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By addiction I mean the ritual process of repeating an act over and over in hopes of an outcome of transcendence that creates transformation. Yet this ritual does not fulfill its objective. The addictive process usually manifests through consumptive behaviors like: eating, spending, taking drugs, drinking alcohol, gambling, and sexual behaviors. Always the process and the result are the same: the addict is given a taste of transcendence, but after a while the taste becomes bitter, and the life of the addict takes on the religious dimension of a devotee or priest. The addict / priest perform the ritual, or addictive process, in response to the inner longing for transcendence. He cooks up the heroin in the spoon, transfers the liquid to the syringe and then piercing his vein, injects the drug into his blood stream. He is moved within by the spirit of the heroin – the opiate. A chemical process occurs in the brain. He is altered. This transcendence is fleeting. And the transformation the addict truly sought never comes, no matter how many times he tries. What comes is emptiness and despair, which triggers the cycle to repeat itself once again. Let’s consider addiction and Wall Street. If we apply the notion of the addictive process as having a religious component (the Latin root of the word religion is “religare” which means “to bind”), then the addict is seen to be bound to the ritual of their addictive process, just as a priest, or religious cleric is bound to his Eucharist, or religious sacrament. With Wall Street we have the trading pits, which can be imagined as sacred spaces where the traders (priests of the economic god) practice their religion. Just as the religious cleric follows the religious calendar, so does the trader. As the trading day begins with the sound of the bell, the rite is initiated. Soon the trader is swept away by the spirit of the floor. All of the traders are captured by the autonomous life of the economic god who erupts and diminishes in the ritual process of the market. When does this become addictive? When the trader sees the trading as a transformational experience, and treats it (unconsciously) as a god. The spirit of the trading ritual lifts the trading into an altered state. His mood is altered. When he is ahead, he is blissful – in a Jungian sense he is “inflated” with a type of grandiosity, a god-sized pleasure, and power. When he is behind, or down, he is inflated again - this time in a grandiose, god-sized displeasure (pain). The trader sustains the ritual process to return to the earlier state, to regain his losses: psychic and monetary. This is the essence of addiction: the first taste of the drug, or process, gives the addict a transcendent moment, but it doesn’t last. So he attempts it again. Once reached, he experiences a sense of power and is invincible; then he crashes again, only to repeat the process again, and again, and again. He experiences fortune and lost fortune – and all that goes with it: broken relationships, broken health, broken soul. It is my opinion that addiction is only possible in our culture because we are estranged from the sacred. Primitive peoples lived with a sense that “all things are filled with gods” (Euphrates) – all things are alive, animate. Descartes came along and declared this not to be so. His perspective stated only humans have soul. All other things are inanimate – without soul. With the establishment of this belief, we lost our connection to the sacred. Hence we lost connection everywhere because it is the sacred (or divine) that animates all life. Today we live in a ubiquitous estrangement from everything and everyone. This is the root cause of all psychological suffering. The addictive process is a ritual attempt that arises from the depths of soul, spontaneously seeking to reconnect with the sacred it is longing for. One could call this a “holy longing.” This longing is meant to be fulfilled so individual and collective soul is made anew – transformed. In primitive cultures, the ritual process of “initiation” – the “process of dying and being born again” (Moore, p. 78, The Archetype of Initiation, 2001) was a natural part of living. Our current culture has lost this process. Hence addiction is the symptom that reveals this loss, and at the same time attempts to get this need met. Because we live in the Cartesian way, in denial of the existence of the sacred, we humans have developed into a self-centric / individualist culture. “My needs” take priority. My need, or hunger, is archetypally insatiable – as these needs are not my needs, in the ego centric sense – but I am identified (on an unconscious level) with an insatiable hunger. This collective hunger has created massive consumption – we have become a culture of consumers. This consumerism has become our religion, our cultural addiction. Today we live utterly out of touch with the sacred in the world and in ourselves – and so we eat the world in every imaginable way. We can imagine the consumer/addict as a devotee of a religion. The unconscious consumer goes to the mall with a holy longing to connect. The mall holds the treasures from the sacred: deep within the psyche of the consumer is the program (an archetypal knowing). The consumer searches the mall with his talismans (credit cards). We could also consider there is a