Creativity and thinking addiction

A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2009 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

From a creativity perspective, the addiction that will most interfere with our unlimited creativity is thinking addictions. Thinking addiction has it roots in thinking not tied into awareness, intuitive guidance and presence. Here presence means being able to live in the moment a that point of creative power and being fully mindful and awareness to see what the intuitive guidance and body wisdom present to the mind before mind jumps in and judges, biases or otherwise changes the information presented.

Thinking that does not lead to addictions is where our thinking tends to response to our body wisdom and intuitive guidance because body wisdom and intuitive guidance arises from our information systems that span the reaches of infinitely. In needs to be remember that our body represents the localization of our creative spirit and its energy permeates all of reality. It is connected to all that is and in this interconnectedness it has an awareness of all that is. It is our connection with the Source of our Being and All That Is. It is our spiritual connection. It is our pathway to our Higher Self, that portion of our being that has not incarnated and localized in our body. Body wisdom and intuitive guidance has access to infinite knowledge and wisdom. Said another way, non disembodied or embodied thinking is where our thinking responds to their intuitive guidance and tracks and follows the intuitive guidance as the primary focus and not what the mind thinks. One is capable of being out of mind yet fully present to mind and what it thinks and sees.

Thinking that causes addictions is best described as disembodied thinking, that is thinking not tied to our body and its wisdom, and there are two ways we create disembodied thinking. One is to believe one is an observer separate from the creation as opposed to being a detached witness. The other is where the mind is separated from the heart and our body sensations and that occurs whenever one allows a habit or our nonconscious programming to determine our actions as opposed to being mindful and aware of our choice of actions.

Addictive thinking is left brain thinking that doesn’t utilize the whole brain and the body. It does not integrate the right brain, the body and its body wisdom and intuitive guidance. It is here where the detached witness is most essential. The detached witness can stand back and see what the left brain is thinking, judging and analyzing and it can see what the right brain and body wisdom and intuitive guidance are say. The detached witness can then create the space for the left brain to air its concerns and judgments but move to implement and act on what the body wisdom and intuitive guidance are providing. In this regard, emotions and body sensations are part of if not key to ending the addictive process. If one does not and cannot feel their emotions and body sensations in all that they do and think they will foster disembodied thinking and create conditions for a thinking addiction in their response to whatever it is they are experiencing.

Thinking addiction goes back to the tree of knowledge of the Book Of Genesis. Thinking and our thinking process is what has taken us out of the Garden of Eden and out of that Kingdom of God here and now. Thinking separates things out into pieces and such that we do not look at the whole and what is the whole process is providing. Rather we stay focused in our knowledge and viewing reality in pieces and separate parts. In doing so it causes us to jump or shift from one thinking addiction to another. That is one thinking response or pattern to another. If one approach of mind does not work we try another. We are not taught to stop to see what we feel and what our body wisdom and intuitive guidance have to say about what is being experienced and then act on that information. Rather we are taught to distrust, neglect or deny body wisdom and intuitive guidance.

Thinking addiction arise from a response to life and we have a variety of different circumstances in which to respond. We have developed different addictive patterns never realizing how they are related because of how we compartment ourselves and fragment our thinking. So when we are faced with one addictive pattern not working to numb what we feel, we simply jump to one of the others we have created. This becomes a significant problem because the shifting and jumping itself becomes an addictive pattern and becomes an addiction itself. Rather than being able to keep focused on anything we choose, our mind continually jumps from one pattern to the next until it is successful in breaking our focus. It is how mind reinforces its ability not to change.

When we are living in alignment with our creative life energy and creative living process we will get information from our body wisdom and intuitive guidance. When we don’t follow this information we will get another opportunity to follow it but it will cost more and become more difficult to trust and to follow. It is much like following a small brook that we have to cross. We are given the opportunity to step across the brook when it is extremely small and it is not too different than taking any other step in life. If we don’t step across the brook, in time the brook becomes a stream that one must jump across. If we fail to jump the stream becomes a creek that we must wade across. Again if we fail to cross the stream, it becomes a river that one must swim across or begin to think about using a boat. If we don’t cross the river it becomes a lake and we now have to have some type of boat and if we fail to cross that lake, it becomes an ocean and now we need a boat big enough to endure an ocean voyage. The symbolism of the water is not lost here. The water is simply the amount of emotion we will have to process to cross. The longer we wait the greater the emotional content to process. For many rather than consciously processing what needs to be processed, the nonconscious creates an illness, accident or disease that requires medical intervention. Yet often the illness, disease or accident is not recognized for the addictive behavior that it is. What lies at its root, namely the addictive behavior that causes one to deny the flow of the creative life energy creating a void that can only be filled by the illness. Here the focus becomes treating the medical problem and/or the external causes the like the substances abused, the pathogen causing the illness, or correcting the accident situation so it won’t happen again.

Because of how most of us are educated, most of us are trained into a thinking addiction and process. In particular we are taught how to control and to think and analyze as opposed to learning how to live in the spontaneity of our intuitive guidance. When we slip into the illusion of control, that we believe we are in control of what we experience, we have slipped into the illusion of our addiction for we are denying what we are seeing and feeling. Any time any system, or any person is in the illusion that they can control what they experience is by definition an addictive system. As discussed in the topic "Addiction, avoiding the anxiety of the unknown," it was said there was an the illusion of control because we live in our habits we think we are controlling the unknown of the future.

