179 - Addictions

QUESTION:

My question is on addictions, and mainly because I’ve got them and everybody I know has got one or two or three or whatever.

And I’m talking about addictions like smoking, cigarettes or marijuana or harder drugs, drinking, eating, gambling, whatever. I realize that we have addictions to suppress things we can’t cope with, memories from the past. And if we could face them then we wouldn’t need our addictions.

Why is it so hard for humanity? And what is the key to healing that? I mean even people on the spiritual path have also still got their addictions.

ANSWER:

You are only ever addicted to that which will cover up your uneasiness, your being out of peace. And what causes you to feel out of your peace is not experiencing your wholeness.

Again, it is the attempt to get rid of the bell that is ringing on the truck that is backing up!

Now, if you want to deal with your addictions, don’t deal with your addictions - address your peace. Make the conscious choice for your peace more consistently.

When you are in your peace, you experience absolutely no call for defense, because you feel no vulnerability.

“Yes, but I have meditated and I still find I need the cigarette or I still want to get up and have a chocolate eclair,” or whatever.

Well, I will tell you that it is very important for you to know something that I shared yesterday, and that is: when you become still, when you yield up control and relax into your peace it isn’t just an absence of anxiety, of nerves. It isn’t that your body has simply, for a time, relaxed. This experience of peace is a direct connection with your capital “S” Self, your essential Being, the nature of which is immoveable peace - unchanging peace.

Your very practice of meditation is proof that whenever you choose to abandon anxiety and move into your peace, it is there. What you are not clear on is the fact that you didn’t create the peace by means of your meditation. The practice of meditation simply allowed you to move into that place within yourself where your peace is unalterably, unchangeably, eternally present.

So when you do take steps to become still and you do experience your peace, I want you to start paying attention to it as though it is a direct experience of your divinity and not just a physical absence of tension. And as you begin to pay attention to it as an actual experience of what you divinely are, the experience of your peace will begin to enlarge and more meaning will come into play in you.

Eating, smoking, any of your addictions are defenses against being uncomfortable. But they are steps taken at an ego level to address an ego experience and they will forever not solve the problem. The only thing that will solve the problem is the experience of the real peace of your Being, which is available to every single one of you at every moment.

In your peace you begin to experience equilibrium, balance. Anxiety is when you are out of balance. And this balance, when you are experiencing it, is unlimited. There simply is an awareness of being big, is the only way I can put it. And so this balance is a huge balance. So huge that it’s obvious to you that there could be nothing to actually unsettle it.

I will tell you one of the reasons that it is so important to meditate - or in Biblical terms, to go into your closet and pray unto the Father which is in secret, or which is in the silence - one of the greatest reasons for doing that is not the immediate reduction of tension or anxiety, but the fact that you get, shall I say, on a regular basis an experience of your divine Self, not as a concept or an idea, but as an actual experience. And if you do it regularly, this experience of who you are and what your nature is becomes more familiar to you. And the more familiar it becomes to you, the more you will spontaneously make a choice for it.

Now I would encourage all of you to not think of your addictions in terms of levels of seriousness. Addiction is addiction. Addiction is a compulsive grab for whatever will cover up your experience of imbalance, without correcting the imbalance. It is the ignorance, it is the absence of the experience of your peace that causes you to take steps to atone for it by insulating yourself against it, which really doesn’t constitute atonement.

Everyone’s attempt to succeed in life against the odds is an addiction. And it is no less or more morally judgeable than addiction to a drug.

Indeed, everything that I have been sharing with you today, yesterday and will be sharing with you tomorrow, is directed at uncovering to you your innocence and your fundamental nature so that you might consciously choose for it, rather than choosing for that which blocks your experience of it and seems to provide you with insulation against your discomfort.

Addiction to the challenge of life... Life isn’t a challenge. Life is an unfoldment. Life is a Movement. And at the bottom line, it is a Movement of Conscious Awareness. And you are not experiencing it as the Movement of the Conscious Awareness that you are, because you are presently identifying with a small portion of the infinity of you called your body and your own little mind, that seems to be in the middle of and subject to this Movement.

At the bottom line: All of you are addicted to escaping yourself; escaping the infinity of you that is inseparable from the presence of the Movement of God called Creation.

So now, does that mean that you stop condemning the ones that are addicted to drugs and you get on your own case? No. Let-go of the judgment, and begin to consciously choose for your peace, even if it means that you are meditating only twice a day for twenty minutes, or once a day for twenty minutes. The point is to begin on a somewhat regular basis to provide yourself with the experience of your peace; because that is the first step of the experience of your wholeness, of your balance or equilibrium, in which there is nothing present to insulate yourself from. And, therefore, nothing compelling you to grab for relief.

