=kit063.txt

[ 'SOS' = 'divergent text from the SO SURESNES KIT' ]

[ Skimming only, I find no significant divergence in the Kaivan
KIT 62 text from the SOS KIT 62 text ] *

KIT 63 - Meditation as a Factor in Addiction Reduction

The escalating number of case histories of recovery from addiction
confirm that medication, while undoubtedly effective in reducing
and even removing the physical withdrawal symptoms, most times
leaves the patient high and dry, emotionally deleted, in a kind of
moral limbo. The reason is that a therapy limited to the physical
syndromes fails to address the deep psychological motivations
behind the craving, whether it is alcoholism, drug abuse,
cigarette addiction, masochism, sadism, over-eating, sexual
perversions, or the quest for trance.

These motivations present themselves as an antinomy: on one hand a
need for an emotional high, in the hope that it may lead to access
a more cosmic and transcendental and nobler dimension of ourselves
and indeed of the universe than our commonplace one; conversely an
escape not just from the platitudes of the hum-drum daily routine
of most people and the ensuing low-key emotional attunement
incurred, but from the despair attendant upon the sense of
powerlessness to control one's life in which most people find
themselves jammed.

The same applies to meditation which paradoxically offers the very
complementary therapy to the medical one required for effective
addiction remission. The craving for an emotional drug-free opiate
masks an escape from a sense of inadequacy in dealing with one's
responsibilities.

            For this reason, the Sufis seek an emotional high 'in
life' rather than beyond life by advocating modes of meditation
that aim at awakening in life rather than beyond life. In fact,
the key issue is our desperate need for the sacred, both in and
beyond the universe including ourselves. Failing the fulfillment
of this need, our self-esteem is eroded.

What do we mean by sacredness? An example: one is forcibly aware
of the sacred when one is humiliated: a violation of the divine
status of one's being; the same applies to the outrage aroused in
us when the divine status of others is defiled and profanated.

            Our sense of the sacred is obviously inextricably
linked with our concept of God. One needs to grasp that one's
higher self is coextensive with that aspect of God called in the
Twelve steps the Higher Power. It may be helpful to visualize as a
model: think of radial lines that have an epi-center in common, or
alternately apply the holistic paradigm. Furthermore one needs to
extrapolate between the cosmic and the personal dimension of
oneself (called by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan one's nature in
contradiction to one's character.) 

Since we limit God by our conceptualization of God, it is
important for us to explore how our human psyche actually projects
its experience of the 'superlative' in terms that are meaningful
to it.

The notion of God conveyed by the Unconscious is embodied in the
archetype of the (1 ) nurturing mother: our evolutionary
underpinning, (ii) the archetype of the father: our divine
inheritance, (iii) the archetype of the child within: our
recurrent rebirthing, and (iv) the archetype of the alter-ego: the
universe in its many splendored bounty of those we cherish and
love - enlisting the enriching cross-polinization with 'other than
ourselves'.

            The transference to the actual mother, father, child-
within and partner is most times fraught with fulfillment or
frustration, or both simultaneously. Dependance upon these must in
the very nature of things be followed by severance with the
ensuing sense of loss, or alternately one feels a need to free
oneself from this dependance, in both cases in order to find one's
own self-actuating self whereby one arrives at a healthy mature
relationship with these.

Sufism therefore values both the fulfillment and enrichment
attained by involvement and the invulnerability and overview
gained by freedom from involvement, moreover most particularly
they foster the great art or cross-pollinating between both.

For the Sufis, our need for involvement in life, with people, in
circumstances is the way in which the divine nostalgia works
through/as us to the end of building a beautiful world of
beautiful people. Craving is considered as a distortion of the
divine nostalgia for existentiation where the divine impulse has
been lost to sight. And our need for freedom from dependance upon
the existential underpinning of our lives exemplified in
asceticism evidences the conditioning to the more advanced modes
of the programming of the universe in which we participate by our
incentive in ':fluctuating the orderliness of the universe from a
state of equilibrium" (Ilya Prigogyne) which if perpetrated would
stifle the evolutionary advance. The Sufis illustrate the quest
for freedom as a participation in the divine act of unification
whereby the know-how gained by experience at the existential level
is recycled into the programming of the universe.

