Freedom from Addiction and Obsession

It can be difficult to break old habits. It can be difficult to set aside things that have been with you for a long time—preoccupations, behaviors, activities, interests, hobbies and so forth. People can hold onto these things long after they have ceased to have any real meaning, if they ever had any real meaning to begin with.

People talk about change. They say how much they have changed, or that they want to change. But you must ask yourself: “Do people really change at all?” Or are the changes that they make more cosmetic or circumstantial in nature?

Real change is a change of heart. And a change of heart shifts your focus, your priorities and, as a consequence, your relationship with many things. Change without a change of heart is not really change. It is only cosmetic in nature. It is looking different, sounding different. But on the inside a real shift has not yet occurred.

It is this change of heart that is so essential. It is this that will give you the power to break your addiction to things, your association with things, and to help you re-evaluate your position regarding everyone and everything.

Real change happens beneath the surface. It is not something that occurs at the intellectual level. It is a shift at a deeper level. And over time you come to realize, as a consequence, that your values and your priorities are changing. The way you feel about yourself and your situation is changing. You are looking for different things now. You are losing interest in things that fascinated you before.

To really break an addiction you must have a different kind of focus for the mind that must really be all consuming. It may even look like another addiction. But it must be strong enough to displace and replace what has captivated your mind previously, and what still tends to captivate your mind.

Instead of being addicted to a drug, you become addicted to God. You become addicted to the experience of Knowledge within yourself, the deeper Intelligence that God has placed within you. You become addicted to serving others. You become addicted to maintaining your health. This new addiction may be temporary, but it serves as a bridge, you see.

You can question your motivations about your current addictions. You can try to understand what created these conditions. You may gain a psychological perspective regarding your behaviors. You may see a connection between early events in your life and the kinds of fixations that are haunting you now. But this does not mean that you can really let go, and that you will have the strength and the capacity to do that.

An addiction is a replacement for real relationships. That is a very useful definition of addictions. It is a replacement for real relationship with yourself, with other people and with the world.

People lose their relationship with themselves and must replace it with something. They must have something to which they are dedicated, that occupies their focus and their time. And so instead of that which is real and meaningful, they have chosen a substitute. And these substitutes, at the very least, consume one’s attention and, at the very worst, destroy one’s life.

If an addiction has reached this stage of advancement, then it must be replaced by something of equal force and strength. You must now become addicted to something else that points your life in the right direction, that reaffirms your natural abilities and native worth. It is still obsessive, of course, because you have not yet reached a real balance within yourself. But as a replacement, if it can garner enough attention from you and focus, then it can serve to alter the course of your life and turn you away from meaningless and self-destructive behaviors.

That is why certain people who were addicted to drugs or other kinds of fantasies turn to religion with such adamancy, such fervency. It is because they are trying to replace one addiction with another. Perhaps they were addicted to drugs and now they are addicted to Jesus or Muhammad or the church or the mosque. They are still addicted, which means their life is still out of balance, and they are still prone to make excessive and unwise decisions. But they are attempting to shift their life onto a different plane, and they are using religion or belief, or the lives of the great emissaries as a means of doing this.

Your addiction to romance, your addiction to your fantasies about your hobbies, your addictions to certain kinds of foods or activities must be replaced by something of equal or greater importance. You cannot simply dissolve an addiction through understanding and awareness. You must replace that addiction with something else. Otherwise, you will be struggling continuously, trying to avoid and to deny and to repudiate your obsessive behaviors and tendencies. They are still operating within you even though you understand what they are and can think about them objectively.

A person who has been addicted to eating bad food and has become unhealthy and overweight can become addicted to health and athletics. But eventually they will have to deal with the real Four Pillars of their life: the Pillar of Health, the Pillar of Relationships, the Pillar of Work and Providership and the Pillar of their Spiritual Development.

Addiction and obsession occur when these Four Pillars are not being attended to adequately. That is why obsession and addiction represent a life that is out of harmony and out of balance. The teaching about the Four Pillars and the whole Four Pillar approach to life is the perfect antidote to obsession and obsessive behavior because it requires so much work, so much care, and so much attention being given to all of the fundamental elements of your life—all of which fall into one or more of these Pillars—that you do not have time to be obsessive or compulsive. You are taking on a life that requires you to be responsible all the time, to be aware and conscious all the time.

