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The Man and Addiction

Civilization? Where are we amid all of this?

By Rudina Published 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 24 min read
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The Man and Addiction
Photo by Mikail Duran on Unsplash

We are a society of sloth, paralysis, passivity, unconsciousness, suffocation, conventions, customs, mystification, loathing, fear, legislation, political slogans, social, religious, and philosophical deceit, confidentiality, hope, coping mechanisms, drugs, opiates, Roman popes, four-year electoral mandates, fascism and communism, Holocaust and Nazism, ideological dead ends, busy airports, authorities, ubiquitous technology, cell phones, confessions, invoicing, purchase orders, accountancy, nuclear weapons…an endless stream of new concepts and new phenomena.

Civilization? Where are we amid all of this? Where in this world is the Man; creative, free, soaring, world bearing, joyous man? The ecstatic humanist making music unworldly, leisurely playing, writing poems of melancholy, selflessly loving, casually musing, and freely interpreting himself? Has this Man been eclipsed by the role play Man, this wrecked age product that struggles for material gain and the low survival of its own low life?

Who is to tell such a man what path to follow, what to believe in? What is true and what is false? Who today can know for sure, the way the whole world presumed to know for centuries before, if, beyond the material world, there is a spiritual reality whose moral imperatives are worthy of being observed and followed? Where do the limits of moralities lie? What may be accepted and what may not?

Where do the limits of personal freedom lie, and where does excess begin? Material or spiritual; capitalism or self-sustaining communities? Fitting in or breaking out? Domination or mercy? Ambition or humility? Faith or atheism? Globalism or nationalism? West or East? Can man recognize himself in this vibrating chaos? Can his emotions be defined in such a cacophony? Is he able to remember his goals, joys, his humanity?

For the most part no and consequently one gets lost, scared, sick or confused. One escapes, one flees to the woods for a breath of fresh air, to see a calm, self-confident immobile happy tree, to contemplate the peaceful still mirror of a lake, and to find the truth that today only trees and animals remember.

Indeed somewhere along the way, we have managed to forget the truth, and so we recognize two possible “solutions” when faced with our unlivable age: either to dumbly accept the convoluted chaos and mindlessly fit in, or turn to addictions to forget, to escape as far away as possible into the phantasm world of pleasure-dreams and rapturous illusions, to decamp and run, every minute and every hour, then once awakening, sobriety and reality’s bitter return down once again turn to intoxication and top up, take another hit, blackout, deeper and further, because the world hurts too much to bear because reality is a killer, a soul killer. Does it matter if intoxication wastes the body?

Addiction — all about self-soothing.

Working for more than one year with addicts I must admit that it’s sad to see how they spend their days and how most of them spend their lives. Studies indicate that homeless people are, generally, single without nuclear families; have either never married or experienced a break in relationships; tend to have tenuous ties to extended family members; experience physical and mental disabilities that often go untreated (46% report a chronic physical condition and 22% report severe mental illness, 5 to 7% of which need to be institutionalized); are extremely impoverished with incomes that are 50% less than the official poverty line; suffer a series of long-term problems prior to the onset of homelessness, that include unemployment, a lack of affordable, and other interpersonal troubles. They die of HIV, they die of Hepatitis C, infections of their heart valves, they die of infections of their brains, of their spines, their hearts, of their bloodstream. They die of suicide, of overdose, of violence, of accidental deaths.

If you look at them you call to mind the words of the great Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahvous who wrote, “Nothing records the effects of a sad life as graphically as the human body” because these people lose everything. They lose health, they lose their beauty, they lose their teeth, they lose their wealth, they lose human relationships and in the end they often lose their lives. And yet nothing shakes them from the addiction. Nothing can force them to give up their addiction.

T he addiction is powerful and the question is: why? As one of the service users said to me, “I am not afraid of dying, I am more afraid of living.” the question we have to ask is: Why are people afraid of life? If you want to understand addiction, you can’t look at what’s wrong with the addiction, you have to look at what’s right about it. In other words, what’s the person getting from the addiction? What are they getting that otherwise they don’t have? What addicts get is relief from pain, a sense of peace, a sense of control, a sense of calmness, very, very temporarily. And the question is why are these qualities missing from their lives, what happened to them?

