Addiction and Attachment
Addiction is attachment. Addiction is the repetitive seeking out of a certain sensation. This sensation can be sexual, intellectual, emotional, and so on. Thought is sensation, although we don't tend to think of it as such. There is the sensation of hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, smelling, and thinking. All that which the mind is aware of is sensation. Addiction is the search for something the mind has experienced before, repetitively. Addiction comes from a sense of emptiness. To escape this emptiness, one fills one's psyche with different sensations. Yet, any sensation is passing, transient, so satisfaction is never accomplished. That is why addiction is a vicious cycle. Addiction is self-fulfilling. Addiction believes that satisfaction through sensation is the only way to joy. It is unaware of the fact that it enforces itself. It is ignorant to the fact that no sensation can be fulfilling. This also means, the emptiness is not there actually, but created by craving, by addiction itself.
Attachment is the maker of emptiness. There is no such thing as emptiness. Emptiness is a construct of the mind, a mind which is caught in seeking satisfaction. Only a mind which recognizes itself as unsatisfied can feel that sense of emptiness, of lack. Attachment means one values one thing over another. Attachment means a lopsided approach, a skewed perspective. Such a perspective is never stable, whole, so it is perpetually in movement. From this attachment, the matrix of values, arises the possibility for emptiness and lack. It is because the mind is attached to one over the other, that such a mind experiences lack. In reality, no lack is there. Lack is only an experience which is based on a matrix of values, and this matrix is constructed by the mind. The mind deceives itself. Attachment is the game the mind plays, and without awareness of this game, which is ignorance, the mind will always be influenced, induced, stimulated, deceived by its self-constructed values. The freedom from attachment is the awareness of the movement of the mind. When the mind is aware of its own values, its preferences, addictions, then it realizes that it is itself the creator of dissatisfaction. Then, the choice of not playing this game, of not residing in the matrix of values, arises. An unattached mind is a stable mind.
Cover photo by Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash
