Handbook To Higher Consciousness
Chapter 19
How To Recognize Your Addictions


Chapter 19

How To Recognize Your Addictions

Since the Living Love Way to Higher Consciousness is based on gradually eliminating your addictions, it is most important that you learn to automatically spot them in your moment-to-moment flow of consciousness. A year contains 31,536,000 seconds each of which offers you an opportunity to grow in consciousness. How fully you benefit from these thirty-one million opportunities is up to you.

You can recognize an addiction by your awareness that your biocomputer is using emotional programming to make you irritated, angry, jealous, confused, tired, bored, defeated, fearful, resentful, or upset in one way or another. Once you are well on your way to reprogramming your more gross addictions, you may then become aware of your subtle addictions. A subtle addiction does not get you upset emotionally — but with a subtle addiction your consciousness is preoccupied with the addiction for a period of minutes, hours, or days.

We may kid ourselves that we are thinking profoundly and continually about a subject, but we’re actually churning away most inefficiently and ineffectively — and diverting energy and consciousness that could be more optimally used. As you grow into higher consciousness, your here-and-now broad-channel perception and your relative freedom from having your consciousness dominated by addictions will intuitively give you the wise and ef- fective answer to any problem. As you work toward the higher levels of consciousness, you will find that thinking (juggling words, hypotheses and ideas centering around a problem) is usually not the way to find the optimal solution to your problems. A free, undominated awareness that is highly attuned here and now to the people and situations around you will best enable you to benefit by the wisdom that is waiting to be tapped in your biocomputer. Your problem is to get at the wisdom that you already have — but which is now inaccessible due to your security, sensation and power-dominated consciousness.

One of the obstacles we must overcome to grow into higher consciousness is the Spiritual Lawyer phase. When we first begin our journey and really see the job of reprogramming that awaits us, our ego will experience a threat because of a necessity to change certain lifetime habits that keep us on lower consciousness levels. But then once the ego gets familiar with the rules of the game, it learns how to distort these rules so that we can rationalize our avoiding the Twelve Pathways and other tools for consciousness growth.

Let us suppose that you annoy yourself when someone asks you to repeat something you just told him. Your ego puts your consciousness on the power level by introducing the thought that if the other person had given you enough of his attention and realized the importance of your words, he would have been able to hear you clearly the first time. Your ego then tells you that it is important that the other person learn to respect you enough to pay attention when you speak. You are showing your irritation in order to help him develop better habits of attention. Your ego at that time does not permit you to remember that your uptightness is a sure sign of an addiction (in this case a power addiction) and that you are creating duality and alienation between yourself and the other person. All of us from time to time ask people to repeat what they have said. And so the other person is just doing something that all of us have often done. If we were responding from the Love Center of Consciousness, we would feel no irritation — and simply repeat the information asked for.

waste what you do have

Your ego may find that it can continue to operate as usual and protect the Power Center of Consciousness by twisting some of the Pathways. During the very moments when your curt tones are creating alienation and separation because you are treating another person as different from yourself, your ego can be telling you that you’re really doing the other person a favor by giving him a chance to use the Third Pathway: I welcome the opportunity (even if painful) that my minute-to-minute experience offers me to become aware of the addictions I must reprogram to be liberated from my robot-like emotional patterns.

Your ego might even summon up the Twelfth Pathway to justify the duality that you are producing by telling you that you are an awakening being who is here to teach your friend to listen more consciously to your words of wisdom. But, of course, this should be seen as a distortion of the Twelfth Pathway. This Pathway does not place on you the burden of playing God for the benefit of other people! Rather, it tells you, I am perceiving everyone, including myself, as an awakening being who is here to claim his or her birthright to the higher consciousness planes of unconditional love and oneness. You love and serve an awakening being by doing what he or she asks you to do. If someone asks you to repeat something, you repeat it. In other words, you treat him as a being who is here to help you become aware of your addictions and get free of them. You avoid letting your ego pump you up into a pseudo-guru who is authorized to dominate or teach others.

When your consciousness is dominated by the lower three levels, it is the natural flow of your personality that will best teach other people. It is most important that you realize that any attempt to play God and consciously teach others by deliberately and intentionally giving them dualistic experiences may retard your consciousness growth. It will create alienation between you and other people.

As you grow into higher consciousness levels, you will intuitively feel when a person is open to instruction in consciousness growth. You will either wait until you are clearly aware of this openness or until you are asked to act as teacher. And even then you tell people only the things they are ready to hear and can understand with oneness. If they begin to get restless or show continual irritation, you will know that you are not operating from a higher consciousness level that gives only what the other person is prepared to hear. When the requirement of readiness to hear is met, that which is given is received so naturally that the person almost feels as if he thought of it himself. In fact, his readiness creates the experience of learning as much as the information of the giver.