If you look at the drugs like heroin, morphine, codeine, cocaine, alcohol, these are all painkillers. In one way or another they all soothe the pain. And that’s why the real question in addiction is not “why the addiction?” but “why the pain?”

I just finished reading the biography of Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones, a heavy duty heroin addict for a long time. In his book he writes that the addiction was all about looking for oblivion, looking for forgetting. He wrote, “The contortions that we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.” I understand that very well myself, I know that because I used to have discomfort with myself, I know that discomfort being in my own skin, I know that desire to escape from my own mind. The great British psychiatrist R.D. Laing said that the three things that people are afraid of, are: they are afraid of death, they are afraid of other people and of their own minds.

From time to time I have wanted to distract myself from my own mind because I was afraid to be alone with it. And how would I distract myself? I have never used drugs and never smoke but I have distracted myself in a different way. I have distracted my mind through work and throwing myself into activities, through shopping; in my case food, classical compact discs and clothes. I was a real addict every time I didn’t feel well with myself, with my mind and I would lie about them when asked as every addict does, so I know what that escape from the self is like.

I would define addiction as any behavior that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure but in the long term causes harm, has some negative consequences and you can’t give it up despite those negative consequences. And from that perspective, you can understand that there are many, many addictions. Yes, there is the addiction to drugs but there is also addiction to consumerism, addiction to the internet, addiction to food, shopping, to sex.

The Buddhists have this idea of the hungry ghosts, who are creatures with large empty bellies and small scrawny necks and tiny little mouths, so they can never get enough, they can never fill this emptiness on the inside. We are all hungry ghosts in this society. We all have this emptiness and many of us are trying to fill that emptiness from the outside. Addiction is all about trying to fill that emptiness from the outside. If you want to ask the question of why people are in pain, you can’t look at their genetics. You have to look at their lives and in the case of the homeless service users, the highly addicted ones; it’s very clear why they are in pain; because they have been abused all of their lives. They began life as abused children. All the service users I worked with over this period have been abused as children and have been traumatized as well. They have been neglected, physically abused, abandoned, and emotionally hurt over and over again. And that’s why the pain.

There is something else here too: the human brain. The human brain itself, as you have heard already develops in the interaction with the environment. It is not genetically programmed. The kind of environment that a child has will actually shape the development of the brain. I recall now about two experiments with mice that I have read. You take a little mouse and put food in its mouth and he will eat and will enjoy it and swallow it, but if you put the food down a few inches away from his nose, he will not move to eat it. He will actually starve to death rather than eat it. Because genetically, they knocked out the receptors for a chemical in the brain called dopamine which is the incentive and motivation chemical.

Dopamine flows whenever we are motivated, excited, vital, vibrant, or curious about something when we are seeking food or a sexual partner. Without dopamine, we have no motivation. What do you think the addicts get? When they shoot cocaine or almost any drug they get a hit of dopamine in their brain. The question is: what happened to their brains in the first place? Because it’s a myth that drugs are addictive. Drugs are not by themselves addictive because most people who try most drugs never become addicted. The question is why some people are vulnerable to being addicted. Just like food is not addictive but to some people it is; shopping is not addictive but to some people it is; television is not addictive but to some people it is. The question is: why this susceptibility?

I recall another little experiment with mice where infant mice, if they are separated from their mothers will not cry for their mothers. What would that mean in a while? It means that they would die because only the mother protects the child’s life and nurtures the child. Why? Because genetically they knocked out the receptors the chemical binding sites in the brain for endorphins and endorphins are indigenous morphine like substances, endorphins are our natural painkillers. What morphine or endorphins also do is they make possible the experience of love; the experience of attachment to the parent and the parent’s attachment to the child. So these little mice without endorphin receptors in their brains will naturally not call for their mothers. In other words, the addiction to these drugs and of course the heroine and the morphine what they do is they act on the endorphin system; that’s why they work.

So the question is: what happens to people who need these chemicals from the outside? Well, what happens to them is, that when they are abused or neglected as children those circuits don’t develop. When you don’t have love and connection in your life, when you are very, very young, those important brain circuits just don’t develop properly. Under the conditions of abuse things just don’t develop properly and their brains then are susceptible when they do the drugs and they feel normal, they feel pain relief, and they feel love. I cannot forget the moment when one of the service users said to me, “When I first did heroine it felt like a warm soft hug, just like a mother hugging her baby.”

