Addiction and mind's way of avoiding the anxiety of the unknown

A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2009 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

As simplistic and naive as it sounds, from a creativity perspective, if we pull the string on what we feel, all addictions ultimately arise from a pain of separation. It is a separation from what our creative spirit desires to create and what it is creating as a result of how what our transcendental mind and enculturated mind has come to think and believe. Alternative said, it is the separation between what our heart wants often at its deepest levels and what our mind wants often at its deepest levels That separation, depending on what level of being in which it occurs and as a result of how our inner world is reflected in the outer, then gets translated into a physical experienced primary in our body or primary experienced within the world we experience.

All creative endeavors have an inherent separation which gives rise to the creative tension and the generation of energy for the creative endeavor. Additionally, as a creative endeavor, it is something not previously experienced by our mind. Consequently, our mind has no idea as to how to address what it is we need to do to address the separation and subsequent anxiety we feel. As with any creative endeavor, it is difficult to sit in the anxiety of the unknown and/or to feel the undercurrents of energy pushing us in some way not knowing where they are leading. Many look for ways to calm what they feel rather than sitting in the anxiety of the unknown. However whatever we do the calm what we feel rather than facing the anxiety risk creating a addiction or an addictive response pattern to life.

Our problem is that life itself is a creative endeavor. As such, we will feel some separation or anxiety about life to live life. Although the ultimate pain we face is a pain of separation arise from the creative process that has generated our life, exactly how it arises in us will be unique to each of us. We each are a unique creative being with a different set of life experience and how and what have come to think and believe. As such the way we face the pain of separation and what it feels like to us for the same creative endeavor we undertake as another will be unique.

However, many do feel the pain of separation as either a physical or nonphysical pain. Rather, the separation is felt and experienced more as an anxiety or discomfort. That is, we know at some level of our being we are separate from what we desire and we know what we need to do. That knowing turns the pain into an anxiety. We feel pain when we are in separation and do not know how the address the separation. We experience anxiety when we experience the separate and know what we need to do but we have no idea as to how to go about doing it. Here there is no denial of the separate and what we feel in separation. It is just that we feel anxious at not knowing what to do or there is an anxiety about what we face for we don’t know how to face it. But, as with pain, we can try to numb, suppress or otherwise alleviate the anxiety and that effort can lead to an addiction of some type.

Avoiding the anxiety of the unknown

If we look carefully, what we will come to observe is that we all have a very subtle addiction patterns. We are all addicted to particular habits of the mind that cause us to live the way we live. Most individuals are familiar with addictions to substances that are used to numb the feeling in the body such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, food and the like. Additionally, there is the concept of how our desire for a warm fuzzy feeling can also create addictions. However what is clear is that we also have even more subtle habits of the mind that give the same sort of effect.

In the same way the external substance gives a certain feeling of pleasure that numbs the pain, we have subtle mental patterns that give a certain levels of security and comfort. The subtle patterns numb the anxiety we feel about living life and focusing on the unknown. These subtle mental patterns in effect do exactly the same thing as an addictive substance. Much of our life has had experiences of pain, hurts, disappointments, unfilled expectations, doubt, fears, betrayals, controls on our freedom and a myriad of other thing we find we dislike about life and don’t want to experience. But the future is unknown and we really don’t know what the next moment is going to give us. Hence we fear that the unknown of life will give us more of the same. We fear the unknown and are anxious about what the unknown has to offer.

To avoid the anxiety that can come with the unknown, we retreat to a habit of the mind which give us a warm fuzzy feeling about the future that allows us to think we have life under control. Wee live with the illusion of the mental habit that we will not experience the things that displease us because we are getting a mental high from the habit that is numbing our anxiety. Hence we continue to recreate the past and fail to fully embrace the possibilities of the future. We expect the sun to rise in the morning because the alternative or alternatives become too fearful to the mind. This is the illusion of control. Because we live in our habits we think we are controlling the unknown of the future.

If we look at the overall process of how we live life, we will come to see that addiction and addictive type behavior is what keeps us from accessing our birthright. There are two primary reasons for incarnating and the second follows the first. Our first reason for being here in the physical plane is that there is an intention, a purpose or a set of experiences that we incarnated to have. The second is in accessing this purpose or reason, to use it to claim our birthright to come to the awareness of how we are capable of consciously creating the reality of our choice. If we look at the overall process of how we create our experiences we can begin to see exactly how addictions and addictive type behavior stand in our way.

