A species of addicts
May 28, 2024 20:50:34 GMT
Post by Stella on May 28, 2024 20:50:34 GMT
This is something that's been playing on my mind for the past six months or so. Our common cultural understanding of addiction is that it's a mental health issue, or a social issue, or to some people out there, a personal failing. I beg to differ and this post is me voicing what I feel addiction is in reality. The more I think about this the more I'm convinced that addiction is pretty much what being a human being is all about. Am I saying that we are all addicts? Yes, I am.
Human beings naturally form emotional and psychological attachments as a fundamental part of our behaviour. This is how we make sense of our environment. Language is the central human reference point for existence. If it cannot be verbalized and cannot be put into words then it cannot be comprehended. That what we can sense and feel goes way beyond what we can put into words and explain. Take for example love. Why do we love some people but not others? How do we know that we love someone? What is it that causes us to fall in love? There's certain aspects of our experience of life which cannot be easily explained or put into words.
Love is the outermost levels of our consciousness. Much of our environment and the universe, actual reality, lies way beyond our perception and comprehension. The universe is not what we think it is or imagine it to be. It's a multi-dimensional 'koan' or puzzle, three dimensional, four dimensional, or maybe even a hundred dimensional. The universe and much of our environment is a conundrum, a mystery, which we seek to learn more about. Our learning can only take place in the mind, which is space, but is also an environment in itself between our memory and our different senses. While we understand existence to be a matter of consciousness, energy and space, atoms and molecules, from the human perspective existence is predominantly conceptual, and based on language, words, and concepts.
This is how we understand our existence, in terms of perceiver and perceived, subject of an experience and also an object of a desire, a feeling, an emotion, or an attachment. We do not perceive existence in terms of protons, photons, quarks and quanta. We perceive our experience of life and existence in language. We have figured out that we can share insight, consciousness and truth through language, just as we can create and imagine concepts, ideas and beliefs and share these also through language....continue reading
Human beings naturally form emotional and psychological attachments as a fundamental part of our behaviour. This is how we make sense of our environment. Language is the central human reference point for existence. If it cannot be verbalized and cannot be put into words then it cannot be comprehended. That what we can sense and feel goes way beyond what we can put into words and explain. Take for example love. Why do we love some people but not others? How do we know that we love someone? What is it that causes us to fall in love? There's certain aspects of our experience of life which cannot be easily explained or put into words.
Love is the outermost levels of our consciousness. Much of our environment and the universe, actual reality, lies way beyond our perception and comprehension. The universe is not what we think it is or imagine it to be. It's a multi-dimensional 'koan' or puzzle, three dimensional, four dimensional, or maybe even a hundred dimensional. The universe and much of our environment is a conundrum, a mystery, which we seek to learn more about. Our learning can only take place in the mind, which is space, but is also an environment in itself between our memory and our different senses. While we understand existence to be a matter of consciousness, energy and space, atoms and molecules, from the human perspective existence is predominantly conceptual, and based on language, words, and concepts.
This is how we understand our existence, in terms of perceiver and perceived, subject of an experience and also an object of a desire, a feeling, an emotion, or an attachment. We do not perceive existence in terms of protons, photons, quarks and quanta. We perceive our experience of life and existence in language. We have figured out that we can share insight, consciousness and truth through language, just as we can create and imagine concepts, ideas and beliefs and share these also through language....continue reading