The rational mind is such an unbearably unpleasant place to live that we must promise ourselves a prize at the end of all the activities we undertake. Because there is no fuel of desire, it is a perpetual pushing forward of a boulder. The inclination of all activity becomes to just get through this. It starts to demand everything be broken down so it can be easily digested in order to get through it more quickly. There is no room to meander or explore with the slow-moving quality of curiosity. We want our world handed to us preordered and packaged with the proper formula, so that without opening the experience, we know how to respond. This way there is no need to sink down into the body to read the sensations. No need to descend the stairs and waste our limited energy to keep the fueled-by-fumes system continuing with a smidge left over for the experience of pleasure—the return to a state of homeostasis.
Privately, we grow energetically stingy to stave off the discomfort of burnout. The body is there as an abundant resource, but the rational mind views itself above the slothful, nonachievement-based ways of the body. This deficit makes us mean and insensitive. It makes it seem as if the people in our lives are a burden or a distraction from the important work that will get us to our desperate relief. Real-time relating, when it wants to organically arise, is instead compartmentalized. We need to do everything fast. We need to relax fast, enjoy fast, connect fast with the impending return to the rational mind’s looming demands.
This is why we work hard and play hard. Not because either feels good but because we are under the watchful command of an unrelenting master, and everything must be faced in this way. Fast and hard. On fumes, our work is never very good, much less excellent, much less at the level of genius where we would be carried through into a different timeless dimension. With the watchful eye looming, our relaxation is never relaxing. More often than not we need to add in outside resources to accelerate the process. We are revved up, and it actually takes power to come down—power we lack—so we subsidize the process with a form of gluttony, of too much of the come-down activities we have available to us.
The rational mind on fumes starts to become sharp and attacking. Life hits like bone against bone. We do not have a buffer of power. We feel the attack, and from lack of power we lack the ability to stand up and say no or adequately defend against it. And so we feel a compulsion to appease the rational mind. We find ourselves cowering to that voice where we agree to work harder, move faster, do more, be better.
However, because we are running on fumes, “good” becomes a narrow category. It becomes whatever will keep us further from the body. So we restrict and renounce anything that would feed the body—which we imagine would distract us from the work—in order to keep the rational mind at bay. In doing so we feel even more depleted. We no longer have the capacity to hold out or away from the gravity of the body, so we give in. We get some actual and genuine relief. We can breathe again. But it is short-lived.
The habits of the rational mind catch up to us. Only now, the berating is more intense; we have failed to resist temptation and need to make up for it and do double time. This is where non-Eros-based addiction is born. The mind tasted an experience of the body and is now withdrawing. To the extent that the mind is still lacking power, needing what only the body can offer, there will be compulsion and obsession for the objects that signify a ballast that can bring us down into the body: food, people, substances.
It will not be for the joy that these things offer but for the desperate need they fulfill to bring us down. This is where the perfectly rational, upright person of integrity ends up mentally and emotionally gripped and tortured. We do not understand that the rational mind with no power has no capacity to stop the survival-based need for power, which is located in the body. It spends half its limited resources attempting to resist the call—sometimes succeeding for long periods of time, believing itself “enlightened,” when in fact it is merely disassociated.
All our attention is spent managing our state. Or, we succumb and are awash in shame and self-disgust, the tools of the rational mind to draw our attention back upward. The rational mind so overestimates its power that it believes it can merely say that something is or is not so and this changes reality. It is therefore totally confounded when it cannot rid itself of obsessions, compulsions, or cravings merely by admonishing them or saying they are no longer wanted.
The cravings, all of which are rooted in a call back to the body, will not subside until we enter the body or until we disconnect the thread between the mind and the body. One ends suffering for good; one is the cause and perpetuation of suffering. We make the assumption there is a problem, rather than a simple call. Then we believe the solution is in the object that can be a ballast, rather than establishing a ballast through OM.
This will release the fear that buoys us back up and develops the full connection with others that roots us into our bodies, as connection is what we are born to experience. The rational mind, not wanting to descend into the miasma of the body, will grasp on to one object using it to get the “fix.” The issue is not the object. It is not the person we are obsessed with, nor the food, the drug, the alcohol, or the porn. It is using it in isolation to the exclusion of all else.
We tend to think not being addicted is good and addiction is bad. That is never the issue. The question is, “Is it on the spot or not?” Good or bad will stick us in a reality where we are constantly trying to force solutions. Being on the spot gives us space to be with the truth of what is. On the spot is just as clear as right or wrong. More so, in fact.
The spot is willing to release an ideological approach to life in order to honor and respect what genuinely wants to happen. It doesn’t see addiction as any better or worse than hitting bottom or any better or worse than recovery or any better or worse than not being in addiction. The point is, do we come when we are called? Up or down. Eros says, “Please go ahead, be addicted.” Addiction is wonderful. It is a journey into the place of true healing.
Just keep everything else. This is how to have a practice of addiction that organically and naturally evolves into recovery through balance. To be a skillful addict, we are only required to maintain equal simultaneous connection with the other body-based aspects of our life. Connection versus isolation. We OM to increase power so that we are not attempting to get it from one finite source that we have to keep going back to get a drop.
There is a practice of facing fear in order to hit the release valve of pressure so the body is a pleasurable place to be. With enough power, we will self-organize for balance. We do not need to do all the desperate management and renunciation. This is the black-and-white, all-or-nothing work of the rational mind—starve, then ashamedly gorge. We end that cycle when we deliberately choose to go into the body that our addiction is trying to take us into.
Our addiction can give us the lessons it needs to this way. The lessons, more often than not, are the facing of foregone conclusions, but the body likes experience. We knew that person was wrong or that this food would never make us happy or that the relief of alcohol would grow detrimental one day. But the body wants us to know this in our bones and not in theory.
Remember, the body does not see any experience as a failure. One important caveat is that addiction does take us out of control and limits our ability to manage things according to our preferences. As things shake out and the intense front-end portion of an addiction wears off, as the lessons are gleaned, we are restored to balance—just not that of the world’s preferences.
Our body might like a little more or less weight than the average, or might not want to drink anymore, or still might like to watch porn. The person we were obsessed with may look like fool’s gold. We do not know and cannot guarantee what the self-regulating system will want, only that it will have within it the recipe for our happiness.
We can know we are practicing tumescent addiction if we begin to withdraw from our life and our connections, or try to stop the process with shame or self-criticism rather than when the sensation does in fact say to stop. Don’t do that. We let addiction do its work on us. We go in the direction it is going, let it take what it will take and show us what it wants to show us about who we really are. Then we share the experiences we have in this dimension with others, and use it as what we connect with, not what we avoid. We let our addiction be revealed and naked. Then it is a gift to ourselves and others.