Our bodies are the perfect vehicle to have these experiences and/or to do what we came to do. We selected our bodies because they fit so well to the experiences we intend. Our inherent body wisdom, that same wisdom that grew us in our mothers womb and grew us from an infant into an adult is perfectly capable of guiding us to fulfill the purpose of our incarnation if we only listen and follow that wisdom. However to do so, requires us to be "out of mind" or beyond mind and we need to allow ourselves to just be with what is and just be who and what we are. It is much the way of a very young child before they learn to control their life to please their caretakers and what the external world expects of them. Most of us have long since lost that ability to just be with what is and who and what we are. More importantly we have lost the ability to listen to our body wisdom. In fact, most individuals have developed mental patterns and habits that allow the individual to think they are listening to their body wisdom when in fact their mind has been always in control and retains control. Mind accomplishes this feat with these mental patterns to mask the heart to give the equivalent of the warm fuzzy feelings.

To be fully present in present in the moment and be fully open to what the body wisdom has to offer in the moment, one has to be able to sit in the anxiety that accompanies the unknown. Most of us have developed mental habits that numb this anxiety long before we realize we are in a mental habit that has removed us from the present moment. As a very young child we wanted the warm fuzzy feeling of being cuddled (or its equivalent). Rather than face the anxiety of the unknown of knowing whether or not we would be wanted or accepted for cuddling, we developed the habit of going to a way of being that gave us the assurance and security that we would be cuddled and we would get our warm fuzzy feelings. Although we grew out of childhood cuddling to some extent (at least some individuals do), we always kept two things. We kept both the desire to have a warm fuzzy feeling and the habit of going to a way of begin that would give us security and remove our anxiousness. Hence we developed a coupling between these two desires and developed an addiction to avoid the anxiety of the unknown and get a warm fuzzy feeling. The particular habit we go to doesn’t matter. What matters is that we avoid sitting in the uncertainty of the unknown by habit. It is the habit composed of not sitting with the anxiety of the unknown and running to some way of being or thinking that is satisfying by giving us whatever we consider a warm fuzzy feeling.

The easiest example to understand how fast this process works is walking. To walk, we must become unbalanced to move forward. So walking is a constant dance between going into and out of balance. Yet we never feel the unbalance. If we feel unbalance we think we are going to fall and we experience "falling" as opposed to "unbalance" because our mind has already raced ahead and brought forward an existing fear (fear of falling) rather than allow us to be present to "unbalance." Our mind already judged the state of unbalance as being a state of falling. Yet ever step we take requires us to be in a state of unbalance. Yet we never allow ourselves to experience the unbalances state or that unbalanced feeling because of the habit the mind has formed to allow us to walk. We never remember the unbalance we felt in our body and in our being in learning to walk because we learned to walk before we become conscious or rather consciously aware.

If we can remember the experience of learning to ride a bicycle we will probably be able to remember the feeling of unbalance we had as we wobbled along. That same feeling was present and is present every time we walk. But we mask the feeling by the mental habit of walking so we feel no unbalance. The mental habit of walking that we developed numbs the unbalance we feel because the mental habit give us the warm fuzzy secure feeling that we know how to walk and will not fall.

This, by the way is true for any task that we learn to do. There is anxiety in the learning process but once we feel we can master what is presented to us, the anxiety is gone but there is always the uncertainty that we will be faced with something we cannot do. Rather than actually experience walking as we walk and the going into and out of balance, we experience the mental habit of walking which actually removes us from experiencing the feelings the body is having. If we always felt unbalance being on a bicycle like when we first learned to ride the bicycle, we would most probably avoid riding the bicycle. However once we have developed a mental habit that allows us to live in the unbalance of movement, we are comfortable and ride the bicycle.

Our mind does the exact same thing with the anxiety of the unknown. Rather than live in present in the moment and face the unknown, we enter a mental habit based on a past activity that gave us a warm fuzzy feeling that we think we know what the future holds and that carries us into the future such that the future becomes the present and we don’t have to have the experience of the anxiety of the moment as the future forms. Yet it is the anxiety of the moment as to which of the infinite possibilities of the moment will form is where we have choice of infinite possibilities. If we are not open to the anxiety of the moment but living within a habit numbing this anxiety we are not open the infinite possibilities that can manifest in that moment and miss the point of creative power. In missing the moment we rob ourselves of our creative power. Hence we become trapped in a habit of the past that we are using to numb the anxiety of the moment.

Related topics
Origins of thinking as an addiction
Point of our creative power
Topics on addiction

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