Please, can I have your attention? What If I told you, “You can end your addiction right now, and you already have the remedy.” Do I have your attention now?
You can end your addiction right now if you remember this one truth; if you want to get sober remember: It is always right here and it is always right now. That’s it, any questions?..
No questions…hell, that was easy! Okay, then, I’m all done here. Thanks for your time, and best of luck with your sobriety. Just don’t forget to remember that one truth: It is always right here, and it is always right now.
Oh, Oh, there is one more truth you need to remember. If you want to stay sober, remember to love yourself right now. Okay, That’s it; that’s all I got…good luck… See you around… Unless you have some questions. Are there any questions?
Yes…
Okay, let’s see if I can physically explain the first truth. I have a little prop here that we can use to visualize: It is always right here, and it is always right now. Let’s contemplate this tennis ball with a hole drilled through it, which allows it to slide along this rope.
Could I please get two volunteers to hold the ends of the rope? I promise that’s all you have to do. I won’t ask any questions or embarrass you in any way; I will ask you to pull the rope back and forth through the tennis ball a few times, which will only take a few minutes.
Let’s imagine that this length of rope represents a distance, which we can perceive as the space between two points; one point at each end or anywhere we want to stop the ball along the rope is a point. Now, the same rope length represents how long it takes to get from point A to point B, which is what we think of as the time it takes to travel between the points along the rope—points in the past to my left, the present right here, and the future to my right.
Let’s talk about the tennis ball. Let’s consider that the tennis ball can represent any one of us. The ball’s surface represents our physical body, which travels with time in space—physically experiencing each event at points along the rope. The body endures the physical wear and tear of our life changes as we travel with time in space. Let’s imagine that our mind resides inside the tennis ball. We can’t see it, but we know it resides as the physical brain, imprinted with all the inherited genetic information collected since life appeared on earth, for the survival of our species. The ethereal mind, the conscious thinking part that also resides inside the tennis ball, has been branded with all the emotional wear and tear we have endured in our life: before birth and during our childhood, adolescence, teen years, and adulthood, thus constructing our self-ego—our human tennis ball.
Now, what is the one thing we must remember? That’s right; It is always right here, and it is always right now. Ok, if that’s the case, the tennis ball, my physical brain, and body—my mind-body—are always present, moving along the rope into the imaginary future, creating the past now—in every present moment. If this is true, the tennis ball, my mind-body is always present, right here, right now. This example seems simple, and it would be true if only the ego-mind, the thinking part of our brain, could grasp that truth.
If we are living our lives, and it is always right now wherever my brain and body are, why do I have such a hard time mentally staying in the present moment? Why does my mind erratically bounce around from trying to change regrets in my past to controlling the unknown in my future like a crazy person? Depending on our mental conditioning, we all experience this maniacal time travel, some more than others. The truth is our physical body and the brain are always present here and now, everywhere, but the thinking part, the human part of our mind—is not! That’s because the thinking part of our mind—the ego—is not physically real. The brain’s thinking capability, the ego, is the conscious illusion of being something, anything physically real. The ego imagines and directs a surreal movie from all the physical events and emotional experiences recorded in the brain as unfinished memories from the past. Then, the ego constantly edits this highlight reel to produce a biography of our life story, as needed to control its imaginary future. This movie is how we see ourselves and project our image—our made-up ego—into the world.
This biography of unfinished memories, implanted in our brains and branded onto our bodies, are reference points of our physical survival, and, depending on the significance or severity of emotional pleasure or pain, they are mentally registered as memories of joyful delights that we want to experience again or as traumas of suffering that we want to avoid if possible, or at all cost. Some are joyful experiences we can’t wait to repeat, some memories are unforgettable stories that didn’t end well, and we don’t want ever to experience them again. That is the image we see in the mirror and the movie that we watch in our head while lying in bed, wondering how we can face another day as the conditioned, emotional ego we identify with, the image that keeps us trapped in our mind—the illusion of living in time.
