We are all here because we are becoming aware. We have become aware that we are living in conflict, suffering from addiction but wanting to stay sober. Thankfully, by universal grace, we are awakening to the truth: that we are psychologically divided from our hearts that have been separated by addiction-to-thinking (the past) from understanding our feelings—now—in the present moment. For me, I am waking up from addiction to understand the root cause of my substance abuse finally. Addiction happens when my mind is not in harmony with my heart but separated by my ego, Vic, the ‘I’ my societal environment has created; my memories have become my false self-consciousness; my past (time) has come between my true self-awareness and my heartfelt feelings that can only exist in the present moment.
The ‘I,” the result of my environment, is in conflict with the environment…
I conflict with my environment. My suffering is the external conflict between my ego, the result of my environment, and the environment that created it. The conflict stems from my past: living in my environment, which is all I know, memories have created my ego identity—the way I think. Because the society that created my thinking is imperfect, my ego feels insufficient; it is lacking and always desires more—constantly craving satisfaction, which is never enough. So, the environment can never satisfy the ego it created; this conflict of always desiring more, which is never enough, is addiction.
Also, my suffering is the internal conflict of not being worthy to fit in my flawed cultural, social, religious, and political environments. Based on comparison to imperfection, I suffer in a constant state of fear of not being adequately imperfect. So, I constantly make corrections, adjustments, and modifications, following advisors, gurus, techniques, systems, and self-disciplines to fix a false ego to fit a flawed environment better. Living in fear causes me to act irrationally because my past has disconnected my mind (intelligence) from my feelings in the present moment.
We are ostracized by society when our irrational dysfunction in addiction is no longer considered respectable by the same society that has conditioned us with its cultures, schools, religions, and politics. The society that has created and molded our ego in an environment of authority, boundaries, laws, institutions, and exploiters has flooded us with biblical generations of its environmental past, which has washed out the bridge that used to connect our intelligent minds with the feelings in our hearts. Society suffers from addiction because it does not understand that society itself is the source of our addictions but, rather, would blame it on individual genetics. This societal molding was the slow drowning of our original innocence, our natural virtuous intelligence. The societal flooding and drowning of our original mindful presence—have diluted our virtues and covered up our innocence with division, confusion, and fear, which, for many, leaves only one survival option: to escape our environment, to avoid our thinking and our emotions, by losing ourselves in substance addictions—to escape the source: addiction-to-thinking that society taught us.
I can blame society all I want, but the truth is society can’t fix my addiction to society. I can only look within to reconnect with my heart, learn to love myself as an individual again, and regain my innocence.
I was blessed to wake up at CeDAR (UC Health, Center for Dependency, Addiction, and Recovery). I escaped my suffering to wake up in a community founded on unconditional love. There, I started to understand better how my mind works and realized that it was disconnected from the love flowing through my heart. The CeDAR Alumni community opened my heart, which allowed me to connect with the unconditional love flowing from each of us into the community. We are all feeding from it to gain the strength to look within and reclaim our divine source of self-love, innocence, and intelligence to awaken and learn to transcend the environmental cause of our addiction—the ego that society helped us to create—so we can live life naturally.
I don’t remember where or if I hijacked this mantra, but I have adopted this as the truth about my addiction:
“I can’t think my way out of addiction, but I can feel my way through it!”
Thinking is trying to change the past—taught by society—with what we already know: the past. Again, it is a case of the false trying to fix the false to make a truth. That is the definition of addiction: repeating a dysfunctional habit—what we know is a harmful pattern—over and over and over, expecting a different result.
When we hit bottom in addiction, time stops, and our thinking stops when the created ego surrenders. That is when our heart opens; the bridge is reconnected with the mind—unburdened by the past—and we start to understand our feelings again. Then, when emotions arise—the heart-felt, vibrational energy-in-motion constantly flowing through our mind-body consciousness—we understand our feelings with a unified intelligence. This is our unchanging innocence: our natural state of ‘being,’ our unspoken stillness, our sense of peace, joy, connection, and compassion—our sense of Love for all-natural existence—that never changes within us, no matter the suffering we endure.
We can’t change our conditioning, but we can surrender our past!
We can’t change our addiction and make it disappear; we can’t control our environment to treat us differently. We can’t change the past, but we can surrender our past through meditation. I’m not just talking about sitting cross-legged on a rug, burning incense in a darkened room, with ambient music in the background—meditation. I’m talking about active situations when we can quiet our thinking through silent, complete mind-body awareness that transcends thinking and time to reach a meditative state of mind in the present moment—that is our Higher Power. Our Higher Power is shining the eternal light of nonjudgmental understanding on our past conditioning to heal the connection between our mind and heart, unblocking our constant flow of Love into the world.
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Loved this Vic, thanks for sharing it with all of us!