THE POWER OF ADDICTION : THE ADDICTION OF POWER

Because these people lose everything, they lose their health, they lose their beauty, they lose their teeth, they lose their wealth, they lose their human relationship, in the end they often lose their lives.

And yet nothing shakes them from their addiction nothing can force them to give up their addiction. The addictions are powerful and the question is why? “I’m not afraid of dying”, he said, “I’m more afraid of living”.

Why are people afraid of life? if you want to understand addiction, you cant look at what is wrong with the addiction, you have to look at what is right about it.

In other words what is the person getting from the addiction? What are they getting that otherwise they dont have?

What addicts get is relief from pain what they get is 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?

The real question in addiction is not ‘why the addiction?’ but ‘why the pain?’

Addiction was all about looking for obivilion, looking forgetting

3 things that people are afraid of :

1. They are afraid of death
2. They are afraid of other people
3. And they are afraid of their own minds

For long time in my life. I wanted to distract myself from my own mind, because i was afraid to be alone with it. Now would I distract myself? I have distracted myself through work, through myself into activities.

My definition of addiction is any behavior that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure. But in the long term causes harm, has some negative consequences and you cant give it up.

Hungry ghosts are creatures myth who has large empty bellies and small scranny necks and tiny little mouths, so they can never get enough they can never fill the emptiness on the inside.

And we are all hungry ghosts in this society we all have this emptiness and so many of us are trying to fill that emptiness from the outside. Now if you want to ask the question why people are in pain. You cant look at their genetics, you have to look at their lives. Perhaps they have been abused all of their lives, they began life as abused children.

Why are some people vunerable to  being addicted? Now what do you think the addicts get? When the addicts shoot cocaine, when the adduct shoots crystal meth or almost any drugs they get a hit of dopamine in their brain.

The question is : what happened to their brains in the first place. Because it is a myth that drugs are addictive? drugs are not themselves addictive because most people who try most drugs never become addictied .

 

So the question is why are some people vunerable 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. Televison is not addictive but to some people it is. So the question is why this suscepitibility?

Endorphins are indigenous morphine like substances, endorphins are our own natural pain killers. What morphine or endorphins also do is they make possible the experience of love. They make possible the experience of attachment to the parent and the paranets attachment to the child.

The addiction to these drugs and of course the heroine and the morphine what they do is they act on the endorphin system. That is why they work. So the question is, what happens to people that need these chemicals from the outside?

Well. What happens to them is they are abused as children, those circuits dont develop when you dont find any love and dont feel or have any connections in your life when you are very-very young. Then those important brain circuits just dont develop properly.

And under condition of abuse, things just dont develop properly and their brains then are susceptible when they do the drugs. Now they feel normal, now they feel pain relief, now they feel love.

When I first did heroine : it felt like a warm soft hug just like a mother hugging her baby. Now I have had the same emptiness not the same degree as my patients, what happened to me is that I was born in budapest, hungary in 1944 to jewish parents. Just before the germans occipied hungary and you know what happened to the jewish people in eastern europe.

And I was 2 months old when the german army moved into budapest, and the day after then, my mother phoned pediatrician and she said : would you please come and see gabor, because he is cryin all the time.

And the pediatrician said “of course, i will to come to see him but i should tell you, all of my jewish babies are crying” WHY?

What do babies know about hitler or genocide or war? nothing…

What we were picking up on is the stresses and the terrors and the depression of our mother. That actually shapes the child’s brain. Of course what happened to me, that i have got the message that the world doest want me, because if my mother is not happy around me, she must not want me.

Why do I become a workaholic later? Because if they dont want me, at least they are going to need me and I will 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.

And what does that mean? It means that Iam working all the time, what message do my kids get? My kids get the same message that they are not wanted, this is how we pass it on… We pass on the trauma and we pass on the suffering unconsciously. From one generation to the next.

So obiviously there are many – many ways to fill this emptiness and for each person there is a different way of filling the emptiness but the emptiness always goes back.

To what we did not get when we were very small and then we look at the drug addict and we say to drug addict, how can you possibly do this to yourself? how can you possibly inject this terrible substance into your body. That may kill you?

But look at what we are doing to the earth, we are injecting all kinds of things into the atmosphere and the oceans and the encironment that is killing us, that is killing the earth.

Now which addiction is greater? the addiction to oil? or to consumerism? Which causes the greater harm and yet we judge the drug addict because we actually see that they are just like us and we dont like that.

So we say ‘you are different from us, you are worse than we are’. Because power the addiction to lower is always about the emptiness.

Buddha/Siddhārtha Gautama  and yesus, both of them were tempted by the devil and one of the thing the devil offers them is power, earthly power and both say no. They say no because they have the power inside themselves, they do not need it from the outside and they.

They both say no, Because they do not want to control people. They want to teach people, they want to teach people by example, by soft words and by wisom not through fforce, so they refuse power.

So a real sense of insecurity and inferiority and they needed power to feel okay in themselves, to make themselves bigger. And in order to get that power they were quite willing to fight wars and to kill alot of people just to maintain that power. That you are trying to till from the outside and napoleon even in exile on the island of St.Helena after he lost his power, he said “I love power, I love power, still”.

He could not think of himself wutgiyt oiwer he had. No sense of himself without being powerful externally. Jesus says : that the power and the reality is not the outside of yourself but inside. Find a lamp inside yourself, be a lamp unto yourself. Find a light within.

The people in power iam afraid to say, they are oftenly some emptiest people in the world.  Instead of we have to find that light within ourselves, we have to find the light within communities, within our own wisom and our own creativity.

People run on the bigger platforms are empty inside, so they dont want this.. Energy is stored in our cellular memory.