So even if you replace an unhealthy addiction with something that is healthier, you must eventually deal with the Four Pillars of your life. This is what really begins to establish a new and strong foundation for you, and puts distance between you and your former existence and all of the tribulations that were created there.

If you have been a person who has been obsessive or addicted to substances or other things, you must recognize that you have a compulsive-obsessive nature. And now you must manage that nature. You cannot make it go away. You cannot dissolve it by telling yourself that it is over. You cannot replace it with happy thoughts, or even with religious beliefs. You will have these tendencies ongoing. You cannot erase them, but you must learn to manage them. And management, self-management, is the issue here.

If you are engaged in any activity that is out of harmony with your values, then you are generating conflict, and you are losing energy to that. It is robbing you of life. It is robbing you of time. It is robbing you of self-confidence. It is robbing you of your self-esteem. It is taking you away from the real focus of your life and your ability to discover the greater purpose that has brought you into the world.

That is why you must manage obsessive tendencies. Replace them if you can with more beneficial activities. Shift your insecurity and your lack of stability, which drive your self-obsession, to focus on other things that are demanding of you. But they must be powerful replacements.

If you are a compulsive eater, then you will have to be a compulsive athlete to correct these tendencies. But that is only the beginning of your transition. You must then move into a focus upon the Four Pillars of your life, each of which will require a considerable amount of your time on a regular basis.

If your behaviors are not in keeping with your values, it will generate self-conflict and self-doubt within you. What are the behaviors that you engage in now that are not in keeping with your values or your sense of integrity? Write these down and really focus upon them. See what kind of behaviors or activities could replace these things that would be in keeping with your values and your sense of integrity.

Integrity means that you are one person: you are the same person in all situations, with only slight modifications for social adaptability; you are guided by one true impulse within yourself; that you are not moving in many directions at once; that you are unified and harmonized within yourself.

But to reach this state of integrity, it requires that your thinking and your behavior and your associations with others must be in keeping with your real values. Your real values are different from social values, which have been impressed upon you since childhood. The real values are your real values, that which is in keeping with Knowledge [the deeper intelligence] within yourself.

You may have to make compromises in your work, but you should not make serious compromises in your relationships with others. You should not make compromises regarding your personal behavior and activities.

If you violate yourself, you will feel violated, and you will be angry and frustrated. And this anger and frustration will be projected upon others in the form of accusations, blame and condemnation. You will hate others for the things that you yourself cannot accomplish. You will point the finger at other people’s failures because they represent your own. Everyone has much work to do in this regard. No one is exempt.

There are so few people who are strong with Knowledge—whose lives are really integrated, who are really in harmony with themselves in their lives—that there are almost no exceptions to what We are presenting here. People are violating themselves in countless ways, all the time, everywhere. They are violating themselves through their behavior, through their associations with others, through their ideas and beliefs, through their political and religious involvements, through their own personal behavior and standards. This has to do with you, and everyone.

Knowledge within you really gives you your true values, your true standards, because in your heart you know what is right and what is not. And this can be in grave conflict with your ideology or your beliefs, or your submission to the beliefs of others.

People can be addicted to ideas as much as they can be addicted to drugs. They can be addicted to romance. They can be addicted to the acquisition of wealth, taking risks, and winning the game. There are countless things that people are addicted to, but they all represent a substitute for Knowledge, and a kind of compensation for a life that is fundamentally out of balance and filled with insecurity and uncertainty. The manifestation of addiction is tremendous and varied. People can be addicted to the most innocuous things or the most dangerous things.

You know you are addicted when you think you cannot do without something that you can really do without. There are essential needs like food, water, shelter, clothing and security. There are important needs that are not essential such as companionship, sexuality, social engagements, artistic expression. Next, there are needs that are neither very important nor essential, and this includes a vast array of human activities.

You know you are addicted when you cannot do without something that is really not essential, when you believe that you cannot function without something when in reality it is not essential for your survival and well-being, particularly if it does not meet the first two criteria of that which is a need that is essential and an important need that is not essential. Beyond this, you must be willing to let go of anything that stands in your way, or that is impeding your progress, or that is compromising your integrity.

Addictions to food, addictions to pleasures, addictions to places, addictions to people, addictions to certain kinds of personality types, addictions to beauty, addictions to wealth, addictions to power, addictions to hobbies, addictions to sports, addictions to things that appear to be healthy but which in fact have become obsessive because they are displacing the other Pillars of one’s life.