So everyone is in the same boat. And everyone, no matter what the name on that boat is, is worthy of getting out of that boat. And you get out of that boat by daring to begin to have a different view of who and what you are. And the easiest way to peg who you really are is to use the word divine. Because the divine has no dualistic or negative connotations to it, except that you think that being divine will mean you won’t be too popular. “Nobody likes a nice guy,” the saying goes.

But to experience your divinity is to experience your integrity. And to experience your integrity means there is no experience in you that feels like holding itself back—being a wall flower, being shy. And so you make the gift of you, in any circumstance, more easily.

The answer to your question is that your release from addiction comes from the experience of your peace. And so your peace and a consistent experience of it is what is called for. You can delve into all of the psychological reasons that you can find within yourself, but that is not going to solve the problem. Without understanding what all the psychological motivators are for your addiction, you CAN choose for your peace and practice it by praying in the sense of going into the silence within you and desiring of God to be filled with the clear experience of who you are.

And as I said, in the midst of the experience of the equilibrium of your divine Being, the so called psychological triggers to your addictions, even if they don’t dissolve, will not trigger anything anymore. And in not triggering anything anymore, they will dissolve.

So I encourage all of you, relative to your addictions, not to set up a task for yourself of self-analysis, which because of the great complexity of your psyche is necessarily going to take a long time before you can reach that peace of mind that would allow you to wake up. Just begin to value your peace.

And as I said, remember the experience of your peace is not just the absence of physical anxiety, it is a direct, real experience of your essential capital “B” Being - your divine Self. And that realization will allow for an embellishment, an expansion of the meaning of the peace of your Being and your clearer experience of who you really Are, right here, right now, without dying and going to Heaven.

Now, you thought I was finished. Connected with the release of any addiction is necessarily a subject of forgiveness. Forgiveness can become a lengthy complicated process - another time consumer. And what you need to know is that indeed when you come into the direct experience of the peace of your being it is impossible for you to hold a grudge, and forgiveness happens spontaneously.

I realize that it sounds like I’m taking all of the fun work out of getting better. After all, there would have been some satisfaction to have worked your way through your problems and solved them. You could give yourself a pat on the back. It’s just another way the ego has of keeping you preoccupied from actually waking up for a little bit more time.

And you know what? Most of what I am saying to you, at one time or another you have had an experience of. You have had an experience of peace, where your concerns were absent, your anxieties were absent, and you had a clarity about you that allowed you to act or behave appropriately. But you thought it was a transcendental, temporary experience—a glimpse of how it will be at another time and another place. When actually what happened was, you became defenseless enough for a long enough moment to have a Real experience of being in the NOW. That’s the fact!

And the lesson of it is that at any moment or for consecutive moments if you allow yourself to be defenseless, that will be your experience without having to GRO-O-O-OW into it, DE-VEL-L-L-OP into it, IMPR-O-O-VE into it. “Father, I didn’t do anything.” No, you just let, you just let it happen and it happened. No, it’s not very satisfying to the ego, “can’t take credit for it.”

Who cares whether you can take credit for it if you’re experiencing it, and if what you are experiencing is you in full embrace of your Sanity experiencing your Wholeness.

Again, this improvement, this development, is all part of addiction. Climbing up from the bottom of the barrel—boy, wait till you can tell everybody that you got to the top. Why not cut a hole in the bottom and fall through.

Getting in touch with your Being is like allowing yourself to be at the bottom of the barrel and giving up. Because what you’re giving up is the addiction. The addiction to being successful in a frame of mind that is not natural to you.

I am very glad you asked the question.

QUESTION:

I have a personal question it’s in relation to my relationship with my husband. He’s a very creative person, but is not expressing himself because he’s a teacher and finds it difficult to be creative outside of the teaching experience. He’s also alcohol dependent.

And my questions is about alcoholism, I can’t understand it. And I can’t understand the nature of his search.

ANSWER:

I will tell you that the alcoholism is a means of avoiding the search. It is a means of withdrawing into a false sense of safety, but one which feels safe.

Now there are two things you need to know. First of all, it is not appropriate for you to be tolerant of the alcohol dependency. It is important for you to stand firm in disagreement with it, and further be present as the call for action, if you will, on his part to do something about it. You are not to join him in his ignorance,let us say, and be tolerant of it.

Now, if everyone around him simply closes their eyes and expresses what many people call unconditional love, which means not expressing any intelligence at all, then all of you will be joining him in his ignorance. And it is not unkind for you to be the presence of intelligence actively expressing itself.

Now if you simply say, “this is intolerable, this is not intelligent,” and you leave it as that, it is most definitely going to come across as criticism and judgment, and there will be resentment to it. But if you say, “this is intolerable, this is unintelligent, and we must replace it with something that is intelligent, that steps must be taken that help uncover your capacity to be independent and to also be safe,” then that cannot be taken as easily as though it were a criticism.

