How does self-love cure my addictions? How does self-love awaken my understanding of the root cause of addiction and its opposite, sobriety, allowing me to live my life without constantly craving either? Initially, awakening self-love begins with gaining self-awareness, which can happen when the mind has suffered enough to shut down, to stop thinking and detach from its entire past, releasing every dream about the future, and letting go of the fear of death now—to be in a meditative state. Such an awakening of self-awareness happened to me when I hit bottom in alcohol addiction and was blessed by universal grace with the fearless humility to relinquish my tormented past and dissolve my ego from constantly becoming the separate ‘me’—for my ‘self’ to disappear. When the ‘self’ disappeared, my egoic thinking stopped, letting go of the illusion that “I am” my thinking. My heart opened with flowing love and compassion to heal my addicted ego divided by psychological time; it disappeared in the unity of reality, the timeless present moment.
Self-knowledge comes from self-awareness, the ability to detach and nonjudgmentally observe my thinking and learn how my mind works as the ‘self.’ Without clinging to the ‘ego’ identity, detached observation shows how the mind creates the illusion of the ‘self ’ by constantly identifying with the past to become something else in the future. It constantly imagines that life can be different than what it is living right now, based on what it already knows, which causes it to continually repeat the past. “Constant craving,” illusionary self-centered thinking, is the root cause of all addictions; the prison created in my mind for the ego living in fear of losing its identity—psychological death.
When the understanding of self-knowledge exposes the truth that I am not my thinking, my heart opens, and my mind is emptied to let love flow undistorted into the world again. In the (w)holiness of an open mind in unity with a loving heart, the duality of opposites becomes irrelevant, and choice ceases in the total understanding of selfless ‘right thinking’; there is neither changing addiction nor sobriety, only being—what is—enough in the present moment. When the ‘self’ disappears, all that remains is Love—my Higher Power!
VAB 07-29-24
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