For years I battled with addiction.
There were brief periods of sobriety, lasting a few weeks at most. But sooner or later, the addiction won out. I felt like I was living two lives. In one, I was desperately trying to stay sober. In the other, I just wanted oblivion.
I lost count of the number of times I lay in bed after another relapse, sweating and retching, swearing to the very core of my being that I would never drink or use drugs again. Three weeks later I was on the same train wreck to hell.
Now, nearly twenty years sober, something is beginning to occur to me. There was a reason I struggled for so long.
The addiction was the path.
What the addictive substance actually delivers
When I think back to the times I took that initial drink or hit after a period of sobriety, there was always a brief sense of ease and comfort. This feeling of relief was, I now think, a momentary loss of self.
The relentless internal narrator goes quiet. The judgement stops. And the mind comes to a rest for a few minutes.
This is what the addict is really reaching for: the brief, accidental silence the substance produces as a side effect of its chemistry. What the substance delivers isn’t pleasure but an absence: a few minutes free of the self that needs relieving.
Jung saw the thirst. The Gita names the water
Carl Jung was the first to put words around this. In his letter to Bill Wilson, he wrote that the craving for alcohol was a misguided attempt to experience wholeness. Spiritus contra spiritum: the longing for spirit answered, disastrously, by the wrong spirit.
Jung described what is longed for as union with God, in the language he had available. What he could not give Bill Wilson, because he was writing as a psychologist, was the Vedantic description of what spiritual thirst means.
The Bhagavad Gita and Advaita Vedanta give exactly that. Union isn’t the meeting of two separate things but a recognition that the seeker and the sought were never two in the first place.
In BG 6.20–23, Krishna describes a state in which the mind comes to rest in itself, where one knows a happiness the senses cannot reach, and where even the heaviest sorrow does not disturb.
Every addict has tasted a counterfeit version of this. The relief was not in the substance. The relief was in the brief gap the substance opened up between you and the noise of your own thinking.
The thirst was real. The water was always there. The bottle was just the only place you knew to look.
Why the counterfeit version always fails
The Gita has a precise description of the relapse cycle, written more than two thousand years before the word “addiction” existed.
BG 18.37-38: the pleasure born of contact between the senses and their objects is nectar at first and poison in the end. The pleasure born of the Self is poison at first and nectar in the end.
The substance worked until it didn’t, because what was actually doing the work was the temporary quieting of the mind. Once tolerance set in, the silence shortened and the cost grew. Eventually only the substance remained, and the silence was gone.
You keep reaching for the same door, but the door no longer opens.
What the Gita points towards works in the opposite direction. Poison at first, because turning towards it means sitting with everything the substance was helping you avoid. But what comes through that, is not temporary and not chemical. And it never runs out.
The addiction was the path
Most people are never forced to ask the question that addiction eventually forces.
What am I, beneath all this?
For someone whose life is reasonably comfortable, the question is optional. The mind can be managed, and any discomfort can be distracted away. The pattern of identification with thought, which the Gita and Advaita identify as the root condition of human suffering, can be lived inside indefinitely.
The addict does not have that option.
The mind that produces the craving cannot be the mind that solves it. Willpower fails. Self-control fails. Every strategy that depends on the mind getting better at managing itself fails, eventually, because the mind is what is generating the problem.
This is the recognition the 12 Steps walked me toward. The first three steps, read carefully, are not really about alcohol. They are about the collapse of the self that thought it was in charge. They are the doorway.
What the Gita and Advaita name, on the other side of that doorway, is not a better-controlled mind, not a stronger sense of self, not a new identity. It is the witness, the saksin, the awareness in which the entire drama of addiction and recovery has been appearing all along.
This is not an attempt to romanticise the wreckage. The wreckage was real, and people got hurt. Years are gone that I will not get back.
But the wreckage is what made the question askable. Comfortable people rarely ask it. The addict has to.
The same silence, here, now
The substance offered a few minutes of unconsciousness, paid for with progressively heavier interest, until the account closed.
The witness offers the same silence. Continuously. With nothing to pay back.
The thirst was real. The water is here. It always was.
Leave a Reply