Always remember that the Twelve Pathways will gradually and continually lead you into completely peaceful and loving spaces no matter what people do or say around you! If you prefer that something be different from the way it is, you work from the certain knowledge that love and expanded consciousness are absolutely enough to lead you to the optimal enjoyment of your life. Your striving, pushing and dominating can only make surface changes in the way people feel and act. You need to deeply recognize that these superficial changes are usually obtained at a heavy price in alienation and unhappiness. Your forcing usually brings only temporary changes on the surface of behavior. Since real love requires the unconditional acceptance of another person, you are showing that you do not love him because there are conditions he must fulfill before you can love him.

When you can love a person only if he or she is able to act in a fashion that fits your addictive programming, you are treating the other person as an object to be manipulated. When you were growing up, you probably experienced a lot of dominating behavior from your well-meaning parents. You now have ego-backed programming that addictively resists dominating intrusions into your life. Of course, as you grow into higher consciousness, you reprogram even these power-resisting addictions, so that dominating behavior on the part of another person is understandingly seen for what it is — his entrapment in the Third Center of Consciousness. Thus you select the communications you find useful and let the rest quietly go by — and most importantly, you no longer mirror another person’s addictive stuff.

It is important that you deeply perceive that love and expanded consciousness are completely enough to give you everything you need in your life. For example, if you like your coffee cooled before it is given to you to drink, you can use a dominating impatience to help your friend remember to put a little water into your coffee so that you can drink it as soon as you get it. If he or she forgets, you may show irritation to help him or her remember — but in so doing you will disturb your peace and serenity. You will also disturb his or her peace and serenity. And you will produce a duality and alienation that slightly dilutes the feelings of love that make the relationship delightful. You need to tell yourself that if you love that person and gently and lovingly communicate what you prefer, she or he will sooner or later remember to make your coffee exactly the way you want it. It is far better for you here and now to lovingly get up and put a little water in your coffee than to engage in alienating emotional behavior. Keep telling yourself that your usual habits of control and domination have never been enough to enable you to find the love, peace, and serenity that you would like in your human relationships. Remind yourself at every opportunity that love and expanded consciousness can be enough — but they must be deep and genuine and flow from your inner being.

There is nothing about higher consciousness that says you have to become involved in other people’s predicaments. You just learn to love them unconditionally — regardless of what they say or do. You’re still entitled to your own choices and you can steer your boat down the river of your life in any way that you want. Just don’t keep crashing into the boats of other people.

Suppose your friend Mary enjoys making fish chowder and puts in a lot of pepper to make it hot and spicy. Suppose also that you cannot enjoy chowder when it has that much pepper. Using the Seventh Pathway that advises you to communicate your feelings, you tell her that you cannot enjoy the chowder when it has so much pepper. Suppose Mary replies that it is better to put the pepper in when it is cooking so that it can become blended. If you work from the Power Level of Consciousness, you will get into an argument and point out that it tastes just about as good if the pepper is added later by each individual. Then Mary will mirror your annoyance — and soon love, peace and serenity have temporarily departed. If Mary accepts your attempt to dominate the situation to fit your inside pattern, she may leave out the pepper but feel resentful towards you. You will have less pepper, but you may also have less love with your meal.

Now suppose you handle the problem of the pepper in the chowder with the complete knowledge that love and expanded consciousness are always enough. You have previously communicated your feelings about how the pepper keeps you from enjoying the chowder. If Mary serves the hot chowder again, your love and expanded consciousness may tell you that it is more flowing to test it with a single sip and then concentrate on enjoying the people, the salad and everything else around you. Just steer your ship around the rock gently and lovingly.

Don’t put out the vibration that you can’t enjoy the chowder because of the pepper — for this would just be another method of expressing irritation. Completely accept the fact that you’re not supposed to be eating chowder that night and go ahead and enjoy whatever there is to enjoy. Don’t put out any feeling tones that could make Mary uncomfortable because you are sacrificing yourself and not eating the chowder. Just flow as though the chowder had never been served.

If you can love Mary just as much when she does not follow your request to leave out the pepper, it is very likely that your love and expanded consciousness will enable you to enjoy unpeppered chowder the next time. For Mary is a conscious being and she will notice that you are not eating the chowder. She will also notice your complete acceptance of this and she will not be likely to get upset about it. She will just accept it as that which is. Mary will appreciate your not complaining repeatedly about putting in too much pepper. She may begin to feel that although she prefers putting in the pepper when it is cooking, she has a greater preference for your enjoying the chowder next time. So you may find that Mary may quietly omit the pepper the next time she makes the chowder. If you can keep your consciousness completely free of the Power Center, you will help Mary stay away from her Power Center. And the simple matter of peppering the chowder will not become complex because of the ego stuff that you mirror back and forth.

