How to Overcome Addiction

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C V Raman’s consciousness level is not Ramkrishna Yadav’s. We all have different consciousness levels. Criminals exist at very low levels of consciousness and are driven by hostile emotions. Psychologist and author, Dr David Hawkins, places shame-based emotions at the lowest level of consciousness. People who exist at the level of shame tend to be cruel, brutally cruel. A little higher on the hierarchy of consciousness is guilt. Apathy comes next. And so on, it goes. A vast majority of people, 85% of the entire population, live at these low levels and grapple with very serious psychological problems in life. Too many people are mentally unhealthy, in other words.

Quite a few of them take shelter in drugs and alcohol. These addicts and potential addicts are probably better persons than the so-called ‘normal’ people because the search for a ‘high’ is an indication of a desire for a better existence while the ‘normal’ people are contended with low levels of existence. Drugs provide the ‘highs’, no doubt. What are these ‘highs’?

Imagine you are listening to an orchestra. A technician has filtered out all the lower tones. You hear only the high notes and deep booms. “The suppression of the low notes doesn’t create the high ones; it merely reveals them,” Dr Hawkins says. This is just what the drug or the drink does. It suppresses the low emotions of shame, guilt, apathy, fear, anger, and so on and accentuates the noble emotions normally engendered by cooperativeness, acceptance, love, etc.

The higher-level emotions are far more enchanting than the lower ones. Anyone who has experienced the intensity of those higher emotions wouldn’t ever want to descend to the lower ones. As Richard Bach put it in Illusions, if you have conquered certain heights you won’t descend, you will spread out your wings and fly.

This is what all of us want to do: spread our wings and fly. There are many ways by which we can obtain those wings. in the words of Dr Hawkins, “Such higher states are attained through the experiences of love and religion, classical music or art, or through the practice of spiritual disciplines.”

Dr Hawkins places much stress on spirituality. But one can rise to the higher levels of consciousness without religion too. Of course, religion and spirituality are different things and the former can even be a deterrent to the latter. You don’t need religion for loving fellow beings. In fact, religion can circumscribe one’s love. And love occupies a very high place in the hierarchy of consciousness levels.

The addict is usually a romantic at heart. He is looking for a better world, one in which most people – if not all – exist at the high levels of consciousness. The addict’s heart most probably belongs there in the realms of love, understanding, cooperation, and the like. But like the metaphorical orchestra mentioned above, life filters out these higher tones for some people. Circumstances are not always in our favour. And the addict takes the short cut to the ‘highs’.

So what’s the solution? The addict has to realise that the short cut is not an answer to his quest at all. The ‘high’ provided by that short cut is an illusion, a temporary experience. The lasting experience of the higher levels of consciousness comes through strenuous hankering after. You have to be an ascetic of sorts in order to ascend the ladder of consciousness levels. You need to work for it really. The ecstasy of music comes after years of toil with the crotchets and the instruments. The artist attains perfection after ruining many a canvas. The writer has to labour much before the words become verse. And the higher levels of consciousness lie there – in that music, on that canvas, in the verse…

Addiction is a psychological disorder that arises out of a person’s discontentment with low level existence. The person’s soul (spirit or whatever one might call it) belongs to the higher levels. All our souls do, in fact. But we hoodwink ourselves with the palliatives of rituals and pilgrimages and melas. The addict refuses to do that. He is more honest to himself. He just has to be helped to get on to the highway to the higher levels of existence. And that’s the ideal way out of the mess. Interestingly, that would be the ideal for everyone who wishes to have sound mental health.

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter's CauseAChatter