The illusion of control exists for two reasons. One is that mind is limited and anything that happens if on an infinite dimension with an infinite number of interconnections so it an illusion to think a finite mind controls infinity. The second is if one is in mind trying to control, it is not open to its body wisdom and intuitive guidance which has access to the infinite. To access the body wisdom and intuitive guidance we must surrender and be willing to step out of mind and live in the moment. We can do that is we are living a habit or an addictive pattern.

It needs to be realized body wisdom and intuitive guidance are instantaneous and cannot be controlled. They will change from moment to moment as the energy it is sensing changes. They arise naturally in response to the environment in which one finds themselves. Similarly, the universe does quite well without our presence and will do quite well without us in the future. We are not going to control the world around us. We cannot control what we actually experience. We can control what we perceive. We can manipulate that which we become aware, but we can’t control the raw material out of what all arises. To think we can control the thoughts we have we are in denial for we cannot control the body wisdom and intuitive guidance and the control we think we have is an illusion.

One of the greatest illusion of control is that we can control our ego and who and what we think we are and should be. Our egos are always changing as a result of each experience we have. To think it is fixed is an illusion and to think we know who the ego is is an illusion. Yet we all have an idea of what we should be like. We all have a way we should be. We have an illusion of the perfect us and illusion of perfectionism of what the "perfect" us looks like. This "perfect" us is a construct of all that ideas and expectation of others that we try and fit into. Everyone who wants us to be other than who we are has added to our belief about who we need to become whether we realize it consciously or not.

Perfectionism is defining ourselves in the way we like and the way we should be and then focusing on fitting into the definition we ourselves have created. However the definition we give ourselves, is always too small and always will be. We are beings of infinite being and infinite dimensions most of which we have not consciously experienced while in our human form. So any definition we give to define ourselves will be incomplete and inadequate. Even to say we are infinite creative beings with a unlimited creativity does not do justice to who and what we are. We believe we can fit ourselves inside the definition we have created and which satisfy our parents, the society, our friends, our children, our spouses, ourselves and whoever they think we should be for it is from them we get our ideas of who we need to become to be "perfect." Who we think we are and who we think we should be has nothing to do with reality.

In this regard, thinking addictions is a very circular type thinking. We create an idea of how things should be and then continually go around and around trying to make things fit into this concept we have. However if we are open to our feeling and are accessing our body wisdom and intuitive guidance we can actually use this circular patter to grow and expand well beyond our wildest dreams. However if we are disembodied in our thinking, it is only an addictive patter that keeps up bound. In addition to projecting an image of who we think we are on ourselves, we projection similar type images on others and the world we experience and this projecting externally is just as addictive as projecting internally. Projecting our opinion, our idea of how things should be on somebody else or projecting our understanding of how things are working into a situation that is not real. We do this all the time with our explanation of how the universe works but we really never pay attention to what is real and what truth is valid any where, any time, any place. It is really no different than giving ourselves an identity that is an illusion. The identity we give anything in the external world, including the world itself, and how we think it works is just a great illusion. Then again, it doesn’t matter as long as our thinking is not disembodied or embodied. It is only when we separate ourselves and our thinking that we create our problems.

Then of course we move into dualistic thinking, judging one way right or wrong that only reinforces the illusion we already created. It serves as a way to protect our illusion from every being revealed for what they are, simply illusion crated by our mind and not necessarily in any way reflective of reality.

In working to deal with the addictive patterns we have created, especially our thinking addiction is to change who and what we think we are. It means to step out of mind and the mind we have created. It requires a surrender to the flow of our creative life energy and our intuitive guidance and body wisdom. One of the things we can change is ourselves but we cannot change by the control of the mind. We can’t control the change by mind for changing by control means we are going to have to use the mind but the mind is an addictive pattern. The problem we face in changing is that anytime any person thinks they can control they are in an addictive system by definition. Remember to be in control is to be in the mind and the mind will not allow itself to lose control so we will not change. To think we are going to control how we are going to change is just another addiction we put ourselves into and one cannot change themselves by thinking for the addictive process of thinking is in control. If we are trying to change ourselves to get out of the addictive process by control we are not going to do so. Our body wisdom and intuitive guidance however can guide us through transformation if we surrender to it, but we are not going to control it.

Transformation requires sacrifice both internally and externally. As long as we see the transformation we must make internally and externally as separate from the recovery process we will not recover from using addictive patterns. We may change the pattern and substitute another pattern, but we will continue to deny who and what we are in some way. Only transformation will create a permanent solution. However if we don’t attempt to recover in some way, we will never recover because we have to see ourselves with that addictive pattern to be able to recover. What needs to be understood to heal or step out of our addiction is we have to transform ourselves and how we respond to life itself. To do so we have to find some new way of being to utilize the creative life energy we bring back or call back as we leave the addiction for the addiction is denying a part of our creative life energy. The transformation of our identity and our life is not separate from the recovery from a addiction. The issue is not recovery but transformation. Transformation of our thinking and our being. But as said above to recover or transform, one needs to recognize they are in an addictive behavior and any thinking addiction will be hard to recognize for as said before, one can learn to jump between the different addictive responses for mind to remain in control.

Related topics
Origins of thinking addiction
Topics on addiction

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