Authors: Gary Zukav
Enter into your own fear, into your own sense of wanting a drink, or sex with a different partner. Ask yourself to seriously review all of the times in your life that you thought you would gain so much from that, and face what you gained.
Hold onto the thought that you create your experiences. Your fear comes from the realization that a part of you is creating a reality that it wants, whether you want it or not, and the feeling that you are powerless to prevent it, but that is not so. This is critical to understand: your addiction is not stronger than you. It is not stronger than who you want to be. Though it may feel that way, it can only win if you let it. Like any weakness, it is not stronger than the soul or the force of will. Its strength only indicates the amount of effort that needs to be applied toward the transition, toward making yourself whole in that area of your life.
Recognize that what you are doing when you fear that you will be tempted, and that you will not be able to resist the temptation, is creating a situation that will give you permission to act irresponsibly. Is it possible to create a test that you cannot pass? Yes. The experience of wanting to be tempted in order to test yourself is the act of creating an opportunity to act irresponsibly, to say to yourself, “I knew I couldn’t do it, anyway,” and give in to your addiction. The heart of making a temptation that is greater than you can resist is that you do not wish to be held responsible for your choice.
The greater the desire of your soul to heal your addiction, the greater will be the cost of keeping it. If you-if your soul-have chosen to heal an addiction now, you will find that the decision to maintain your addiction will cost you the things that you hold most dear. If that is your wife or your husband, your marriage will be placed in the balance against your addiction. If that is your career, your career will be placed in the balance.
This is not the doing of a cruel Universe or a malicious God. It is a compassionate response to your desire to heal, to become whole. It is the compassionate Universe saying to you that your inadequacies are so deep that the only thing that will stop you will be something of equal or greater value in opposition to your inadequacies. This is the same dynamic that is expressed in terms of space and time and matter by the second law of motion: “A change in the momentum (mass, direction of movement, and speed) of a body in motion is directly proportional to the force affecting the body in motion, and takes place in the direction that the force is acting.” By the magnitude of the costs of your addiction you can measure the importance of healing it to your soul, and the strength of your own inner intention to do that.
Try to realize, and truly realize, that what stands between you and a different life are matters of responsible choice. In your moments of fear, what you are obscure about in your thinking is the power and magnitude of your own choice. Recognize what your own power of choice is. You are not at the mercy of your inadequacy. The intention that will empower you must come from a place within you that suggests that you are indeed able to make responsible choices and draw the power from them, that you can make choices that empower you and not disempower you, that you are capable of acts of wholeness. Test your power of choice because each time you choose otherwise you disengage the power of your addiction more and more and increase your personal power more and more.
As you work through your weaknesses, and you feel levels of addictive attraction, ask yourself the critical questions of the spirit: If, by following those impulses, do you increase your level of enlightenment? Does it bring you power of the genuine sort? Will it make you more loving? Will it make you more whole? Ask yourself these questions.
This is the way out of an addiction: Walk yourself through your reality step by step. Make yourself aware of the consequences of your decisions, and choose accordingly. When you feel in yourself the addictive attraction of sex, or alcohol, , or drugs, or anything else, remember these words: You stand between the two worlds of your lesser self and you’re full self. Your lesser self is tempting and powerful because it is not as responsible and not as loving and not as disciplined, so it calls you. This other part of you is whole and more responsible and more caring and more empowered, but it demands of you the way of the enlightened spirit: conscious life. Conscious life. The other choice is unconscious permission to act without consciousness. It is tempting.
What choose you?
If your decision is to become whole, hold that decision. You will not be as tempted or as frightened as you think. Hold it and remind yourself again and again: You stand between your lesser self and your whole self. Choose with wisdom because the power is now fully in your hands. Do not underestimate the power of consciousness. As you live and make conscious choices each moment and each day you fill with strength and your lesser self disintegrates.
As you choose to empower yourself, the part of you that you challenge, the temptation that you challenge, will surface again and again. Each time that you challenge it, you gain power and it loses power. If you challenge an addiction to alcohol, for example, and you are drawn twelve times that very day to have a drink, challenge that energy each time. If you look upon each recurrence of attraction as a setback, or as an indication that your intention is not working, you choose the path of learning through fear and doubt. If you look upon each recurrence as an opportunity that is offered to you, in response to your intention, to release your inadequacy and to acquire power over it, you choose the path of learning through wisdom, for that is what it is.
The first time that you challenge your addiction, and the second, and the third, you may not feel that anything has been accomplished. Do you think that authentic power
can be had so easily? As you hold to your intention, and as you choose again and again and again to become whole, you accumulate power, and the addiction that you thought could not be challenged will lose its power over you.
When you challenge an addiction, and choose to become whole, you align yourself with your nonphysical help. The work to be done is yours, but assistance is always there for you. The nonphysical world, the actions of your guides and Teachers, touches yours in many ways-the thought that brings power, the memory that reminds, the surprise occurrence that reinforces. There is much joy in the nonphysical world when a soul releases major negativity and the quality of its consciousness shifts upward into higher frequencies of Light. Therefore, do not suffer in aloneness. There is no such thing.
Look at yourself as someone who is reaching for healing, and at the complexity of what needs to be healed. Do not think that you exist alone without other human beings of equal complexity. All that the human experience is about is the journey toward wholeness. Therefore, you can look at each individual and rest assured that they are not whole. They are in process. Were they whole, they would not be physical upon our plane. In other words, you have the company of billions of souls.
