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 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).

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.
