Nearly twenty years ago I was a different man entirely. Every two or three weeks I would relapse and disappear into a bender, each one worse than the last. Three or four days later I would come to, shaking with the DTs, my mind spinning with guttural voices that promised the horror was only beginning.
Today that life seems like a nightmare that has long since passed. It doesn’t even feel like that life happened.
I run my own business and I travel the world with my partner. Alcohol is no longer a problem. There is simply nothing about it that interests me.
Seemingly, I have lived two lives. Both felt completely real as an experience. But from a non-duality perspective, they’re two states arising in consciousness, the only true reality being the awareness both appear in.
What can you point to and honestly call yourself?
What can you actually point to and honestly call yourself? Almost nothing you name as me is constant.
Consider the body. Mine at fifty-three is not the body I had at forty-three. Cells have died and been replaced; its shape and substance have changed almost entirely. If the body were the self, the self would be a thing that changes every few years. So is the body truly what we mean by ‘me’?
How about thoughts? The thoughts I have today bear no resemblance to those that ran through my mind when I was drinking. The obsession, the bargaining, and the endless internal case for one more drink are all gone. If I were my thoughts, then the person I am now and the person I was then would be complete strangers.
So the body changes and thoughts change. And despite this, there is a sense of inhabiting the same being who lived it.
Do you ever feel like you haven’t really changed since you were eighteen? The only evidence of advancing years tends to be when you look in the mirror.
If you can watch it, can it be you?
The answer is no. Whatever you can observe, you are not.
This is one of the oldest insights in Advaita Vedanta, set out in a classic text called the Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka, the ‘discrimination between the seer and the seen’. Anything you can perceive is an object in awareness. The seer is never the seen. What sees can never be the thing that is looked at.
Your body is something you can observe, so it is seen, not seer.
Your thoughts are things you can watch arise and pass, so they too are seen, not seer.
Even your moods, your cravings, your sense of being a particular kind of person, all of it can be noticed. All of it appears in awareness and that means none of it is the awareness itself.
Whatever you are, you are the one to whom all of this appears. You are not the story. You are the one watching the story.
In Advaita, that watcher is called the sākṣin, the witness: the silent awareness in which every experience shows up. There is something strange and freeing about the fact that this witness can never itself become an object, and I explore that more fully in You Cannot Watch the Watcher.
So were you ever really the addict?
There is no question there was an experience of addiction. The craving was real as an experience and the wreckage certainly happened.
But if you look closely, you will see that addiction runs on identification: thought fusing with a feeling and announcing ‘this is me, this is what I am’. The engine of it is the ego, the sense of a separate self who must drink, kept convinced by a mind that never stops talking.
I said both of my lives felt completely real. Advaita has a precise word for that kind of reality: mithyā. It describes something that is real as an experience but has no independent existence of its own.
Think of a wave. It genuinely rises, it can genuinely soak you, yet it was never anything separate from the ocean. The ego is like this. It is a real experience, but it is not a real entity.
So when the thought arose, ‘I am an addict,’ something real was happening. But the ‘I’ in that thought was a wave calling itself the sea.
Behind the whole performance was something that never drank, never craved, never relapsed: the awareness watching it all unfold. The awareness is what I am, and what I was even back in my drinking days. The addiction was a state arising in that awareness, and it could never touch what it arose in.
Does this mean the addiction wasn’t real?
It does not. And this is the point where the whole idea can turn dangerous if it is misunderstood, as addiction can kill.
Advaita holds two levels at once, and confusing them is easy to do. On the deepest level there is no separate addict, only awareness and what arises in it. On the everyday level, the level where you live, work, and pour or don’t pour a drink, the body and mind carry a genuine dependency that has to be met with real care. Both levels are true. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Collapse them and you get a lie that sounds like wisdom: ‘there’s no addict, so the addiction can’t touch me’. That is not freedom. That is a relapse waiting to happen.
Recognising yourself as the witness does not grant permission. It grants distance. It does not tell you the danger is illusory; it changes who is standing in front of the danger.
You are no longer a helpless someone made of craving, but the awareness in which the craving manifests. Settling in awareness means there is space to choose. The wave that thinks it is the sea doesn’t have the power of choice.
How does any of this help when a craving actually hits?
It changes the relationship to the craving.
Picture a moment when the craving arises. Ordinarily the mind fuses with it in an instant: ‘I am craving, I need this, I have to have a drink’. The claim and the feeling become one thing, and the feet start walking to the nearest bar.
Now try something else. Instead of walking, sit for twenty minutes and simply observe the craving.
Don’t argue with the craving. Don’t build the case for and against, and don’t pivot between the imagined relief of that first drink or the certain consequences of relapsing. Just observe it as a sensation arising and shifting, the way you would watch weather.
Notice how it physically feels in your body. This is the seer and the seen once more: anything you can observe cannot be you. You can observe the craving. So you are not the craving. You are the awareness it is appearing in.
Watched rather than believed, a craving loses its grip. It is our identification with it that makes it powerful, not the sensation itself. Observe rather than identify, and the thing that felt like a command turns back into a passing state.
What this leaves you with
You were never the addict.
There was addiction. For me it was a destructive experience, and it nearly cost me everything. But ultimately it was a state, and states pass. What does not pass is the awareness the experience arose in.
The addiction is the wave. You are the ocean.
This changes what recovery is about. Most recovery work is framed as becoming someone new: the old self dies, a better self is built. Of course that has value, and nothing here replaces that.
But beneath it sits a different possibility. There is no new self to build, because the self that needed rebuilding was never who you were. Looked at through a non-dual lens, recovery isn’t about construction. It’s about recognising your true Self.
So the next time the mind announces ‘I am craving’, pause. Two lives can arise in one awareness. A craving can too. And the one it arises in has never craved anything.
You don’t have to become someone new. You only have to notice who you always were and will be.
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