Dr. Stan Grof's [ STANISLAV GROF ] research reinforces our hunch
about the pain and sense of loss in the severance and weaning from
the mother, or alternately frustration because of a paucity of
nurturing. Thus frustrated, the child's resort to the father is
obstructed by the fear of ego loss under the constraint of
authority. Moreover to find fulfillment in partnership, the
adolescent needs to attain a certain degree of self-actualization.
Hence the need for dependance therefore is transferred to a
surrogate prop or crutch: alcohol, psychedelic, tranquilizer,
cigarette, otherworldliness that addresses one's need to find a
relief from the strain of taking responsibility by a dalliance
with one's powerlessness that betrays complacency.

When one however comes to the realization through the Twelve Steps
that one is fooling the body and mind by failing to acknowledge
that one's crutch is self-defeating, one is ready to uncover
within oneself the dimensions of one's being from which healing
may be mustered.

The Sufis recognize four dimensions of healing energy:

1)         an earthly dimension which operates a repair process,
restitution to the originally unimpaired state, (homeostasis)

2)         an inner dimension from which a regenerative force
emerges which will revitalize the cells of the body and the
emotions of the psyche

3)         a cosmic dimension from which energy may be availed of
from the environment

4)         a transcendent dimension from which a paradoxical
energy acting as a catalyst releasing latent energy may quicken
one's being in a sudden flash of instant healing (called the holy
spirit)

Let us now examine the four archetypes of the unconscious referred
to earlier, a little more closely and outline the corresponding
meditation practices with a view to explore the manner in which
they may effectively help in the addiction recovery program.

THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE

Our resort to the mother archetype evidences our need to be both
shielded and nurtured owing to our sense of powerlessness and
inadequacy, or at least owing to our sense of the limits to our
personal power or capabilities. Our dependance is compensated by
the quality of dependability embodied in the mother archetype:
reliability, stability against excessive turbulence or
uncertainty. This stability also requires and encourages an
enhanced sense of practicality, the importance of ensuring the
practical underpinning of our enterprises, with the inevitable
quest for material comfort.

Mother earth, nature presents an essential feature ensuring
homeostasis: the tendency for the reinstatement of a state of
equilibrium that has been disturbed, a repair faculty written
right into the system; conditioning, habit-forming which is an
essential factor in learning. By the same token, the disadvantage
of this stability could be excessive conformism, traditionalism,
even fundamentalism; yet paradoxically adherence to traditional
modes of worship safeguards and fosters the attunement to the
sacred in age-old ceremonies.

It follows inevitably that the religious practices enlisting the
importance of the mother aspect of God are embodied in earth
rituals, as that of Persephone, sometimes leading to orgiastic
rites as in the Greek mystery cult of the Menaedes.

Yogis harness this telluric energy in the Kundalini practices
whereby the upward surge of nerve impulses from the bottom of the
spine is fostered. This is called kindling in neurology, reversing
the more usual energy flow of nerve impulses initiated by the will
which generally flows downwards.

            Typical meditations illustrating refuge in the mother
archetypes are achieved by practices enhancing an oceanic sense of
oneness with the environment or the universe at large which the
French poet Rimbaud called 'participation mystique' and described
by the astronaut Gusty Shweikart relating his experience in a
space walk: "You are out there, no frames, no boundaries... your
identity is with that whole thing".

In the Buddhist practice liberation from dependance upon the
physical mental and psychological underpinning of our being is
achieved by clearly distinguishing between the observing self on
one hand and the body, thinking, emotions and psyche,
systematically withdrawing one's identity with these by
considering these as 'other' than oneself and identifying with
pure consciousness; then in a next step withdrawing one's sense of
identity from one's personal consciousness to an impersonal 'I' is
considered as the fundamental illusion. Clearly, by freeing
oneself from the limitations upon one's notion of oneself by one's
dependance upon one's existential underpinning (the mother
archetype), one awakens into one's cosmic identity - not however
to be confused with one's transcendent identity found in the
'Arupajhnas' of Buddhism as in the yogic Samadhi. Therefore it
might be defined as self-transcendence.

