more Joan

An addictive habit is an old familiar pattern that we have learned. It happens automatically. Some feeling or thought arises, and suddenly we want a drink, a cigarette, a sexual encounter, or our favorite train of thought (maybe dreaming about what we will someday become, or thinking compulsively about all the ways we've been mistreated and victimized).

And this isn't just a vague take-it-or-leave-it kind of desire. It feels like an irresistible, compelling force. It seems like something we must have or do, like our very survival is at stake. And is some cases, as the addiction progresses, we will do amazing things to satisfy it. We will drive for miles in the middle of the might to buy cigarettes, and we will keep smoking even though we are dying of emphysema. We have to do it. Or so we think and feel.

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The same thing happens with so-called awakening. There are moments of clear seeing, and then the old view comes back and seems to overwhelm us again. Empty, spacious awareness appears to contract back down to the tight little reactive capsule of "me," the character in the story. How does that happen? How does it shift? Is there any choice involved?

This is a question to live with. Watch and see, moment to moment, how these shifts occur, between clarity and mind smog, between freedom and compulsion. Taking the smog personally, or viewing it as an obstacle, is just more smog. Simply be curious about the whole movement--the flip back and forth--see it, observe and investigate it. Don't settle for anyone else's answers. Look for yourself.

To whom do these apparent flips occur? Is there some individual who owns these experiences, who has them? Or is that merely an idea, a mental image, a sensation?

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I was struck with these passages while reading yesterday. They seem to have some keys to unlocking self-limiting beliefs, and instituting self-enhancing ones in their place. And this is a very good thing. Obviously they can come and go, and there is little that I have to do with it other than hanging on to a story about them. The story is much easier to drop from this vantage point.