Thank you so much, Andre, for your thoughts!!
You are correct that what we desire is a cause of suffering, in this case the mental suffering of worrying. But the suffering caused by desiring the wrong thing is not limited to worrying.
All the physical pleasures of this world, as well as other distractions like entertainment, etc., only provide short-lived pleasure. The pleasure lasts a little while and then it's over, and we either need more of it, or we need something new. The same can be said of other kinds of worldly pleasures, like riches or fame. Those don't satisfy for long either.
The key is in desiring the right things of good Spiritual value, as you pointed out. In Jesus' case He tells us to desire the Kingdom of God and God's Righteousness, which will lead us to have an inner peace and calm because we trust in God for the other stuff and don't worry about it. For non-Christians I suppose their goal is to find another way to that same kind of inner peace and calm.
As for Dr. Rubin, I now see that quoting only one paragraph from his whole book is not enough, not enough for readers to get the general idea of what he says about self-hatred. And that's too bad, because Compassion and Self-Hatred is actually a great book so I want to do it justice if I can.
If I were to try to justify or explain what Dr. Rubin says, with a little more context from the other parts of the book, I would say something like .... If we pay attention to our thoughts (the 1st step), and we detect that we're worrying, if we don't stop that runaway train of worrying if at all possible on our part then it's a subtle form of self-hatred. This is because in this situation we have a choice to worry or not worry (because we're aware of our thoughts and paying attention) and we can make the choice not to worry about things that are honestly beyond our control.
Of course what he's saying is only possible if we're tuned in to our own inner experience and we pay attention to the thoughts that go through our head. Only then can we stop ourselves and say, "hey, I'm worrying about this thing. But there's literally nothing I can do about this until next Wednesday. Until then it's completely out of my hands. So I'm just not going to worry about it 'till next week, and life goes on."
If the person in the example above chooses instead to worry about that thing until next Wednesday, they have made the wrong choice according to Dr. Rubin.
Again, thank you very much for your response and I'm glad you enjoyed my post.