In contra-distinction thereto, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
traditions and of course Tantra include the body, and psyche as
integral aspects of our total self but distinguish between those
elements in us that we should reject (the monster) and those that
we may make good use of (the monkey - our ancestral evolutionary
inheritance) but needs to be transmuted (alehem).
[ Note (sa):  SOS 'alchem', meaning I suppose 'alchemy' ]

THE FATHER ARCHETYPE

The quest for the father archetype fulfills the need to discover
the archetype of which one is the exemplar; and hence evidences
our innate hunch regarding transcendence which the French
mathematician Henri Poincar describes as our intuition that there
always is a number greater than the greatest number we have
envisioned so far and this in infinite regress. The same applies
to time and space and accounts for our sense of perfection.

The practices illustrating the quest for the father archetype
envisioned as 'beyond the beyond' are typically embodied in the
Yogic search for Samadhi: that is awakening beyond the existential
realm by unmasking the hoax of our mind-games, that is upgrading
the commonplace conditioning of our middle-range thinking by
substituting a more sophisticated software (Patanjali) exhibiting
cosmic and transcendental dimensions more in keeping with the
thinking of the universe. Rather than taking for granted that one
awakens out of the sleep perspective into diurnal (day)
consciousness, Shankaracharya advocates awakening out of the
perspective of diurnal consciousness first into the dream
perspective (orthodox sleep), then into deep sleep (paradoxical
sleep) where the object of consciousness whether perceptual or
imaginary has fallen out of focus. Consciousness evacuated of its
content evaporates, giving vent to the awakening of intelligence
which is actually the ground or seed-bed of consciousness.

It offers direct access to the thinking of the universe without
reference to its actuation in existential experience. One
discovers that if for example the physicist is able to make sense
of the programming of the universe, it is because human thinking
is isomorphic and co-extensive with (that is of an identical
nature with and holistically enmeshed in) the thinking of the
universe. Isaac Newton said: "I think after God's thinking". This
is transcendence, not to be confused with self-transcendence
encountered in Vipassana where consciousness has spilled beyond
the boundaries of the notion of the self, but has not petered out.

Typical involvement in the father archetype may be found in people
who have difficulty in taking responsibility and need to be guided
or enjoy being dominated, even sometimes by a despot (which
accounts for typical political incongruities), also in quite a few
cases of guru worship. This may equally be encountered in
excessive value or credulity attached to belief systems based on
religious authority or institutions. God is looked upon as
irascible, fate as irrevocable. The result is fatalism and the
down-play of personal initiative.

The father archetype appears thus as threatening to the ego will.
This inevitably manifests in resentment for authority and a
defiance of orderliness; one dethrones the father. The result is
slackness, slovenliness, permissiveness, even unruliness,
hooliganism, culminating in a lack of self-respect. However a
Higher Power is yielded to when there is no alternative, when
every effort of one's incentive has failed. This spells surrender
- the return of the prodigal son.

By some sardonic paradox, that which ventured to challenge the
divine will (ascribed to fate), avers itself to be one's
vulnerable puffed-up display of masquerading personal power,
actually masking one's fear of exposing one's inadequacy under the
smoke screen of addiction. (Tav Sparks). This personal evaluation
of one's inadequacy, vulnerability and fallibility is based upon
one's having convinced oneself that one is powerless to control
one's life. Both assessments are of course relatively fallacious
because based upon (i) one's failing to grasp what is being
enacted behind one's problems and (ii) one's identifying with
one's personality rather than grasping the cosmic ground of one's
being attained in the appropriate meditation (iii) one's looking
at things from the personal vantage point rather than (a)
extending one's consciousness into its cosmic dimension or (b)
awakening beyond the act of consciousness into the realization
grasped by the act of intelligence attained in the transcendental
modes of meditation.

When confronted, the Trojan horse of one's make-believe and self-
deception sustained by the illusion meted out by the drug admits
to having been a ploy. When fully broken down this subterfuge will
yield to an awakened respect for the sovereignty of the
orderliness behind the programming of the universe manifesting as
the divine operation in one, embodied right into one's own higher
will.

Resolution may be arrived at by integrating one's personal ego
personality with the ground of one's personality which the Sufis
ascribe to one's divine inheritance. We have difficulty in
achieving this because of the obvious incompatibility between the
splendour of our eternal self and the inadequacy and sometimes
paucity of our personal idiosyncrasies. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
addresses this need "to reconcile the aristocracy of the soul with
the democracy of the ego".