This situation with hugging a baby recalls me also my volunteering placement in Israel. When talking one day with a Jewish man who recently had “made aliyah” (this is the phrase they use when they return from the exile from diaspora back to the land of Israel) he was explaining to me that he had the same emptiness, maybe not to the same degree as the service users. What happened to him?

He was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, to Jewish parents, just before the Germans occupied Hungary. Everybody knows what happened to the Jewish people in Eastern Europe. He was 2 months old when the German army moved into Budapest and the day after they did he told me that his mother phoned the pediatrician asking her to see him because he was crying all the time.

The pediatrician said, “Of course, I will come to see him, but I should tell you that all my Jewish babies are crying.” Well, why did this happen? What do babies know about Hitler or genocide or war? Nothing! What the man I met and all Jewish babies were picking up on are the stresses and the terrors and the depression of their mothers and that actually shapes the child’s brain and of course what happened to him was that he got the message that the world doesn’t want him, because if his mother and his father are not happy around him they must not want him.

He became a doctor and workaholic later. Why? Because he thought if they don’t want him at least they will need him. “I am going to be an important doctor and they are going to need me and that way I can make up for the feeling of not being wanted in the first place” he explained to me. And he continued about his kids. “What does that mean? It means that I am working all the time. And what message my kids get?” he asked me. After a pause he said, “My kids get the same message that they are not wanted and this is how we pass it on. We pass on the trauma, we pass on the suffering, unconsciously from one generation to the next.”

Obviously, there are many, many ways to fill this emptiness. For each person, there is a different way of filling the emptiness, but the emptiness always goes back to what we didn’t get when we were very, very small. We look at the drug, smoke, and alcohol addicts and we say to them, “How can you possibly do this to yourself? How can you possibly inject this terrible substance or put this huge amount of nicotine into your body that will kill you?” Look at what we are doing to the Earth. We are injecting all kinds of things into the atmosphere and the oceans and the environment that is killing us, that is killing the Earth. Which addiction is greater: the addiction to oil or to consumerism? Which causes the greater harm? And yet we judge the drug and alcohol addicts because we actually see that they are just like us and we don’t like that. We say “You are different than us, you are worse than we are.”

Many times in my life I have heard my dad telling me the stories of his childhood and his youth. I have heard the same stories many times. He still keeps telling me nowadays the same stories, stories about his everyday life under communism and how the dictator ran Albania like a maximum-security labor camp. Even food was in short supply. My dad tells me how he was in total fear and terror all his life without doing anything bad, just because his dad (my granddad) was a big trader at that time and the regime took everything from him when hung him in the prison.

The dictator Hoxha in the last years of his life lived an astonishingly lonely life because by then he had killed off so many of his wartime comrades that he hardly had anyone left to talk to. Jealous of anyone else with intellectual pretensions, the bookish dictator stuffed his Politbureau with dullards and people of no education. Loyal they may have been, but they did not offer him much in the way of stimulating chitchat. He was consistently murderous, spiteful and vindictive. Typically, he made sure that when Mother Theresa’s mother was dying in Albania, she was not allowed to come and pay her a farewell visit even though she begged for it. He could easily have allowed it but, naturally, didn’t. And you imagine how one man captured a country and held it prisoner for the best part of half a century.

The question I ask is if anyone can understand the suffering of my country’s people and how that suffering makes them seek relief from pain in their addictions. What about the people who are perpetrating it? What are they addicted to? Well, they are addicted to power, they are addicted to wealth. They are addicted to acquisition.

Trying to understand the addiction to power, I looked at some of the most powerful people in history. I looked at Alexander the Great, I looked at Napoleon, I looked at Hitler, I looked at Stalin, I looked at Enver Hoxha. It’s very interesting when you look at these people. First of all, why did they need power so much?

Interestingly enough, physically they were all very small people, they came from outsiders and they were not part of the major population. Stalin was a Georgian, not a Russian, Napoleon was a Corsican not a Frenchman, Alexander was Macedonian not a Greek, Hitler was an Austrian, not a German, Enver Hoxha was from a very small town in the south of Albania, not from Tirana, the capital.

