Many agree that the underlying cause of many addictions is the desire know one's real self. Alcoholics and other addicts describe their addictions as 'spiritual bankruptcy' or 'soul sickness.' The term 'rebirth' is often used to describe their healing. Many psychologists successfully treat addiction as spiritual crisis, enhancing the pharmacological and behavioral cures of old with existential and transpersonal treatments.
"To many people, behind the craving for drugs, alcohol, or other addictions is the craving for the Higher Self ". (Stanislov Grof quoted in Paths Beyond Ego, p. 145). This craving is never fully satisfied by drugs, alcohol, relationships, power or possessions. The old song, "I can't get no satisfaction" describes the insatiable craving to have more of what one doesn't really want in the first place.
Abraham Maslow's statement that "If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life." describes his understanding of man's search for something beyond what we can see. It occurs to me that the addiction that we should take a look at is the addiction to the role of one who must search to 'find' one's true self. If the fact of One Mind, One Presence is true, if Meister Eckhart's phrase "His presence is my being", the addiction to the belief that we co-exist with Infinite Consciousness has no foundation. But we do act on this addiction, don't we? Many of us read, study, attend workshops to 'learn' about this Infinite Self and then still go on acting as if it were separate, something to attain, over and over again.
The actions we take to "get there" are valuable not because they will get us there, but because the 'there' is the reason for and the very doing of all the actions that are taken. So we don't condemn any addictions or attempts to escape from them. We recognize them for what they are, the look of Mind's activity.
Do we have to escape the ego, or dissolve it, or fight with it or transcend it? Of course not. A quiet look at the addiction to the human picture, the searcher, the person who hasn't quite 'got it' makes for the dropping of the human state (mis-take) to recognize the Infinite Minding that is recognizing Itself and acknowledging its Perfect Allness. Here. Now.
"The one who lives selfconsciously as Mind makes no attempt to transcend his world image or to change it. For him, all identity is conscious identity, himself, and is reality as subject and reality as object. He sees what he sees out from Mind or Science and that seeing is IT - the seen heard and felt." (Laird, Lairdletter March 1972)
