In Roman law, addiction was the term applied to restitution or punishment for a crime. The convicted criminal was addicted, or bound to servitude or slavery, to their master, the offended party in the criminal case.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Spirit beings, who either choose or become trapped by a fascination with physical matter, become attracted to, attached to, and bound to, or, as Roman law dictates, addicted to, the constraints of such matter. In this case, that concentration of matter is a physical body, our animal form, what we define as a human being. Human beings are spirit beings addicted to being human. Addiction is the price for the “crime” of becoming human. Certainly, this notion has resonance with the plight of Adam and Eve, banished for their crime of human adventure.
Once the addiction sets in, what ensues is lifetimes of spirit (pure consciousness) living, in experiential detail, the full range of physical possibilities associated with inhabiting a material master (the body) or masters (many bodies), as one may reincarnate in a variety of lifetimes in earthly time/space.
Thus, life in the human form becomes one of various permutations of addiction, or compulsive servitude, to the wants and appetites of one’s physical host, the human body. Freedom from addiction would then ultimately require releasing one’s attachment to human form and returning to Oneself, to original spirit wholeness—what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called a Magical Being or Energetic Being—freed from addiction, or fixation upon life in a physical body.
Energetic beings flow. Human beings fixate on all things human. Thus, even the most altruistic, giving, loving human can still be defined as an addict. That kind of addiction might take the form of luxuriating in the good feelings of giving. Perhaps the addiction might also belie an underlying attachment to the self-importance of being a selfless, giving being. Perhaps the addiction might simply be one’s final go-round in time/space, the attachment to saying goodbye and releasing from physical life in this dimension forever.
As with the high failure rate of all addiction rehabs, it’s hard to skip grades in Earth School. Each class generally lasts at least a lifetime, and it must be fully lived and fully completed to truly move on, to really be done with that particular addiction in the human form. In AA terms, one who skips over completion of an addiction becomes a dry drunk, not drinking but still equally addicted to the coveted substance in the form of nasty resentment.
The mastery of an addiction is the completion of one’s course with it. The final exam asks you to answer to your exploration of every facet of the addiction. Does it still hold you in its grip? Are you repressing knowledge of your continued attachment? Can you stare it in the face, smile, and say, “I know you! We had quite a journey together, but, truthfully, we are no longer traveling companions. I wish you the best. I love you, but I must move on now. Thanks for the fullness of our journey together.”
This level of completion advances one to the next class, the next level of fixation in the human form. The addiction might shift from substance to money, from victim to abuser, from moral heights to trickster depths, from straight to gay, or from man to woman, as one’s soul explores and gets to know and fully experience its addiction to all the possibilities in human form. The road to freedom may indeed require lifetimes of habitual patterns on a similar fixation until one becomes really bored, often a sign of true mastery and true doneness.
The process of advancement to Earth School graduation involves spirit’s deepening mastery of its addictions. Mastery ultimately leads to real detachment from the addictive fixation that was chosen as the experience in any given lifetime. Real detachment ultimately includes a complete release of emotional attachment to all things physical.
Thus, one bears, upon completion, no resentment, entitlement, anger, negative thoughts about, judgments toward, or obsession with anyone or anything they have been attached to in their lives. One can be thankful toward all the characters, both villains and lovers, for the full range of experiences shared with them, or acted upon them, in their various lives upon the Earth. In true detachment, the overriding feeling is one of love and compassion for all fellow travelers.
Love is indeed the Alchemist’s gold of Earth go-rounds, harnessed and purified in the addiction retort of a human lifetime. The experiment begins with tumultuous attachment, where love is first encountered in its most possessive animal form, with what we call being born. Non-attachment at this stage in human form results in death via failure to thrive, psychosis—where spirit can’t fully humanize—or psychopathy, where spirit serves shadow alone.
As Freud observed, this humanized primal animal energy slowly becomes sublimated throughout childhood, as spirit advances toward civilization. As recent Senate hearings suggest, the fallout for this is what Jung called the acting out of the shadow, where the imprisoned animal can overtake its civilized ego, and pounce.
For love to advance, and be enhanced, it must travel the path of the energy chakras throughout its various lifetimes, finally reaching the heart chakra, the tipping point toward spirit hegemony in human life. Reaching the heart center signifies the human emergence from the primary narcissism of the lower chakras. At the heart center, spirit is able to burn through the veils of illusion that have been generated by the ego’s journey through power, possession, and control in the lower chakras.
From the heart center, spirit is granted its unique opportunity for existence, and love is experienced in transparent sharing, seeing, and communicating. And, yes, the human sexual animal is fully incorporated at this level, entwined in the fullness of love.
From the level of the heart center, the human spirit is finally ready to lighten the heavy burden of its animal survival instinct. That survival instinct transitions from fixation on animal survival to preparation for finally returning to pure spirit form, the human sojourn in Earth time/space completed.
The chakras above the heart center further raise love to its highest human form, pure unattached love. This enhancement is the product of successfully mourning all the required losses of time/space existence, including family, friends, and all the loved ones and things of this world, most especially one’s animal self, the physical body, which must be freely surrendered to death for spirit to move on.
Completion of addiction to human is the shedding of all special attachment to all of the characters, in all of the lives lived in human form, all equally loved in unattached super love. Absorbing and surrendering this fullness lightens the spirit, advancing it to its true state as a Magical Being, ready to take with it enhanced super love, as it launches into its next journey in infinity, curious as to what comes next.
Now, that’s one worthy reason to suffer the human addiction! To put it succinctly: Curiosity is the spirit’s mother of exploration.
Addiction is the thorough exploration of new territory. Repetition is the technology of addiction. Boredom marks the first signs of completion; depression, the precipitant to actual completion. The technology to emerge from depression is recapitulation. During recapitulation, old attachments are released, and energy reclaimed from those attachments is accrued for the next spirit launch.
With the magic fully gathered, off we go, having enriched that which we explored, taking forward all the love, deeply enriched, deeply curious…
Sweetly suffering the human addiction, and curious,
Chuck
