On The Road To Find Out: March 2013

Notes from: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present,” writes Eckhart Tolle. “Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.”

“Your worst enemy cannot hurt you as much as your own thoughts, when you haven’t mastered them,” said the Buddha. “But once mastered, no one can help you as much—not even your father and your mother.”

What a wonderful world it would be if the simplistic view were accurate: that human beings need only negative consequences to teach them hard lessons.

people’s brain physiology doesn’t develop separately from their life events and their emotions.

vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded.

But no matter what, I still don’t accept that things are hopeless for any human being. I believe there is a natural strength and innate perfection in everyone. Even though it’s covered up by all kinds of terrors and all kinds of scars, it’s there.”

The meaning of all addictions could be defined as endeavors at controlling our life experiences with the help of external remedies.… Unfortunately, all external means of improving our life experiences are double-edged swords: they are always good and bad. No external remedy improves our condition without, at the same time, making it worse.

Passion is divine fire: it enlivens and makes holy; it gives light and yields inspiration. Passion is generous because it’s not ego-driven; addiction is self-centered. Passion gives and enriches; addiction is a thief. Passion is a source of truth and enlightenment; addictive behaviors lead you into darkness. You’re more alive when you are passionate, and you triumph whether or not you attain your goal. But an addiction requires a specific outcome that feeds the ego; without that outcome, the ego feels empty and deprived. A consuming passion that you are helpless to resist, no matter what the consequences, is an addiction.

How does the addict know she has impaired control? Because she doesn’t stop the behavior in spite of its ill effects. She makes promises to herself or others to quit, but despite pain, peril, and promises, she keeps relapsing. There are exceptions, of course. Some addicts never recognize the harm their behaviors cause and never form resolutions to end them.

emotional isolation, powerlessness, and stress are exactly the conditions that promote the neurobiology of addiction in human beings as well.

In any disease, say smoking-induced lung or heart disease, organs and tissues are damaged and function in pathological ways. When the brain is diseased, the functions that become pathological are the person’s emotional life, thought processes, and behavior. And this creates addiction’s central dilemma: if recovery is to occur, the brain, the impaired organ of decision making, needs to initiate its own healing process. An altered and dysfunctional brain must decide that it wants to overcome its own dysfunction: to revert to normal—or, perhaps, become normal for the very first time.

What we call “being in pain” is our subjective experience of that stimulus (i.e., “Ouch, that hurts”) and our emotional reaction to the experience.

In other words, we “feel” physical and emotional pain in the same part of the brain—and that, in turn, is crucial to our bonding with others who are important to us.

Stress is a physiological response mounted by an organism when it is confronted with excessive demands on its coping mechanisms, whether biological or psychological. It is an attempt to maintain internal biological and chemical stability, or homeostasis, in the face of these excessive demands. The physiological stress response involves nervous discharges throughout the body and the release of a cascade of hormones, chiefly adrenaline and cortisol. Virtually every organ is affected, including the heart and lungs, the muscles, and, of course, the emotional centers in the brain.

Early stress establishes a lower set point for a child’s internal stress system: such a person becomes stressed more easily than normal throughout her life.

The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress for human beings: uncertainty, lack of information, and loss of control. 35 To these we may add conflict that the organism is unable to handle and isolation from emotionally supportive relationships.

The mind may reside mostly in the brain, but it is much more than the sum total of the automatic neurological programs rooted in our pasts. And there is something else in us and about us: it is called by many names, spirit being the most democratic and least denominational or divisive in a religious sense.

genuine self-esteem needs nothing from the outside.

Self-esteem is not what the individual consciously thinks about himself; it’s the quality of self-respect manifested in his emotional life and behaviors. By no means are a superficially positive self-image and true self-esteem necessarily identical. In many cases they are not even compatible. People with a grandiose and inflated view of themselves are missing true self-esteem at the core. To compensate for a deep sense of worthlessness, they develop a craving for power and an exaggerated self-evaluation

I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is about giving, not getting. HUBERT SELBY JR. Requiem for a Dream (Preface, 2000)

Almost any human being, when overwhelmed by stress or powerful emotions, will act or react not from intention but from mechanisms that are set off deep in the brain, rather than being generated in the conscious and volitional segments of the cortex.

Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process.”

“Choice,” Eckhart Tolle points out, “implies consciousness—a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.”3

“Free choice only comes from thinking; it doesn’t come from emotions. It emerges from the capacity to think about your emotions.

addiction is a response to life experience, not simply to a drug.

“And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests and sometimes one positively ought,” wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground. “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

“In cultivating loving-kindness, we learn first to be honest, loving, and compassionate towards ourselves,” writes the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. “Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness.”

