ego structure that specifically contradict such properties.