All these memories and scars are unfinished business for our thinking mind; the ego can then cherry-pick at will from our experiences to compile any version of our life story that will suit its survival needs—to stay mentally lost in time, the past or the future, which are the only places the imaginary ego can exist. The movie of our life history is the biography of our entire past implanted on the film in our brain that our ego develops to play—over and over again—as thinking, manipulating the story to guide its subsequent emotional reactions, unable to fully understand the reality of what is happening now. That is all the ego does. It constantly thinks about reliving or changing the past or projecting the past into the future, wishing for a better outcome while ignoring the present moment. The ego is constantly thinking thoughts of the past or the future because it can’t exist in the present moment: like stopping a film in the hot light of a projector, the film will melt, just as the ego is dissolved in the light of Conscious awareness. The silent spotlight of observing the ego causes it to get quiet and dissolve. The mind becomes selfless, without thought, in a meditative state. Then, only the silent Conscious awareness of the mind, our true Self, arises as an intelligent, understanding pesence.
How we live our lives is relative to our perspective of this ball-and-rope scenario. One perspective is that we are the ego mind, the tennis ball bouncing around independently through time and space, reliving the past or projecting our memories into an imaginary future. In this scenario, as the first Nobel Truth states, Life is Suffering—suffering from languishing in our dead past that we can’t change or dreaming of a different future we can’t control. Either way, living in time is suffering because the ego can never provide an authentic response to the newness of what life offers in the present moment; it can only react to the reality of what is arising now based on its recorded past experiences.
But what if we perceive ourselves as not mentally bouncing around in time? What if we could stay mentally still as silent observers, just being aware of what is happening now without preconceived expectations but genuinely experiencing life with intelligent, compassionate sensory attention, unclouded by judgments triggered by memories in our past?
In this scenario, the ball is stationary, meaning the body is physically experiencing life in the present moment as always, but now, the ego-mind isn’t consciously bouncing around in an illusion, trying to change the past or to control the future. This happens when the thinking ego-mind gets stuck, like when the ego hits bottom in addiction—out of thoughts or options to stop using, or in a life-or-death situation that requires a spontaneous action—with no time for thoughts of how to survive, or when you have that first glimpse of your soulmate, your newborn, or your mother’s eyes go dark with her last breath; these are all events that cause our self-ego to vanish—in the moment. The ego can no longer rely on illusions, so it quietly disappears, its ignorance of trying to be real is dissolved, and meditation happens; our true Self arises in an intuitive response; when the mind’s intelligence of understanding reality appears, and the mind becomes aware that it is “go time,” now or never, to get sober to take charge, to do what is required to survive out of self-love or selfless love for others we care about and want to save—now!
Let’s thank our time-space travelers for being right here right now to help us.
What if the truth is that we are not an imaginary ball of emotional flesh moving through time and space? We are not the time machine represented by a human tennis ball, the ego recording our experiences, trying to change the past in the future. Our true Self is conscious awareness of everything, including the ego mind-body tennis ball and the perception of time and space, the rope; everything the mind experiences happens within conscious awareness, which is always everywhere, creating everything in the world as we perceive it.
We are—Consciousness being aware; We are the observers of everything happening with time in space; We are always right here, and We are always right now—unattached from the shadow of the self-ego—nonjudgmentally observing everything happening in the world, created by the Consciousness through our mind.
Can you imagine that perspective of being detached from your self-ego? Can you understand that our true Self is beyond time and space, beyond thinking and feeling, and that our true Self is Consciousness itself? Everything in time and space occurs within Consciousness; our awareness is all part of the same Consciousness. We are always everywhere and always will be!
