“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.
“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.”
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.
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