Emptiness Dancing by Adyashanti

Author:Adyashanti [Adyashanti]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Self-Help, Meditations
ISBN: 9781442973091
Google: 8MxMznYtzIEC
Amazon: 1591794595
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2006-05-01T19:30:00+00:00

Berkeley, California: September 2002

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SPIRITUAL ADDICTION

A spiritual person can become addicted to spiritual highs and miss the experience of Truth. Spiritual addiction occurs when something great happens and it feels as if you have received a hit of a great drug. As soon as you have it, you want more. There is no drug more potent than spiritual experience. The intellectual component of this addiction is the belief that if you just had enough of these experiences, you would feel great all the time. It's like morphine. You get a hit of it in the hospital because you break your arm, and you think, "If I had a little drip going all the time, life would be relatively pleasant no matter what happens." Spiritual experiences often become like this, and the mind puts them into its familiar pattern, thinking, "If I had this experience all the time, that would be freedom."

Soon you find that your condition is not much better than that of a common drunk, except that drunks know they have a problem because it's not culturally acceptable to be a drunk. The spiritual person is very certain that there is no problem, that his or her inebriation is unlike the other forms of inebriation, and the whole point is to be spiritually inebriated forever. That's the mindset of an addict: "I got it and I lost it. I need it. I don't have it."

In our culture, with most kinds of addiction, the addict is understood to be miserable. But not in the spiritual world. The seeker is told that spiritual addiction is different from all the other addictions. You're not a junkie. You're a spiritual seeker.

This problem will last as long as there is something in you that holds out some hope for the high experience. When that begins to break down, you start to see that pleasant, wonderful, and uplifting experiences are somewhat like very pleasant and uplifting alcohol binges. They feel great for a short time, and then there is an equal and opposite reaction. The spiritual high is followed by a spiritual low. I have seen this in many students.

Once these high and low experiences have played themselves out for a long enough period of time, it starts to dawn on you that maybe the high spiritual experience is just a pendulum swing followed by a low experience. At some point, you may have an ordinary moment and get on to the fact that these pendulum swings are equal and opposite reactions. You realize it's impossible to sustain one part of the pendulum swing because its nature is to move back and forth. There's no way you are going to pin that pendulum to anyone point.

This is the movement of the seeker, but it's also the movement of the me because the me is always interested in opposite and equal reactions, trying to sustain one experience and avoid other experiences. That's what the me does. It chases after the good and avoids the bad. As

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