So it is obviously a real sense of insecurity and inferiority. They needed the power to feel okay in themselves, to make themselves bigger. In order to get that power, they were quite willing to fight wars and kill a lot of people, just to maintain that power. Definitely, not only small people can be power-hungry but the insecurity and inferiority lead these men to addiction to the power because the addiction is always about the emptiness you try to fill from the outside. Napoleon even in exile on the island of Saint Helena after he lost his power said, “I love power, I love power.” He couldn’t think of himself without power. He had no sense of himself without being powerfully externally.

It’s very interesting when you compare it to people like Buddha or Jesus. If you look at the story about Jesus and Buddha both of them were tempted by the devil. One of the things that the devil offers them is power, earthly power and they both say no. Why did they say no? They say no because they have the power inside of themselves. They don’t need it from the outside. They both say no because they don’t want to control people, they want to teach people. They want to teach people by example and by soft words and by wisdom, not through force. So they refuse power. I find it very interesting what they say about that. Buddha before he dies while his monks are morning and crying and all upset says, “Don’t mourn me and don’t worship me. Find the lamp inside yourselves, be a lamp unto yourselves, find light within.”

As we look at this difficult world with the loss of the environment and the global warming and the depredation in the oceans, let’s not look to the people in power to change things, because the people in power, I am afraid to say, are very often some of the emptiest people in the world and they are not going to change things for us. We have to find that light within ourselves. We have to find the light within the communities and within our own wisdom and our own creativity. We can’t wait for the people in power to make things better for us because they are never going to, not unless we make them.

Let us remember that the word addiction is a Latin derivative of the word slave. When we become a slave to our ego, EMOTIONAL and/or physical monogamy becomes impossible with ourselves and others. The opposite of the word slave is liberty; liberty is an old-fashioned word that means freedom from slavery. The only way we can know true liberty and freedom is to honor what is true to our heart’s honor and release ourselves from being controlled by or enslaved to external forces. This means we are then totally responsible for the quality of our own life, our relationships, and all of our choices. So let us review where our liberty and enslavement lie. Are we being true to ourselves EMOTIONALLY and physically or are we being unfaithful? It is an important question for us to answer, as we attract what we believe we deserve. Old George Bernard Shaw reminds us, “Liberty means responsibility, which is why most men dread it.” It’s true that breakdowns in connection result from our failing to be completely honest with ourselves or with another person about what we want, need, feel and see. No doubt that decreasing expectations and increasing communication with myself and others have worked.

Volunteering, part of my enlightenment

It should happen something in your life to make you think and give thoughts to many things you haven’t imagined you would before. Volunteering helped me on my way of seeing things in different perspectives. I understood that in order to effectively help people, I had to live an authentic life.

I saw a way of being human and particularly a way of feeling well who I am and what the self is and i have been sort of puzzling what should I be: a noble self or a virtual self or apologize for yourself or punish yourself or advance yourself …there are all kinds of things. But actually, I found myself opened to the first message from Buddha that says: “don’t worry about that. The self is just a convention, you are just a stream, a beautiful stream of experiences and thoughts and you just can steer this flow with this beautiful capacity of choice”. That liberated me and my first thought was: we can be released into action. And we don’t have to have an opinion. As Buddha says “don’t get hooked on your opinions, The opinion uses you instead of you using it and you lose your freedom”.

I see myself walking tall now because I am at home in my skin. I am present in the humans. I am not afraid to tell you I am beautiful because I have done the work to be at home in my soul’s skin. I do not shrink to accommodate the insecurities of those around me, but stand tall to remind them gently, why crouch? I walk with my head held high when I walk into a room because I know there is space for me in this world — however, I may come. I show this world my messy heart, tears and my laughter, unashamed. The Appetite about the naked truth being OK with fear, not getting rid of it, our true nature, and the truth of how we feel. It’s boring to be scared and numb. If we are afraid to see the pain we are not going to see the beauty either. U just don’t numb partially. The whole system goes down.

I know better now than to try and fix or heal the suffering of this world I do it by healing my suffering, I am not afraid to move faster or slower than the expectations we lay on vulnerability and opening. I open at my will. I am not a victim of circumstance — I feel when things are out of alignment and I move from them with as much grace as I enter I show up for this world. I set boundaries with ease that honors me. As Civil Rights leader Howard Thurman wisely stated: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I do not keep my freedom in a cage that requires five whiskies to be let loose. I dance the shimmy and shake and love through my life. I have to be sure that we nurture the capacity to love life.

