After a lifelong struggle with addiction, it is hard to look at myself in the mirror without judging my physical appearance or morally chastising the feelings that arise when remembering the actions and failures from my clouded past. I constantly compare myself to what I know: what I have learned and experienced through relationships in my family, schools, cultures, and societies, which I have stored as memories. These judgmental thoughts lead to nothing more than reliving those memories, wishing I could change the past now, which I now understand is ignorance, and the last thing my mind wants to do is wrestle with trying to understand itself—how it works. Understanding itself means death for the conditioned mind created by my past because the ignorant ego disappears when its incessant thinking stops and the mind becomes enlightened. The illusion of psychological time evaporates and uncovers the true intelligence of awareness: the silent unity of an open heart and unconditioned, peaceful mind in the present moment—the unified state of meditation.
The ego creates the illusion of psychological time from all its unfinished experiences, creating fear bottled up as memories. Those unchangeable memories create my ethereal identity, the imaginary ego that thinks it is separate from everything else. Yet, the me, “I,” projected to the world, has become the center of my universe. The ego, my accumulated experiences as thoughts, projects those dead memories into the future as desires, the illusion of having the self-will to control life, to use only what it already knows to change the reality of what is the unknown happening now for a better outcome in the future. So, the ego is stuck in time, remembering its past, thinking, and living in fear of losing everything it has become attached to and desires to hold onto to improve its future; this mental process of manipulating past thoughts and future desires is the root cause of mental suffering.
The root cause of my suffering is getting lost in my mental addiction to thinking that I, the ego, has the willpower of a god to control life happening in the present moment to manipulate the future. All of it: the ego, the past, the future, the willpower, the control, and the mental suffering; all of it is an illusion created by fear, thinking about the end of time—the death of the ego illusion that can’t exist in the present moment.
The ego, thinking, is the self-sustained mental addiction of craving for its survival: to sustain at all costs self-consistency, security, comfort, pleasure, and happiness by manipulating my dead past to create a vibrant imaginary future, ultimately living in fear of death—that is mental suffering. As Katie Lang beautifully expresses in her famous song, “Constant Craving,” mental suffering has always been. The mind’s addiction to thinking, the ego illusion that craves control of the future by changing the past, has no beginning. It is the evolved nature of our species and the cause of human mental suffering. While craving has always been and mental suffering has no beginning, understanding psychological time as the cause can end suffering in the present moment, and it is always the present moment.
Thinking is the root cause of all addictions. Thinking is an addiction to mental suffering, and as I now understand the Four Noble Truths:
First, “The truth is there is suffering” [Mental suffering is living Life in the illusion of psychological time, which creates the constant fear of death for the ego in the present moment];
Second, “The truth is there is a cause of suffering” [Thinking, the ego, creates the illusion of psychological time based on the the past that causes mental suffering];
Third, “The truth is there is an end to suffering” [Awareness of my thinking stops time; mental suffering ends—the imaginary ego, my past disappears—in the present moment];
Fourth, “The truth is there is a path that leads to the end of suffering.” [The Eight-Fold Path is a guide that leads to self-awakening: awareness of psychological time that quiets the conditioned mind (the ego) in the present moment. Still each of us must apply the guide in our own way to end mental suffering].
As instructed by the ancient Greek axiom “Know Thyself,” understanding how the mind works is the end of mental suffering: being aware and truly living in the present moment—when the ego’s craving disappears, all that remains is Love.