God does not change people’s lot until they first change what’s in their own hearts. THE KORAN (13:11) No organism in nature is separate from the system in which it lives, functions, and dies, and no natural process can be understood in isolation from its physical and biological context. From an ecological perspective, the addiction process doesn’t happen accidentally; nor is it preprogrammed by heredity. It is a product of development in a certain context, and it continues to be maintained by factors in the environment. The ecological view sees addiction as a changeable and evolving dynamic that expresses a lifelong interaction with a person’s social and emotional surroundings and with his own internal psychological space. Healing, then, must take into account the internal psychological climate—the beliefs, memories, mind-states, and emotions that feed addictive impulses and behaviors—as well as the external milieu. In an ecological framework recovery from addiction does not mean a “cure” for a disease but the creation of new resources, internal and external, that can support different, healthy ways of satisfying one’s genuine needs. It also involves developing new brain circuits that can facilitate more adaptive responses and behaviors.

“What an abyss of uncertainty,” wrote the novelist Marcel Proust, “whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself, when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking.”

“What we are looking for is what we are looking with.”

Dr. Schwartz writes, “that the brain remodels itself throughout life, and that it retains the capacity to change itself as the result not only of passively experienced factors such as enriched environments, but also of changes in the ways we behave and the ways we think.…

“Intention and attention exert real, physical effects on the brain,”

Mindful awareness involves directing our attention not only to the mental content of our thoughts, but also to the emotions and mind-states that inform those thoughts. It is being aware of the processes of our mind even as we work through its materials.

“Everything has mind in the lead, has mind in the forefront, is made by the mind,” the Buddha said. With our minds we create the world we live in.

By consciously observing the workings of our mind, we are able gradually to let go of its habitual, programmed interpretations and automatic reactions.

The automatic mind, the reactive product of brain circuits, constantly interprets the present in the light of past conditioning. In its psychological responses it has great difficulty telling past from present, especially whenever it is emotionally aroused. A trigger in the present will set off emotions that were programmed perhaps decades ago at a much more vulnerable time in the person’s life. What seems like a reaction to some present circumstance is, in fact, a reliving of past emotional experience. This subtle but pervasive process in the body, brain, and nervous system has been called implicit memory, as compared to the explicit memory apparatus that recalls events, facts, and circumstances.

The other mind entity is what we can call the impartial observer. This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. “In the end,” wrote Penfield, “I conclude that there is no good evidence … that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does.”13

it’s not what happened in the past that creates our present misery but the way we have allowed past events to define how we see and experience ourselves in the present.

Impartial Spectator, a concept that Adam Smith used as the central feature of his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He defined the Impartial Spectator as the capacity to stand outside yourself and watch yourself in action, which is essentially the same mental action as the ancient Buddhist concept of mindful awareness.”2

Step One: Relabel

In step one you label the addictive thought or urge exactly for what it is, not mistaking it for reality.

Step Two: Reattribute

“In Re-attribute you learn to place the blame squarely on your brain. This is my brain sending me a false message.”4 This step is designed to assign the relabeled addictive urge to its proper source. In step one you recognized that the compulsion to engage in the addictive behavior does not express a real need or anything that “must” happen; it’s only a belief. In step two you state very clearly where that urge originated: in neurological circuits that were programmed into your brain long ago, when you were a child. It represents a dopamine or endorphin “hunger” on the part of brain systems that, early in your life, lacked the necessary conditions for their full development. It also represents emotional needs that went unsatisfied.

Reattribution is directly linked with compassionate curiosity toward the self. Instead of blaming yourself for having addictive thoughts or desires, you calmly ask why these desires have exercised such a powerful hold over you. “Because they are deeply ingrained in my brain and because they are easily triggered whenever I’m stressed or fatigued or unhappy or bored.” The addictive compulsion says nothing about you as a person. It is not a moral failure or a character weakness; it is just the effect of circumstances over which you had no control. What you do have some control over is how you respond to the compulsion in the present. You were not responsible for the stressful circumstances that shaped your brain and worldview, but you can take responsibility now.

Step Three: Refocus

In the refocus step you buy yourself time. Although the compulsion to open the bag of cookies or turn on the TV or drive to the store or the casino is powerful, its shelf life is not permanent. Being a mind-phantom, it will pass, and you have to give it time to pass. The key principle here, as Dr. Schwartz points out, is this: “It’s not how you feel that counts; it’s what you do.” Rather than engage in the addictive activity, find something else to do. Your initial goal is modest: buy yourself just fifteen minutes. Choose something that you enjoy and that will keep you active: preferably something healthy and creative, but anything that will please you without causing greater harm.

As you perform the alternative activity, stay aware of what you are doing. You are doing something difficult. No matter how simple it may seem to others who do not have to live with your particular brain, you know that holding out for even a short period of time is an achievement. You are teaching your old brain new tricks. Unlike the case with old dogs, no one can tell you it can’t be done.

Step Four: Revalue

In this revalue step you will remind yourself why you’ve gone to all this trouble. The more clearly you see how things are, the more liberated you will be. We know that the addicted brain assigns a falsely high value to the addictive object, substance, or behavior, the process called salience attribution. The addicted mind has been fooled into making the object of your addiction the highest priority. Addiction has moved in and taken over your attachment-reward and incentive-motivation circuits. Where love and vitality should be, addiction roosts. The distorted brain circuits, including the orbitofrontal cortex, are making you believe that experiences that can come authentically only from genuine intimacy, creativity, or honest endeavor will be yours for the taking through addiction. In the revalue step you devalue the false gold. You assign to it its proper worth: less than nothing.

