What Are We Addicts Of?

What I slowly realised was what occurred as humans experienced self-consciousness; that this was different to anything else on our planet. Animals, like humans, are integral parts of the cycles of change and inter-relatedness. Not being self-conscious, however, they are not aware of their situation, their is-ness, their existence, they just are.

The life of Helen Keller throws an enormous light into what it is to be an animal, and the change to self awareness. Helen was struck dumb and blind at an early age when she had only learnt one word. She lived like an animal without self awareness until the age of eleven. So she grew wild, violent, and without any feeling about her own existence.

Then she was taught by a deaf and dumb teacher and remembered the first word and quickly began the climb to become a human person. So Helen suddenly made the extraordinary leap that we all make at some time, from knowing nothing but feelings, to being able to communicate and think. In describing that moment Helen has said, “Suddenly I felt… a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.” For language is like an amazing computer program that once it is fed into the brain radically changes us from an animal to an animal capable of self awareness, but it needs an upgrade .

In trying to explain to people what it was like to live a life without words and thought, Helen said that although she existed, she didn’t know she existed. There was no pain because there was no ‘Helen’ to feel any pain, only a body with sensations. She existed as a sort of nothingness. See Helen Keller and also WolfBoy

Animals live, they procreate as an expression of their creative natural and cosmic energies. But unconsciously they are part of the wonder of the cosmos. Nothing is their own, not their birth, not the life, not their death. Animals do not  suffer uncertainty about who they are, but live their life as part of nature, Life itself.

But we as evolving humans had lived in this state for millions of years where we never had to make decisions but were directed by our instincts. And being conscious and able to look back upon oneself and ask, “What am I?” – we were suddenly naked of this background of support given by instincts and felt exposed and unprotected.

But we still have the animal feelings of fear, anxiety, panic attacks and so suffer incredible confusion and depression. As humans we began to feel the awfulness, the loneliness, the absence of choice, the compulsiveness of their situation. They no longer had the connection with the Whole and the wonderful deep instinctive wisdom  that animals have, except for some remarkable women and men.

Many religious doctrines stressed this realisation. In Buddhism it is said that we are bound to the wheel of life and death without really knowing our plight.

In Hinduism it is stated as being lost and blinded by Illusion, and so chained to existence because we are blind to who or what we are and what we are doing. In Christianity it is stressed we are sinners and have no real existence if we are not saved. We are sheep – that are led to slaughter and eaten by the Shepherd.

For religions talk about eternal life, but of course they are not talking about our body’s life, but there is such a thing as eternal existence, for a cell doesn’t become old it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. So, no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self. This seems to say that our real and eternal self is in the seed our body developed from, and we, our ego our personality and body are ways the eternal life, the cell, can gain new experience, which is all carried in the seed.

Also we believe that ancient self is beyond knowing, but of course many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking and it is a shock.

People run from this realisation in any and every direction. But a few men and women worked out the puzzle of human existence and death. They noticed a factor that was not in itself natural (yet it is not unnatural, as in infinite change, everything is possible). The people noticed that humans were, like animals, locked into compulsive instinctual life patterns but without the coping instincts of their fellow animals. So eating, sleeping, sex, self-seeking, were unconscious compulsive drives in which all humanity were immersed; it was found one in four women in the US are taking a prescription drug for mental health.

Most of us are in fact addicts – addicted to eating too much or too little; addicted to sex as the meaning of life; addicted to get more of everything than others, such as money or power; addicted to seeing themselves as powerless – “life’s a bitch, and then you die”; addiction to killing, hurting and maiming others in war and activity. But having self-consciousness, decisions could be made. One could decide not to live out these compulsive patterns, and through being aware if this they gradually climbed out into a new life. See Life’s Little Secrets – Ox Herding

If one actually stopped and simply recognised that we are all a part of Life and so do not need to be victims of our own ‘natural urges’ – something unusual sometimes happened. We are all born victims of circumstance, but we need not remain a victim.