Suffering is the mental turmoil we all endure when our thinking—the mind trapped in psychological time—resists the constant life-giving spiritual energy flowing freely through our manifested body-mind existence in the present moment. This illusion of mental suffering, distinct from the painful reality of physical deterioration, is caused by the barriers of resistance, memories we accumulate in our minds from traditional moral beliefs, imitated survival skills, and emotional scars of unfinished experiences. These barriers often resurface when triggered by regrets from the past or fears of future loss—in the illusion of psychological time. Suffering is the resistance caused by this maze of barriers, the mental filter that shapes our perception of how I, the “me,” my ego, is reflected by the world we construct based on our past experiences and desires for a different future. The illusion of psychological time causes mental suffering from the ego clinging to the past—for dear life—to, ultimately, create a similar future from what we already know because the ego cannot exist in the unknown of the present moment. These accumulated thoughts from the past and traditional reasoning to control the future form the barriers that obstruct and distort the natural flow of energy—Love—into the world in every present moment!
What am I conveying here? It’s a truth that has been scientifically validated, philosophically elucidated, and religiously manipulated throughout human history: universal energy, the constant undistorted flow of energy—Love—cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed. Our minds, however, tend to become entangled in a complex process called ‘thinking.’ This process, far from mere information processing, involves accumulating and storing past experiences for the continuity and survival of our perceived self—the ego we present to the world. The ego addiction of thinking, this process of psychologically transforming and distorting Love energy into other energies in motion (emotions), often leads to human (psychological) suffering. But remember, the transformative higher power of undistorted Love is always available in the present moment, offering a path to liberation from the mental suffering of the ego mind in time.
Traditionally, what we call addictions are the possessions and substances that we add on top of the mind’s inherent addiction to thinking. Thinking is suffering, the constant mental craving for attachment to things: possessions, including people, and substances—things outside of my (spiritual) true Self—to enhance my physical and psychological survival, the sensations of comfort and pleasure, and to ensure the illusion of the ego self-existence. My ego’s insatiable desire to prove its existence, when on display, can cause my community to view me as dysfunctional, unable to manage pleasures in moderation, control my emotions, or adhere to living within societal guardrails. I am labeled as a person suffering from an addiction disorder and, even less than a person, an abuser of legal and illicit possessions and substances for pleasure that this “normal” society uses to enrich itself at the expense of us lesser dysfunctional addicts.
So, the truth is that getting sober from possession and substance addictions is only the first step to ending my suffering from addiction. Removing the resistance caused by substance addictions only restores me to the basic level of addiction, suffering caused by my inherent addiction to thinking: conditioned thought patterns and imitated traditional reasoning that is required to survive in the “normal” society in which I was trained to disappear, to be normal.
There is nothing worse than realizing that I have been stumbling through life as an alcoholic while ignorantly imitating generational reasoning for social acceptance in the dysfunctional world I have helped to create, which has guaranteed a lifetime of suffering. In other words, I was a drunk somnambulist, sleepwalking through life with no understanding of how to wake up and minimize my suffering and, thereby, world suffering.
At the age of sixty years, my life energy was choked off, barely flowing through me at all. My mental resistance caused by a lifetime of alcoholism, on top of my inherent addiction to socially conditioned thinking, was causing severe mental suffering and showing up more frequently as physical pain with a significant potential for chronic illness. I was slowly, painfully killing my physical existence and selfishly sharing my mental suffering with those that I professed to Love, unaware that I couldn’t truly love anyone else until I could let go of my mental resistance of resentments toward myself and others and learned to let Love energy flow through me again—freely.
Getting sober meant becoming aware of the mental barriers that restricted spiritual energy from flowing through me, causing my psychological suffering. Getting sober begins with letting go of the addictive substances that I abuse to cover up the true source of my suffering: my addiction to thinking (time). Getting sober from my core addiction to thinking happens when my mind is exhausted from suffering and emptied of all thought and reasoning, which is from the past. When my mind becomes calm, my ever-present, never-changing spiritual presence—my true Self—awakens in a meditative state, allowing undistorted Love to flow as a non-judgmental action of awareness to vigilantly and silently observe my thoughts with compassionate understanding to heal the past by dissolving time.
Staying aware is the end of the struggle between addiction and sobriety. When the mind is emptied of thought in meditative silent awareness, the concept of opposites, the duality of choice, as time disappears in the present moment. All resistance to the flow of life energy is removed when time stops, thinking stops, the I-ego disappears, the Higher Power of complete understanding arises, and the heart opens up for the pouring out of Love that brings life energy to heal the world around me, which reflects only a loving connection, as being one with the universe.
VAB 06-21-24
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