Not everything is about me though. I can’t always take things personally. The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places. I like what Sherlock Holmes said “The key to my brilliance is that I walk into a situation without any opinion” and however the weird facts are I build the case around that and walk in and if I have a preconception about it then I will be wrong every time.

When ego used to dominate my being, I assessed where I stand, high or low in any situation. Now, genuinely I feel no higher and no lower than anyone else. A tremendous relief accompanies this realization. So much energy was wasted protecting my dignity, status, pride and accomplishment. It is so true that when you feel gratitude, your ego steps away. Admiration and gratitude definitely are the best juice in life.

I knew that I had to lose what needs to be lost to find what needs to be found. I starved the ego and fed the soul. I lost my ego through gratitude and I found grace. I learned how to wait to answer when I am ready if my first response is not from a place of grace. I have learned to win with humility and lose with grace.

I want to believe that I have found grace in my life. I like to use this word. We use it and hear it in many different contexts, probably without giving it much thought. But if you do give some thought to its many facets, you will discover it to be mysterious, perhaps even magical. Grace is important for which we must each find our own personal meaning. Finding grace for me is finding a life of greater ease. It’s a way of living in full appreciation of all that is wonderful while finding acceptance of that which we cannot change. Grace is that magical quality that — if we can find it — smooths our path through life.

I don’t at all understand all the mystery of grace. I know only that it meets us where we are but doesn’t leave us where it found us. The first image the word grace conjures in my mind is that of a ballerina. For me she is the epitome of grace. Grace is beauty and elegance in many things. The dancer shows us beauty and grace in movement. We watch her poise and refined movements and wonder if it’s possible for us to move through life with her ease and finesse. Her dance is not easy, although she makes it seem so. Her dance requires strength and discipline and in spite of this, she doesn’t lose sight of its joy or fail to express its beauty. She is supple enough to accommodate the challenges. She is grace. As in nature, as in art, it’s rough treatment that gives soul as well as stones the luster. Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature is a help, it’s an instrument of grace. Grace is not merely something to be passively observed, it is the active enhancement of our world and experience. Grace in action honoring, favoring and lending dignity. For all its dignity and propriety, grace is still humble. Grace is having a commitment to, or an acceptance of being ineffective and foolish. It makes us willing cheerful and ungrudging because pain is certain, suffering is optional. Grace speaks of forgiveness and mercy, of decency and propriety. It’s something we continually work for. It describes the sort of higher spiritual values that we show in our time on the earth. It’s a good journey to perfection, every day learning who I am and resigning with a good grace all that I am not. A life lived with grace lights the face. There is a loveliness to life that doesn’t fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency towards grace that doesn’t fail us. Beauty from within will always shine through.

I definitely love the word “Grace”. It represents spiritual wisdom, something we gain through experience that brings peace to us as well as to others. To have it is to be kind, generous, and forgiving. Grace is the spiritual wisdom to express appreciation for the beautiful world around us, and in so doing, to be part of that beauty; it’s not part of consciousness, its amount of light in our souls; it’s not knowledge, nor reason.

They say that human nature is competitive, aggressive, and selfish. No. It’s just the opposite. Human nature is actually cooperative, generous, and community-minded. We all need these to survive and to be healthy psychologically and physically. Competition, aggression, and selfishness are just self-defense mechanisms that unfortunately are part of everyday life for most of us to protect our mind and ego from anxiety and social sanctions, but actually, they put us into more anxiety and fear. Well, there is a fact that all over the place, there are people waking up with the heart as big as the world inside them. We see and hear everywhere about people opening up with trustful friends and family, sharing, giving, and receiving, people committed to a better world, deep inside we are community-minded. That’s actually human nature.

The most “selfish” thing we can do is help this planet and the others because then we will be happy. If we find that light within, if we find our own nature, then we will be kinder to ourselves and we also will be kinder to others and to nature. Life is short and full of struggles — and, really, we’re all in it together. If we can be there for ourselves and for one another and work as a team to make the world a better place, our existence will have a whole new meaning.

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About the Creator

Rudina

Through years of inner work, I learned how amazing life can be once you let go of fear, limiting belief, and false identification with achievements.

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