thing in the mall that actually calls (in the animistic sense) to the consumer to find it. A shirt; the shirt announces itself to the consumer’s imagination. He must have it. It wants him. The purchase is made. The object is taken home. It is worn several times. After a time the consumer gets bored with it. Eventually, it hangs lonely in his closet. Then the ritual is repeated again. Find a new shirt and go through the experience again, and again. What the consumer doesn’t know is that the shirt - all shirts, all things - have spirit (are numinous). In that we don’t imagine this way, we don’t consider the shirt as alive. Rather it is dead in the Cartesian sense - inanimate. If we did imagine it alive, as primitive peoples would, we would have an active relationship with the shirt. A primitive people may have one cloak, or cup, or bowl. They may pass those objects down multiple generations. They do this because those items are alive with numinousity - sacred. We don’t think like this. We call this type of thinking childish or superstitious. In our self-centricism we have become “knowers.” This is the evolution of the empirical or scientific way we imagine life. We may say that the primitive people’s way of imagining was mythic. I would propose that science is a myth also; and facts, or empirical data, are the elements of this myth, whereas gods were the elements of the primitive’s mythology. In our science we have unfaltering faith. This is a religious move also. When I speak of our estrangement from the sacred, another way of considering is our disconnection with our own personal “inner” world, what psychology would call the unconscious. Estranged from the sacred we don’t listen to our own interior souls. However, it let’s us know it is there by emotional states and moods such as guilt, fear, anger, sadness, etc. But unless we are in some type of acute psychic pain, we usually don’t pay a great deal of attention to it. Our culture teaches us to take a pill because we “haven’t got time for the pain.” We have an inner stirring that we experience as unpleasant. Rather than pay attention to this inner discomfort and explore its origin, we distract ourselves from it by reaching for something to eat, or something to do. After a while of not paying attention to the unconscious, we start to have symptoms. Symptoms are the volume going up from the soul which is trying to get our attention. Some of the most common soul symptoms are depression and anxiety, as well as somatic problems. We could consider these symptoms as the sacred calling to us to pay attention. But because we have lost contact with the sacred, we don’t understand the language of the symptom. Rather we seek relief of our symptoms. And our empirical scientific mythology has us treating the symptom rather than the cause. We work harder; drink a little more; reach for an extra helping of carbohydrates; buy a lottery ticket, etc. In each instance we are moving from our inner discomfort to get relief. We may experience relief, but this gives the addict the sense that he has some control over his world, which then reinforces and perpetuates the addictive process. An example is an addict who ingests his substance or engages his process, beginning with the ritual. The addict’s inner world responds with an adjustment, giving him a sense he has controlled his inner world. For a time he experiences transcendence from his former state of discomfort and meaninglessness. Here the substance acts as a bridge to the interior world. But the bridge is flimsy. It is not built from a conscious, deliberate intention, as with a mystic. With the addict the connection is accidental, coming from an egocentric move to avoid desperation. Jung’s idea of the ego-Self axis, developed further by Edward Edinger offers us a valuable way to consider addiction. Emanating from the archetypal Self structure, flowing down the axis to the ego, is raw psychic energy. This is the force that animates humans into existence. Primitive cultures imagined in this way. Hence their spiritual practices were a means of regulating this incoming energy. An addict, on the other hand, opens up a channel, and is often flooded with psychic energy. Sometimes this is experienced as pleasant. But eventually, unregulated, the addict is overcome with flooding that impairs their ability to function. Finally, for the purposes of this beginning, I want to note the Rule of Law and how it is applied to addiction in our culture. It seems to me the Rule of Law is over relied upon in our culture. It is applied to every known ill. This is true with addiction. There is a “War on drugs.” Laws and statutes are heroic efforts to try to control the hunger or demand that appears in our culture as addiction. The Law and Medicine (science) imagine addiction as a disease, or a moral problem. Both disciplines attempt to eradicate this ill from their own paradigms. My sense is that addiction is a spiritual problem and can only be properly treated from that point of view. Our cultural over reliance on the Rule of Law, and science, is reflective of the self-centric culture that places emphasis on ultimate control. This is a grandiosity, as it makes the ego a god which then lays the foundation for addiction, as well as other cultural suffering. © 2006, Gary Shunk garyshunk@sbcglobal.net
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