Because you are saying there is something needing to be dealt with, and there is a way to deal with it.

And you must be willing to push for his integrity. He will at times interpret that as your being a demanding wife. But what you will be being is the active presence of intelligence that says there is a solution to this. And it constitutes a vote of confidence in his being able to move into that experience of his integrity. You are saying, “I see that you have integrity in spite of what you are doing. And I demand to see that integrity expressed. I am calling it forth. I want to see it. I am not going to agree to your covering it up, because it isn’t the truth about you. Let’s do something about it.”

Now that’s the first thing for you to know. The second thing for you to realize is what I talked about yesterday, that every single one of you are afraid of your good, are afraid of waking up because you are afraid that it will cost you something.

I’m going to express this idea in a slightly different way: Many of you do not want to know the truth because you are afraid that the truth will condemn you, that it will uncover your faults and your flaws and then you will just be stuck with them. Well I will tell you something, the nature of truth is love. And truth uncovers the illusory nature of the flaws that your ego has told you you have.

Nevertheless, every single one of you is afraid of truth, is afraid of unconditional love being given to you, is afraid of your conscious experience of Reality, is afraid to experience your Christhood. You say you want it, but when you come right down to the actual possibility of experiencing it I will guaranty you you will wonder if it will not bring you a great deal of responsibility that you don’t really want. Or that it will require of you what you don’t have the capacity to give. Everyone is afraid of their good and that is why it is held at arms length to one degree or another.

And so understand that your husband is hiding, is moving into a safe place, because he is afraid of his good, and he is afraid that his good will uncover how bad he is. It is understandable that he is withdrawing from his conscious experience of his independence, because the ego has fooled him into thinking that it will cost him something valuable - his safety in this case - if indeed he takes hold of his independence and his integrity.

So understand that he is not in a worse position than you are, and you are not in a better position than he is, you are both standing at the threshold of being willing to embrace your good and discover that it will not condemn and convict you and thereby put you in the position of having to pay penance. In other words, pay the price and suffer.

The nature of truth is love. And the effect of love is to uncover and illuminate the fact that what the ego has called your faults are illusions, not to be validated, and not to be hidden from. You don’t have to be afraid to have nothing uncovered. And yet, all of you are afraid that the somethingness that the ego has painted you with is real, and that in the illumination of love and truth your ugliness, your terribleness, your worthlessness will show up like a sore thumb.

But the fact is that in the illumination and truth and love your flawlessness, your innocence, your perfection becomes illuminated to you. And it is such a relief.

So at the same time that you recognize that it is understandable that he is taking the steps that he is taking you also must not play into it or validate it. You must see that you are not in a position of judging him, because he is suffering from ignorance just as you are. But then you must make a stand for what he divinely is, just as you must make a stand for what you divinely are. And say, “I will not play into or validate by my silence your ignorance, and this unintelligent way to access safety.”

Now love yourself and then love him in that order. And love yourself by being willing to claim your right to experience intelligence and order and comfort and an absence of fear in your experience. And then love him. And love him by eliciting from him the clearer expression of intelligence.

To be blunt with you, demand it from him. You are demanding that the truth of him come forth and no longer be hidden.

This can be done lovingly. But it must be done firmly. And if you are acknowledging his divinity, his Christhood, right there as the super imposition of the ego seems to obscure it, then you will be able to make the demand without judging him.

And he will be able to more easily hear it as a call for his Christhood, as a call for his essential value and worth. And he will be likely to hear it as a vote of confidence that indeed he has it, even though his ego has fooled him into thinking he doesn’t.

You are calling forth the Christ of him. And one does not call forth the Christ of another with judgment or anger or frustration, but with a clear sense that it is there, and a clear expectation that it will come forth because it is what is Real.

Do not any longer be silent and allow dependency to be his mode of operation. You are not there to change him. But you are there to be, as I said earlier, the light. You are there to be the truth. You are there to be the intelligence. And intelligence calls forth intelligence. Intelligence does not support even by silence non-intelligence.

The ego imposes upon you an illegitimate and false sense of existence. And you in your way, and he in his way are suffering from that imposition. And you are both deserving of being free of it. And that is the basis upon which you call for a change. It is from a standpoint of compassion but not agreement.

He is worthy of being free of it, and that is why you are calling for him to be free of it. And as long as his worthiness of freedom stays foremost in your mind, your firm demand will be expressed without judgment that would turn him away.

Like the one lost sheep he is worthy of saving just as you are, with an awareness that that sheep deserves to be in the company of the rest of the flock. And if you approach him from the standpoint of his worthiness, headway will be made. That’s the end of the answer.