Here a healthy activity or a personal interest can easily grow beyond the bounds of its value and benefit, overtaking a person incrementally until they find themselves so focused upon that, when in fact it is a very minor thing in their life. People become obsessed with athletic activities or with sports or with hobbies that began as a healthy interest and now have become something that is more dominating to the individual.

You can think of so many other situations that are obsessive and addictive because people all around you are engaged in so many different expressions of this fundamental problem of not being engaged with Knowledge and of having your life out of balance and out of integrity with your deeper values.

You can begin to see here that if you have a really disabling addiction, it is going to take a very strong form of activity to correct it. Going to the therapist and talking about it and gaining an understanding will not be enough to overcome it and to overwhelm it and to displace it in your experience. You are going to have to take on something that is much more intense and demanding, an activity and not just an understanding, or a set of activities that are so incompatible with your former addiction that you simply cannot do both in one life. That is why the remedy has to be very powerful; it has to be very demanding.

If you are going to go through the great difficulty of liberating yourself from an addiction to a drug, which can be a serious addiction, or any other disabling activity, it is going to take a very strong approach. You may have to leave all your former relationships. You may have to move to a very different place, put yourself in a very different set of circumstances permanently in order to have the opportunity to build a new life and experience of yourself. It will take a very strong effort to correct a life of obsession or addictive behavior.

There are rare cases where people simply lose interest in something and are able to escape these fixations, but this tends to be the exception, and to be exceptional itself. With the emergence of Knowledge, you will lose interest in things that are out of keeping with your deeper nature and your greater purpose for being in the world. Losing interest here will be gradual and progressive. But for some people, this will not be enough to get them over the top, to break the chains of addiction.

We, of course, recommend taking the Steps to Knowledge as the foundation for any necessary improvement in your inner and outer life. For without this, you are relying upon ideas alone, and ideas do not have the power that Knowledge has. Ideas alone do not have the power to break the chains of addiction or obsessive behaviors.

What this really means is creating a new life and tearing down the old life because you cannot put a new life on top of an old life. You have to dismantle the old life to a very great degree to be able to build something else in its place. This takes a great effort and great courage. You have to break your identification with your behaviors, with your ideas and with your history. That takes great courage and effort.

Knowledge will give you the power to do this and the inspiration to do this, but never think it is going to be easy or quick. You do not dismantle a life that you have been fortifying for decades in a matter of days, weeks, months, or even a year. You must be prepared to put yourself in very different circumstances, around people presenting very different influences, to be able to really create a new foundation for yourself.

For even the best seed will not grow in poor soil; even the most beautiful plant cannot grow amidst a field of weeds. You must find fertile soil. And this fertile soil really is your environment and your relationships.

If you stay with the same people, it will be very difficult to create a real change unless they are changing with you, and unless they are supporting your change wholeheartedly. People underestimate the power of their environment and their relationships to influence them and to dominate them. But nothing grows in poor soil; nothing thrives in impure waters. You cannot begin a new journey in life if you are held in place by your former life.

God has sent a New Message into the world for the redemption and protection of humanity. It has the power to lift you out of addiction and to prepare you to learn to build the Four Pillars of your life, even if you have not built them sufficiently before. It is the Power of God that resides within Knowledge within you, and it is the Power of God that is imbued in the New Message. It has not been corrupted or diluted by cultures or governments or the misuse of ambitious individuals. It is pure. It is powerful. It is real.

To be with the New Message from God is as if you had a chance to be with a Jesus or a Muhammad or a Buddha in their lifetime, when the Revelation was real and fresh and pure and had not been corrupted and adapted to culture, and overlaid with tradition and ideology.

The New Message has the power of redemption, but it still requires that you replace your obsessions with new behaviors, that you begin to build the Four Pillars of your life, and most fundamentally to gain a real connection with Knowledge within yourself that will give you the strength, the courage and the determination to begin a new journey in your life.

People talk about starting new journeys, but they are staying where they are—with the people that they are used to, with the ideas they are accustomed to, with the activities and behaviors that they have adapted to and where they feel secure. So nothing really happens. It is only a conversation; or perhaps it is a self-deception.

People think they are really changed when they have only just changed a few of their ideas and nothing else. They are still the same person with the same tendencies, the same weaknesses, the same frailties, the same deceptions, the same fantasies. Only it looks a little different because they have changed their perspective about it.

