An addiction is a dependency, isn't it ? Being dependent on anything involves a loss of freedom, along with psychological and physical enslavement. But why do we become addicted and how ?
Take cigarettes for example. We often decide to start smoking in order to conform to a certain image. Then we discover the desire, the sensation, the pleasure and the effect of the drug… let's not be afraid of the words. An addiction is an identification and a strengthening of the ego. First of all, there is the brand, the image that it conveys, and to which we identify to. Ex. Marlboro. There is a cowboy, a horse, a denim jacket, the wide open spaces of the wild west, the freedom and the cool attitude of a nonconformist way of life. Then there is the gesture that we adopt, always the same : open the package, remove the aluminum foil, take the cigarette, light it up, bringng it to the mouth etc. Then you consume it, take a puff, blow out the smoke like a fireplace in the cold of the winter, quite a ritual.. Then comes the solicited pleasure, the mental "rush", the burning sensation in the lungs, especially when it is the first of the day. We then experience a slight anesthesia in the mind, the venom starts to act, thus providing a small shift of perception. It is the desired effect, here it is, we hold it.
In short, smoking consists of a series of automatisms which modify the perception, and acts like a drug with which one derives a certain pleasure.
Understanding how pleasure works is essential to fully address the subject of addiction. Pleasure is a sensation, and pleasure is of the past, and you recognize it as such for having experienced it before. So pleasure is a conditioned sensation born of thought. In order to experience you need an external impulse, a word, an image that will drive desire.
Then just thinking about it a desire arises. From this desire the sensation is born, then pleasure. Sensation, like emotion, is a reaction of memory. Pleasure is therefore linked to the ego, to the fact it provides a pleasant sensation to this insatiable ogre, always searching for pleasures. With pleasure comes fear, they are inseparable : fear of not being able to repeat the sensation tomorrow. It is therefore a question of recording a memory, an image, everything from the past, and of wanting to repeat it tomorrow, like a projection into the future. So pleasure generates fear and is only a form of identification, a distraction, an escape from the fact of our existence. What we are saying then is that addiction is above all a habit which generates a mechanical routine in order to provide pleasure. It is therefore through inattention that the habit can set in. A habit is a mechanical action, which traps the mind in the known and deprives it of freedom of action.
The action of the drug then changes perception and acts as a form of relief from internal tensions. Without a global understanding, it is very difficult to get rid of an addiction. We pretend there is the physical lack, the need to decrease, to compensate, to go gradually and all this nonsense..
We often swap one addiction for another, because the fundamental problem remains : the running away from.. Excess of sport, work, sex, food.. all the compensations will do… When we observe in ourself the whole process of addiction and we identify all the tensions, images and ego, it is then possible to detach from it effortlessly.
We are used to methods, systems because we are unable to observe a fact without fleeing from it, condemning it or justifying it... but never observing it. However, an addiction responds to a very precise psychological mechanism. Once the observation has been made, that is to say once the danger has been identified, we naturally dmove away from it. There is nothing else to do.. It is in the observation that one frees oneself..
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