When you have worked hard, take the time to appreciate what you have done. Do not always look at the distance that you have yet to travel. Join your nonphysical Teachers and guides in applauding what you have accomplished. This does not mean to relapse into your addiction. It means allowing yourself to rest when you need it, to recognize when you become exhausted, and to give yourself the grace of knowing that even the best of us get tired.
Understanding the dynamics behind your addiction is one thing. Actually making the emotional connection to discharge the need for it is another story. Your addiction is not insurmountable. It is not overwhelming. If it continues to appear that way to you, it is because deep in your heart you do not see yourself as able to release the addiction, even if you understand why you are drawn to it. If your addiction lingers, ask yourself if you really want to release it, because in your heart you do not.
Until you fill in the inadequacies within you, you will always have your addiction. In order to release your addiction, it is necessary to enter your inadequacies, to recognize that they are real, and to bring them into the light of consciousness to heal. It is necessary to look deeply into the parts of yourself that have such power to you, to look clearly at how deep they are within you, and to see them as honestly as you can. It may be that your addiction has provided you one of the few genuine pleasures of your life. What is more important to you, your wholeness, and your freedom, or the pleasures that you get from satisfying your addiction?
When you understand that your addiction results from an inadequacy, the question becomes how you will respond to your inadequacy-by reaching for another drink, or another sexual encounter, or by reaching inward for those things that fill the whole? Move into how strong the power of your addiction is, into how deeply you feel its attraction, and ask yourself if the time is really right for you to release this form of learning. That is for you to ask and answer. You may hear the guidance of your nonphysical Teachers, and feel that it offers you a path of higher wisdom, but at the same moment realize that you are not ready to take that path. You might decide that this is not the right time, that you are not yet strong enough to live a certain way. You might indeed have to face that.
Ultimately, you will take the higher path, but if you wish to put the journey off for a day or a week or seven lifetimes, that is sufficient. Your Teachers see from a perspective that does not include time. It is the depth of wisdom for you to know that you will eventually take the path of consciousness. If that is the path that you will eventually take, why wait? Yet, there are times when there is wisdom in waiting as the rest of you prepares for the journey. There is no shame in this decision.
The Universe does not judge. Eventually, you will come to authentic empowerment. You will know the power of forgiveness, humbleness, clarity and love. You will evolve beyond the human experience, beyond the Earth school, beyond the learning environment of space and time and matter. You cannot not evolve. Everything in the Universe evolves. It is only a question of which way you will choose to learn as you evolve. This is always your choice, and there is always wisdom in each choice.
When you return home, when you leave your personality and body behind, you will leave behind your inadequacies, your fears and angers and jealousies. They do not, and cannot, exist within the realm of spirit. They are the experiences of the personality, of time and matter. You will once again enter the fullness of who you are. You will perceive with loving eyes and compassionate understanding the experiences of your life, including those that seemed so much to control you. You will see what purposes they served. You will survey what has been learned, and you will bring these things into your next incarnation.
If you choose to continue with your addiction, you choose to experience negative karma. You choose to create without compassion. You choose to be unconscious. You choose to learn through the experiences that your unconscious intentions create. You choose to learn through fear and doubt, because you fear your addiction and you doubt your power to challenge it successfully.
If you choose to challenge your addiction, to move consciously toward wholeness, you choose to learn through wisdom. You choose to create your experiences consciously, to align the perceptions and the energy of your personality with your soul. You choose to create within physical reality the reality that your soul wishes to create. You choose to allow your soul to move through you. You choose to allow Divinity to shape your world.
When you struggle with an addiction, you deal directly with the healing of your soul. You deal directly with the matter of your life. This is the work that is required to be done. As you face your deepest struggles, you reach for your highest goal. As you bring to light, heal, and release the deepest currents of negativity within you, you allow the energy of your soul to move directly into, and to shape, the experiences and events of physical reality, and thereby to accomplish unimpeded its tasks upon the Earth.
This is the work of evolution. It is the work that you were born to do.
There are certain growing dynamics that can occur only within the dynamic of commitment. Without commitment you cannot learn to care for another person more than yourself. You cannot learn to value the growth of strength and clarity in another soul, even if that threatens the wants of your personality. When you release the wants of your personality in order to accommodate and encourage another’s growth, you attune yourself to that person’s soul. Without commitment, you cannot learn to see others as your soul sees them-as beautiful and powerful spirits of Light.
The archetype of spiritual partnership-partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth-is emerging within our species. This is different from the archetype of marriage which was designed to assist physical survival, and in which the partners do not necessarily see themselves as equals. When individuals enter into a marriage, the ability of each to survive physically is enhanced. They are more capable together of finding fire, shelter, food and water, and of defending themselves, than they are individually. The marriage archetype reflects the perception of power as external.
The archetype of spiritual partnership reflects the conscious journey of multisensory humans toward authentic power. Spiritual partners recognize the existence of the soul, and consciously seek to further its evolution. They recognize nonphysical dynamics at work within the world of time and matter. They see matter as the densest, or heaviest, level of Light that is continually being shaped and reshaped by the souls that share this sphere of learning. They consciously cocreate their experiences with each other, with an alive Earth that loves Life very much, and with a compassionate Universe.
Communities, nations and cultures-all of our collective creations-are built upon the values and perceptions of the fivesensory personality, the values that are reflected by the archetype of marriage. They are designed to serve the physical survival of our species. They also reflect the decisions of our species to learn through fear and doubt.