When you are ruled by your compulsions, it can feel like there is a force beyond you acting within you. One who is addicted and one who is possessed by some other kind of force do not look very different – it is the same level of enslavement. So is there another dimension? Let’s understand this – addiction means a certain process of repetitiveness. Repetitiveness means you are going in circles. Being entrapped in any repetitiveness is a horrible crime against your own life. Being a limited human being itself is a crime. In that, being addicted to this or that is the worst crime.

All repetitiveness in the existence is limited only to the physical and the mental. In the body, the genetic process means repetitiveness. This is the reason, the moment someone seriously wants to walk the spiritual path, the first thing is they are asked to forsake their own parents, not because we do not care for them or because they have committed a crime. It is just that if you remind yourself of your genetic origins, you will naturally become repetitive. You will not have a new possibility of life, you will just do what your parents did, maybe a little differently – the clothing and the color will change but the essential scenery will just be the same nonsense. There may be some difference socially but generation after generation, if you look at their life after that generation is gone, all of them have done the same damn things; nothing new. So the body can be repetitive. This is the reason for distancing yourself from your genetic origins.

Mind is also a repetition. It only functions from its archival material. If you take away the archive, it will function as it should – as a plain mirror, just reflecting life for you. But right now, the way the mind functions, it is naturally repetitive because it constantly dwells in the archive. Addictions are essentially of the body and mind.

I would say most of humanity is in deep states of addiction of one kind or the other. Addiction is not just about alcohol, cigarettes, coffee or some other indulgence, it is on much deeper levels. People are even addicted to painful things. Because there is no awareness, it does not matter what it is, you want to cling to something. Many times by chance and sometimes by design, you end up clinging to something or somebody which becomes an addictive process of life.

You are an addiction – addicted to birth and death and all the nonsense that comes with them in-between. Only when you have a de-addiction from the process of birth and death, then you are going straight towards the goal. -Isha Foundation New Zealand