Addiction does not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.
- Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain.
- Addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.
Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.
- This is the one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future.
- The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear.
As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it.
- As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.
- The pain has become an essential part of you.
To see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be quite a shocking realization.
The moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
- You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.
Re-source: Reshape
If those who are addicted only know how easy it is to access in the Now
- The power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain
- The reality that dissolves the illusion.
- If they only know how close they are to their own reality
- How close they are to God (love)
For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the “pain-body” and mistake them for who you are.
- To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
- Be the stillness underneath the mental noise
- Be the love and joy underneath the pain
- To disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into pain and thus transmute it.
- To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior
- especially the repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego.
“craving and resource from “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle
