Post by quinn on Jul 2, 2013 17:41:15 GMT -5
[side note]Just occurred to me that will-power and willingness have the same base.
(all this trying to give up was after decades of convincing myself that it wasn't actually a big problem, I could give up any time, I just chose not to - boy was I wrong about that)
All my rational mind's ideas about how I was not going to do it this time were swept away like dust, every time. I became desperate, and the more I tried to give up, the more intense the compulsions became, and the more desperate I became... it became intolerable
Eventually I became quite exhausted and broken. I realized that I couldn't do it with the rational mind (willpower). I stopped fighting it, and started contemplating life without 'my precious', which was frightening - I actually grieved quite badly. It was then that things started easing up. I can only explain it as grace, because it is not a result of 'willpower'.
There's been much in my life that I can only put down to grace. Losing depression, giving up smoking, giving up alcohol, giving up drugs, letting go of emotional bondages.... I can't claim credit for any of it.
Neuroscience claims that the more dopamine hits you get, the lower your willpower actually is to abstaining from future dopamine hits of from the same source. This is related to the rats in the cage that push the pleasure pedal to the exclusion of food, thereby quite literally 'dying of pleasure'.
I don't hold a belief in volition. The idea that people can do what they want seems ridiculous to me. Reactions (which include a lack of reaction) seem rather obviously to me be a result of conditioning. However, I do feel in most of my activities a 'sense of control'. But I do not believe it is ACTUALLY control.
Just like I see the idea of a personal self as being pretty ludicrous. And yet the sensation of having a self continues to exist. There is an energetic sense of there being 'a me' inside this body (particularly behind the eyes) and a sense of that me making decisions. Still, appearances can be deceptive, eh? :-)
Some things that might well have fed into me abstaining and then recovering from addiction: Doing what I don't want to do, not doing what I do want to do, going on a 'paleo' diet (still on it after 3 months, I have so much more energy), no tea/coffee, exercise, praying, ego work. I only mention these because they are likely contributing factors since I was doing them around the same time.
In the end, we may think 'I gave up' or 'I know how I gave up', but these are things, IMO, that the human mind cannot know. It can only think it knows.
I have also found that it takes some extra thinking to come up with volition. I only see a label that's slapped on what actually happens in order to explain it in some way. And of course, like you say, life presents choices and we pick one. How that choice gets picked, I can't know. And when it comes to something destructive and I keep picking the same one, despite all the consequences... well...even the 'sense' of control is elusive.
I do think, though, that there is some kind of a pull that could maybe be called life wanting to live itself. The same one that fuels seeking. So the desire to stop a destructive habit could be that same pull. Thinking of a plant here, and how it pushes up through the dirt.
You said: "I stopped fighting it, and started contemplating life without 'my precious', which was frightening - I actually grieved quite badly. It was then that things started easing up." Yeah, this is very interesting. We don't talk much about grieving here, but it can be part of letting go. Not always, but probably always when we've held something as 'my precious'. Haha - can't say that without the golum voice, even in my head.
Good stuff, James. Thanks.