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you.”6 Gospel St. Thomas

Dr. Schwartz introduces what he calls the two As: anticipate and accept. To anticipate is to know that the compulsive drive to engage in addictive behavior will return. There is no final victory—every moment the urge is turned away is a triumph.

And accept that the addiction exists not because of yourself, but in spite of yourself. You did not come into life asking to be programmed this way.

Step Five: Re-create

Life, until now, has created you. You’ve been acting according to ingrained mechanisms wired into your brain before you had a choice in the matter, and it’s out of those automatic mechanisms that you’ve created the life you now have. It is time to re-create: to choose a different life. You have values. You have passions. You have intention, talent, capability. In your heart there is love, and you want to connect that with the love in the world, in the universe. As you relabel, reattribute, refocus, and revalue, you are releasing patterns that have held you and that you have held on to. In place of a life blighted by your addictive need for acquisition, self-soothing, admiration, oblivion, and meaningless activity, what is the life you really want? What do you choose to create?

Mindfully honoring our creativity helps us transcend the feeling of deficient emptiness that drives addiction. Not to express our creative needs is itself a source of stress.

The road to hell is not paved with good intentions. It is paved with lack of intention. Re-create. Are you afraid you will stumble? Of course you will: that’s called being a human being.

a key determining factor triggering the stress response is the way a person perceives a situation.3 We ourselves give events their meaning, depending on our personal histories, temperament, physical condition, and state of mind at the moment we experience them. Thus the degree to which we’re stressed may depend less on external circumstances than on how well we are able to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally. We may also take on chronic stresses because of ingrained beliefs of how we “ought” to be. Some people, for example, may find themselves unable to say no to work demands or the emotional expectations of their spouse, adult children, or family of origin. Something has to give—and what gives, if not our physical health, is our mood or peace of mind.

awareness of where we keep ourselves hobbled and stressed, where we ignore our emotions, restrict our expression of who we are, frustrate our innate human drive for creative and meaningful activity, and deny our needs for connection and intimacy. In the ecology of gardening it is not enough to pull up the weeds. If we want something beautiful to grow, we have to create the conditions that will allow it to develop. The same is true in the ecology of the mind.

“Motivation must come from within, not from techniques. It comes from their deciding they are ready to take responsibility for managing themselves.”1

“When you know yourselves, then you will be known,” Jesus told his followers, “and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.”2 – Gospel of St. Thomas

I believe all of us human beings, whether we know it or not, are seeking our own divine nature. Divine in this context does not mean anything supernatural or necessarily religious, only the truth of our oneness with all that is, an ineffable sense of connectedness to other people and other beings and to each and every shard of matter or spark of energy in the entire universe. When we cease to remember that loving connection and lose touch with our deep yearning for it, we suffer. That is what Jesus meant by poverty.

Eckhart Tolle sees as the fundamental source of human anxiety: Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. “Fear” comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it “pain.”3

Addiction floods in where self-knowledge—and therefore divine knowledge—are missing. To fill the unendurable void, we become attached to things of the world that cannot possibly compensate us for the loss of who we are.

The sparser the innate joy that springs from being alive, the more fervently we seek joy’s pale substitute, pleasure; the less our inner strength, the greater our craving for power; the feebler our awareness of truth, the more desperate our search for certainty outside of ourselves. The greater the dread, the more vigorous the gravitational pull of the addiction process.

Meaning is found in pursuits that go beyond the self. In our own hearts most of us know that we experience the greatest satisfaction not when we receive or acquire something but when we make an authentic contribution to the well-being of others or to the social good, or when we create something original and beautiful or just something that represents a labor of love. It is no coincidence that addictions arise mostly in cultures that subjugate communal goals, time-honored tradition, and individual creativity to mass production and the accumulation of wealth.

Human beings, in other words, do not live by bread alone. The higher power, if we wish not to think of it as God or as anything that even remotely smacks of religion, can still be found if we look past ourselves and find some meaningful relationship with the universe outside the confines of our egotistic needs.

Everything … everything that came from mother earth. The leather … our clothes … what we eat and drink from the earth. Everything is alive. Everything comes alive and has a spirit. Alcohol and drugs have a spirit. When you don’t understand that, they have tremendous strength. They will beat you. But it’s powerful. It was here before you. Everything was here before you. That’s another thing that came to me … all these things that are here … were here before you. And they’re going to be here when I’m gone. So I’m not bringing nothing new to the table. The only thing new to the table is myself. I’m actually the learner. I’m the last in line to learn—to learn to live, to coexist with everything, to adapt to a bigger thing, to the landscape of my life.”

“Each carries within himself the all,” wrote Joseph Campbell, “therefore it may be sought and discovered within.”

Mate Md, Gabor (2011-06-28). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.