I don’t know about you, but everything changed when I experienced this revelation that my addiction to thinking, of being limited by time in space, causes my mental suffering. I now know this revelation started when I hit bottom in my alcohol addiction over seven years ago when my mind was exhausted from its addiction to thinking about my added addiction: using alcohol so my ego could remain lost in time and space. I began to understand that my alcohol addiction was caused by my thinking—constantly reliving my past. So, what does being aware of my thinking ego lost in time and space, conscious awareness of being right here, right now, say about my ability to stay sober? This is where the second truth comes in: If you want to stay sober, remember to to Love yourself right now.
Okay, let’s focus on the tennis ball again. If this ball represents you, me, or any other being, what causes us and everything else to exist? After seven years of study and introspection, I have come to agree with numerous scholars like Campbell, Huxley, and Singer, spiritual philosophers like Krishnamurti, Spira, and Osho, and religious teachers like Jesus, Mohammad, and Buddha that the unknown source we call on by many names to save our world but cannot humanly comprehend, uses conscious energy as the mechanism for causing everything that exists. We are; everything is Consciousness, which creates everything in existence to experience itself. Consciousness has graciously given us insight, genetically implanting the ancient axiom in our brain to “Know Thyself”—to remember our true Self from where we come.
We are the endless conscious energy that causes our lungs to breathe, our hearts to beat, and our blood to flow without even thinking about it. We have the power to act, make, and destroy things in this world. We transfer our energy into other things, using our mental and physical capabilities to travel through time and space as generated by our conscious mind.
So, what do we know about energy? From physics, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another. So, we don’t know when or where conscious energy comes from or where it goes, but this unknown energy source causes us and everything in our world, our galaxy, and the billions of galaxies we call the universe, to exist.
If it is always right here and now, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, why does everything die or decay away? Why am I getting older, and my body is wearing out, and my mind is fading, and eventually I will die? The truth is that everything that exists, everything that Consciousness manifests in our minds as being real in time and space, is temporary. Only the energy is real. Only the energy exists. Conscious energy is eternal and everywhere—without a beginning, ending, dimension, or boundary. There is only Consciousness.
What if I told you that this eternal, infinite conscious energy—all this power that can’t be created or destroyed—is Love? The energy that temporarily causes us and everything to appear as existence is the eternal, endless movement of Love. Love is the activity of creation; when eternal, infinite Consciousness limits itself, it manifests—it creates. The universe, galaxies, stars, worlds, and beings are the energetic activity of Love, forming particles into objects that create space and time from within Consciousness. Love is the activity of Consciousness when it limits and forgets itself in the energy of creating a limited existence from within the unlimited.
The limitations and forgetfulness a mother experiences when bearing the creation of her baby into this world is another genetic reminder of the Love activity that happens when Consciousness disappears in the energy of creating stars in the universe. The mother forgets herself, and all that remains is Love in nurturing her baby’s survival, which comes from within the selflessness of her Consciousness. All creation is the selfless activity of Consciousness; forgetting—one’s self—is the only way to express true Love activity; as the self disappears, only Love remains. Our mind-body is not a permanent entity. We are an activity, the sober presence of Consciousness: the activity of selfless creation—Love.
So, that is a long way from where we started this conversation about ending addiction. We must remember to Love ourselves if we want to stay sober. We need to remember that staying sober is more than not using. Staying sober happens when the mind constantly remembers our Conscious awareness: the sober meditation of letting go of experiences in our past and dreams of being something different in the future. Staying sober is remembering that we are the activity, the constant flowing energy of selfless creation—unconditional Love—in the present moment. Remembering we are the transformative activity of changing self-matter back into the energy of selfless Love—power without limitations. Remembering to Love ourselves is our Higher Power: sober meditation—being aware of our addiction to thinking (the past) can transform all self-addictions into selfless Love right now!
Whenever we remember to uncover it, selfless Love flows from within. If ego doesn’t mentally block it with time in space but lets it flow through our open hearts in the present moment, it can be reflected in everything we experience. Conscious awareness is the sober meditation of selflessness when the ego dissolves in remembering self-love; the self disappears, and only Love remains.
To stay sober, remember to Love yourself right now, and it’s always now!
VAB 12-19-24
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