And what if Mary does not choose to make the chowder the next time with less pepper? You simply accept that as being a part of the here and nowness of your life. You’re not supposed to be eating chowder when she fixes it. This is not a great sacrifice. You may not be enjoying chowder, but you are enjoying love and serenity — which are far more nourishing than any chowder could ever be. You are also helping Mary enjoy peace, love and serenity and this is the greatest gift that you could give her. If you are addicted to chowder and have to eat it, you could always go out and buy a cup for lunch tomorrow. You will find that your love and increased consciousness will always give you the optimal ways to veer around problems or lovingly eliminate them.

Always remember that the individual with the higher consciousness is the one who is most flexible — who avoids fixed patterns — who flows in every life situation so as not to get involved in addictive irritations. The individual with the higher consciousness creates a peaceful world in which to live. This can be done regardless of whether or not you are with people who are consciously working on their growth. It takes two people to have an ego battle. But it only takes one person to create the peace and love of higher consciousness! The other person does not have to know the Living Love Way and does not have to be trying to reprogram his alienating addictions. He can be inflexible, power-oriented, ego-dominated and hostile. If you can operate from the Love Level of Consciousness or any higher level, your love and your conscious perceptiveness will enable you to flow in every situation.

Once we see the possibility of living in a peaceful and loving world all of the time (regardless of anything people may do or say), we find that there are certain life situations that often flip us back into the power level of consciousness. For example, our power addictions may manifest themselves when we know we are right, but the other person stubbornly refuses to follow our instructions. We need to remind ourselves that getting irritated will only make the situation more complicated. Oftentimes we get annoyed when we are inconvenienced in some way by another person. We irritate ourselves when people do not follow agreed-upon rules or when someone is thoughtless. We often create resentment in ourselves when we’re trying to explain about how we think and what we’re trying to do — and other people do not seem to be interested. We irritate ourselves when we perceive that another person is deceptive or he or she lets us down in one way or another.

We may get irritated when someone tells us something we already know. Or perhaps we are meditating and we annoy ourselves when someone is not sensitive to our desire for silence. Or perhaps we are busy and someone is not aware of our inner flow when we are trying to finish a task. Or we have responsibilities and another person does not recognize that this is our province where we’re entitled to make decisions.

Sometimes we irritate ourselves when we find that other people are impatient and want us to move faster than we are moving. Or perhaps someone repeatedly interrupts us. Sometimes we feel paranoid when someone does not return our friendliness. Some of the people in our lives will attack us with anger and hostility. And unless we are thoroughly able to operate our consciousness on the fourth level of unconditional love, we will immediately throw ourselves back into the power level and our response will mirror their uptightness.

It is necessary for you to tell yourself that you have been trying to handle these situations all of your life by using dominance, pecking-order forcefulness, emotional uptightness, barter, gifts and other manipulative techniques. These power methods have not yet enabled you to create a fulfilled and beautiful life. Now it is time to switch over and use only love and expanded consciousness as your guides whenever the actions of people do not fit the programs that you have conditioned into your biocomputer.

You need to continually remind yourself that in none of the above situations can you justify yourself at any time in becoming angry, irritable, resentful, fearful, jealous, or anxious. You need to realize that such situations are part of the nowness of your life. The game is to emotionally accept the unacceptable. You are trying to liberate yourself from your addictive traps. So you use all of these experiences to grow in consciousness. If you do get trapped into unloving dualistic Power Level behavior, you just consciously see the drama for what it is — and you resolve not to get trapped again. If you stumble, just get up and go on. Don’t become addicted to not stumbling. Use each fall back to the Power Level as a gift from your life to help you become more conscious and accepting.

The energy you put into your growth toward higher consciousness can be increased if you deeply realize the enormous price you are now paying for your lower consciousness addictions — a toll in lost happiness, lost peace, lost love, lost serenity, lost wisdom and lost effectiveness. If you put half the energy into your consciousness growth that you put into living out your programmed addictions, you would soon begin to live in the warmth and beauty of higher consciousness.

The level of consciousness at which you operate determines what you notice and what you don’t notice. Your programming influences whether you see it all clearly or see it through distorting ego filters — whether it grabs your consciousness or is simply seen clearly for what it is.

Love and peace are not only your goals — they are also the methods you use to get to the goals. Always realize that it is only the programming in your head that is separating you from the beautiful feelings of higher consciousness every second of your life. Happiness is there waiting inside of you — and it becomes more available every time you reprogram one of your addictions.

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