Heavenly life exists and is attainable on the other side of addictions, this may be Jesus good news, James.
I can best describe my experience, when I face plant, when I crash and burn, every three or four weeks, as falling back into addictions. The fever, the franticness, the desperation, the agony, the total lost....
Such curious instruction from jesus, The Parables and stories Etc about servanthood. Even to the point of working all day, coming in, cleaning up, preparing the Master's food, and only then feeding oneself.
Was Jesus trying to enslave us to the master?
Jesus was trying to liberate us from the slavedriver that is the spirits of our head and flesh, our attachments, our illusion that life is arranging the world so that it gratifies the desires of our head and flesh spirits.
It's not possible. We're probably designed, our nervous system is probably designed, so that that can never happen. We are problem solving machines, so no external State can ever be more than briefly gratifying. The reward chemicals are automatically shut off, setting us on fire, and we're slavishly driven out to try and adapt the environment again.
But a life of intrinsic gratification, by serving the world every breath, is possible, if exceedingly difficult, particularly difficult in a world that says that's Madness even to try.
So Jesus leads me to personify that part of me that is all about serving, the Humanity within me, he calls it God, I call it creator. And to develop myself so that my tendency to find and serve that master, the humanity within me, is stronger than my circuits for succumbing to my addictions, the spirits of my head and flesh. Jesus elsewhere calls the addictions the will of the flesh.
And yes, none of my addictions are of the chemical sort.
Jesus seems to have achieved it, Heavenly life in this world Beyond addictions.
We are social creatures by design, that is, we learn vicariously, we're influenced by our environment. And my best chance of beating these horrible addictions, these attachments, is to continue to hold on to my internal personification of him as my primary referent group, and to hold on to what brief learnings I get along the way. And he seemed to have understood that i, that we, need, a stepping stone, a concrete stepping stone, his example and instructions, to reach and submit ourselves to our humanity.
Our addictions generator has hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution behind it. It is what has made us the dominant species on the planet, and it is making us extinguish all life on earth. It is brilliant, relentless, clever, insidious, a trickster. It never stops trying to enslave us. Ever.
I am not without hope that I'm making progress, I think that I am. Unless I'm not.
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