Yet they have not really begun to dismantle their former experience. They have not really broken the bonds that are holding them in place. They have not really begun the revolution that must happen within them to initiate a new life, a new awareness and a new experience of one’s self. To receive a New Message from God, you will go through this revolution. And perhaps you are going through it already.

Many people have begun this process. But they have not found the reinforcement that they need, they have not found the inspiration that they need, they have not found the skills and understanding that they need to really begin anew—to build a foundation based upon Knowledge and not upon ideas or convenience. Some people know they have made little progress; others think they have made great progress when they have, in fact, barely even begun.

You will know that you have made progress when your life is in keeping with your deeper values, and when you have shifted your relationship with everything, when you have moved your sense of authority from your ideas and your intellect to the deeper wellspring of Knowledge within yourself. You will know you have really begun anew when you look for Knowledge in others and when you can look upon the world without condemnation.

For Knowledge gives you this prescience, this vision, this awareness. Shifting from one ideology to another, from one system of belief to another, does not represent a real shift of any kind unless it is a shift that has happened at a deeper level within you, and unless it generates a very different kind of orientation and behavior on your part.

To go from being an angry and vengeful partisan in the political arena to being an angry, vengeful person in a religious arena does not demonstrate any real change at all. It is just you are expressing your instability and aberrancy in a different context. Your life looks different, sounds different, but in a sense is exactly the same.

So We are not talking about a makeover here, or a change in style, or a change in rhetoric, or a change in fashion, but a fundamental shift within you. It enables you to break the chains of addiction and to begin to build the Four Pillars of your life, which will occupy you completely and free your mind once your life is in keeping with your deeper values and with the reality of Knowledge within you.

God is calling you to respond. God is calling you through the New Message that God has sent into the world, a Message that is unlike anything that has ever been given to humanity before, to prepare humanity for a future that will be unlike anything the human family as a whole has ever had to face.

But this Calling requires a deep response from you, a deep commitment to build a new foundation in your life and an awareness within yourself that this is really what you want and need to do. The truth can only speak to the truth in you, and in so doing, it will reveal everything that is weak, false and unnecessary. God’s New Message will speak to what is true and inherent within you, and in so doing will reveal everything that is weak, false and unnecessary in your life.

You must be willing to face this, to accept this, not merely as a recognition but as something that you realize is essential. For if you are really honest with yourself, you will begin to see that your life is not really where it needs to be and that this is the case for most people. They are not where they need to be personally, in their relationships or activities. Even geographically, they might be in the wrong place, and that is why nothing is really happening for them.

To respond to a New Message from God and to respond to the greater purpose that has sent you into the world requires a kind of revolution within yourself—where your former dictators are overthrown and replaced by wise counselors; where your former degrading behavior and experiences are replaced by that which is inspiring, meaningful and productive.

Here you must attend to all Four Pillars of your life, which will create balance and strength. For your life is only as strong as the weakest of your Pillars. Like the four legs of a table, they uphold your life; the weakest leg determines the strength of that table.

Everyone has addictions, great or small. They all emanate from the same lack of balance and awareness in one’s self. They all are a replacement for true relationships. They all represent a life that is out of balance. They all require a serious and determined approach, one that is carried out with compassion and patience, but with great strength and fortitude.

Where will you find this strength? Where will you find this determination? You will find it in Knowledge. And that is why at the center of your redemption and your development and progress is taking the Steps to Knowledge because the closer you come to Knowledge, the more difficult it will be for you to make a mistake. And the more you will lose interest and identification with your former ideas and behaviors that have proven to be harmful and self-destructive to you.

God’s New Message has provided the Steps to Knowledge in a form that anyone can practice and understand. The Way of Knowledge is taught in many traditions, but you may have to search to find a teacher wise enough to guide you in this matter, and such teachers are rare and hard to find in the world.

So the New Message provides a pathway that you can begin today to study and to apply. This will strengthen your connection to Knowledge, which will empower your life and show you where your true devotion, your true love, your true happiness resides, and where it has always resided.

This restores your relationship with yourself, this gives clarity and meaning to your relationships with others, this reveals your real relationship for coming into the world and your purpose for being here. And this reunites you with your Source, which is the source of your strength, your meaning and your value. It is the Great Love that you carry, even at this moment.