Moreover resolution may be attained by availing oneself of the
virtues of passive volition, that is letting the divine operation
have its way while at the same time asserting one's will. This
would tally with Dr. Ilya Prigogine's 'f1uctuating the equilibrium
of the orderliness behind the universe", rather than 'doing one's
own thing' without regard for that orderliness, like a
yachtsperson or hang glider pilot harnesses the wind to the
pursuit of his/her objective. The art of achieving this consists
in clearly discerning the difference between the personal
dimension of one's will and a more cosmic and sovereign dimension
of that very will. This is mastery rather than just stubbornly
forcing one's will upon situations willy-nilly.

It would also mean extrapolating between the perspective of
awakening beyond life with that of awakening in life, that is
transcendence with the oceanic feeling of being holistically
enmeshed with all things. Ideally this would mean being clearly
aware of the nature of the physical phenomena surrounding one and
experienced in the very cells of one's own body, and equally of
the reality of the circumstances and situations affecting not just
oneself, but humanity, in fact, aware in the global environment at
large while at the same times grasping what is enacted behind the
scenario of life, intuiting what is the programming behind the
events, letting the thinking behind the universe transpire in
one's thinking as in Samadhi, while grasping the values at stake,
the personal issues involved, unmasking the mind games and guile
and sham.

THE ARCHETYPE OF THE CHILD WITHIN

The child within proves to be our saving grace when alone in
suffering from a poor self-image, we pine over our profligation.
When confronting ourselves in all truthfulness our acknowledgement
of guilt may lead to a sense of having profanated and the child
within. This is a frequent occurrence in alcohol and other addicts
and appears irreversible, The converse may well occur: namely the
feeling of having been defiled by an inappropriate act of another
person upon one, as in the case of rape.

There seems to be in psycho-therapy a tacit assumption that in
these cases the child within has been damaged. Attention needs
however to be drawn here to an analogy: the voice of Caruso which
was very badly distorted by the bad technology of the time can
today be retrieved owing to our high technological advances. This
points to the fact that the voice is still there within its
distortions, even as eddies on the surface of a lake maintain
their integrity even though intermeshing in wave-interference
patterns.

Here lies the saving grace of the child within against our self-
made sense of opprobrium. The child within is still there
unscathed, covered under unteemed sheaths marked by the spill-over
wreaked upon us by our adaptation to the environment, also the
mortgage of our maturity.

To earmark the child within, we need to peel off the accumulated
sheaths just like in order to retrieve the voice of Caruso, sound
technicians had to reverse the distortions. This would mean owning
up to dishonesty, thus opening up to public blame, giving up any
contrivance to use guile in self-interest, thus appearing ingenue
to our smarter fellows, eschewing any feelings of dislike or
hatred for people who may well be obnoxious.

We may discover this archetype still present in the depths of our
being in the clear eyes, the innocence, the propensity for
compassion, the trustingness of a child. This may encourage us to
trust ourselves to make a fresh start, from scratch as it were,
make a pledge** that opens a new chapter in our lives. 

Our spiritual legacy eulogizes the child archetype as being
immaculate, exemplified in the immaculate state of the Virgin
Mary, or the mother of Buddha or of Zoroaster.

The Sufis ascribe it to our celestial counterpart or subtle
bodies, and Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan describes the quintessential
core of our psyche as a mirror that can never be tarnished by the
impressions upon it. 

The meditation practices aiming at the discovery of the child
within consist in learning how to turn within. As we hold our
breath after inhaling as we withdraw our attention from the
environment and in addition our psyche, we discover the emergence
of a fresh blossoming of qualities trying to break through in our
personalities - a rebirthing. Moreover discover a fresh
dispensation of vitalizing energy that dynamizes the cells of our
body and our minds.

Of course the child in us needs to grow up to maturity: in the
existential drama, the angel becomes the master. Therefore at
puberty the adolescent sheds off the child in him/her like the
snake of its skin because the paucity of the child's
discrimination makes him/her badly adapted to the challenge of
real life. Here lies the moral of the Parsival legend. To mark the
passage from the angel to the master, he sins: he kills the swan -
the symbol of the immaculate. For this he is banished - he has to
learn to discriminate between that which is appropriate or not;
but his encounter with the very epitome of evil in the Queen of
the night brings him back to the father archetype represented by
the Grail temple, not just as the prodigal son, but the hero, the
knight, the controlling master.

