What we believe is our version of reality. It is not reality, and yet it is for us. False, yet true. Many of us live our whole lives not questioning this ‘reality’. It’s just part of our thought system therefore it is true.
I always come back to the concept of addiction here—addiction in general and today I’m going to pick on sugar in particular. By now we’ve all heard that sugar lights up your precortal blah blah blah just like cocaine. I don’t know how cocaine does it, but I’m intimately aware of sugar’s insidious hold. And here’s the thing. It doesn’t even feel good, although maybe it did back in the early days. It’s simply the new normal and you feel pretty blah without it.
But stop right there. That is the thought commanding the addiction. If I were out in the desert and could not get hold of sugar, I would live without it. My body would habituate to a new norm, just like it has done in the past.
The problem with sugar is that you can slip lollies into your mouth all day without the world really noticing, so it can become a silent but powerful monster. The sugar fix is not as obvious as chainsmoking or drinking to excess (apart from all the weight around your middle and the tendency towards diabetes).
Now, consider this. If I didn’t think the thought that I wanted a sweetie every five minutes, I would probably be free of the whole circus pretty quickly. Perhaps I would be uncomfortable as my body coped with the change. It might take three days of occasional discomfort. It might take three weeks. The point is that none of that would kill me.
With anything else I’ve ever tried ‘giving up’, I’ve always succeeded more easily with a substitute. With sugar, the substitute is worse for you than the sugar, but perhaps for just a little while that is okay. Of course, you don’t need a substitute. Not having something any more is easy. You simply withdraw yourself from it. But after so many years of being conditioned to think a certain way it is always easier to follow the rut that thinking the same way has worn in our brains. This-synapse-automatically-fires-that-one type of thing. I think that’s why I find substitution so successful. Give up the addiction while keeping the habit. Reaching for something automatically doesn’t derail the whole process.
But in the end we do not need to think any of these thoughts. They will just go away by themselves once we have really studied them to see what they are and how they work. Our thoughts limit us. They can keep us slaves. But one day they can simply disappear. And on that day, we will be free from all addictions.