The way to get control over our fate where we previously felt
powerless is therefore fraught with the overcoming of whatever it
is in us that causes our devalidation of ourselves and which we
are trying to escape in addiction.

Resolution between involvement in and weaning from the child
archetype is illustrated in the combat between Jacob and the angel
until as the light dawned upon him, he realized the angel was his
celestial counterpart, his own higher self which he was not owning
up to.

Resolution once more requires extrapolating between the effigy of
the child within and that of the master envisioned as two
superimposed images, both bearing a striking resemblance, yet one
being a distortion of the other.   

The corresponding meditation practices consist in a catharsis,
exemplified for example in the 'theosis' of the Hesichasts. It is
a kind of cleaning out of one's thoughts and emotions, working
with one's aura of light while identifying increasingly with one's
celestial counterpart thus purified.

THE ARCHETYPE OF THE ALTER-EGO

The need for involvement with 'other than oneself' whether in a
personal relationship or partnership in general or with nature or
the universe at large evidences the virtue of discovering oneself
in another oneself who is better able to actuate the qualities
lying dormant in oneself than one has achieved so far. Plotinus
said: "That which one fails to discover in contemplation, one
seeks to experience outside oneself." Hence the perennial quest
for the alter-ego - anima of one's animus, or the animus of one's
anima.

Moreover the latent resourcefulness lying dormant within the
seedbed of one's psyche emerge by being called upon to meet the
challenge from 'outside'. Hence the need to achieve in life in
one's partnership with others.

It ensues that one's self esteem is precariously poised upon
proving oneself to oneself and particularly to others. One becomes
overly susceptible to criticism, and most vulnerable.

The outcome is inevitably dependence whether material or emotional
and if one is not a match for the ego of the partner,
condescendence, that is an over-transference of one's ego in
another ego to the extent of enjoying self-validation by
satisfying the needs of the other. This is tantamount to becoming
dependant upon the dependance of another upon oneself.

It is the quest for liberation from dependance that prompts the
ascetic, the hermit (in India the Sannyasin to leave the world,
abandon possessions, seek the solitude, practice austerity by
subjecting him/herself to severe discipline, emancipate
him/herself from the susceptibility of personal emotions in order
to become invulnerable - pursue peace rather than joy with its
mortgage of pain. The consequence is aloofness, remoteness, the
introspective mode.

What would be the resolution in an effort to reconcile these two
irreconcilables? There is a saying of the Sufis: "Renounce the
world, renounce yourself, then renounce renunciation out of love".
The challenge would then consist in involving oneself with people
and circumstances without letting oneself become emotionally
dependant, loving irrespective of whether or not one is loved,
unconditional love, that is loving a person who makes him/herself
most unlovable. A good example of the actual application of this
resolution would be interdependence rather than dependance - self-
actualization in a creative way while networking, sharing. This
would require triggering off in others one's vision of perfection
which was virtually present in them although they may not have
been aware of it.

A further resolution would consist in extrapolating between the
knowledge gained by experience with the intuitive insight gained
by turning within. This is achieved by learning by doing, acting
upon the environment, or circumstances to confirm one's hunch,
rather than merely interpreting occurrences, active looking:
casting one's glance upon things rather than using one's eyes
merely as passive organs of perception.

The corresponding meditation consists in filtering out the grosser
and deleterious impressions from 'outside', sublimating that is
distilling those that are somewhat compatible with the subtle
effigy of one's being. Moreover rather than trying to reinstate
one's Pristine celestial state, brainstorm the way one wishes to
be and what is more transfigure the effigy thus fashioned into the
body of resurrection.

A further meditation practice consists in cultivating qualities
present in oneself in an embryonic state by exploring their
relevance with dealing with problems. Meditation thus avers itself
to be a rehearsal for life.

=================================================================
    
* I have cross_checked this Kaivan KIT 62 against the SOS KIT 62
only by skimming the starts and stops of the paragiraffe (1), not
by reading the sentences.

** SOS has 'ledge' instead of Kaivan 'pledge'
Again, this suggests that SOS is an earlier draft than Kaivan