By George A. Boyd ©1991
The path I have chosen for myself is abstinence from
all drugs and intoxicants. I have abandoned these external, chemical methods
to relax me, to alter my consciousness, to bring me into a state of peace,
joy and ecstasy, because I have learned to produce these desirable physiological,
psychological and spiritual states through meditation.
However, for a person addicted to drugs or alcohol to
simply abandon drugs, is to leave a vacuum within. That person is left
with feelings of boredom, loneliness, confusion, misery and emotional
pain, and physical discomfort and irritability. Trying to recover without
addressing these feelings is to keep the door wide open for relapse. A
person must first learn to deal with the stresses of life without drugs,
finding healthful and non-injurious positive substitutes.
Chemicals do work to temporarily produce relief of these
dysphoric and unpleasant psychophysical states, but their long-term use
for this purpose extracts a heavy toll. Sometimes they demand the price
of your life: destroying your health, your sanity, your dreams, and the
lives of those around you who are unfortunate enough to come into your
path when you are controlled by your addiction.
Meditation is one such a healthful and non-injurious
positive substitute for drug and alcohol use. Meditation empowers your
will, and helps you concentrate. It enables you to relax and relieve stress.
It facilitates processing and clearing of your unpleasant emotional states,
aiding you to work through them and release them. In places you in touch
with your Higher Mind, which is the source of creativity, inspiration,
and intuitive knowledge. It awakens your spirit, and fills your heart
with love and joy. It brings communion with what is highest and best in
you. It leads you to an inexhaustible fount of peace and bliss within
you. It unfolds the infinite potentials of your soul.
Frankly, there is no comparison between drugs and alcohol
and meditation.
- The pleasure of the "rush" that people experience
when intravenously injecting heroin, cocaine or amphetamines does not
in the tiniest degree measure up to the ecstasy of the Kundalini Shakti.
[The Kundalini Shakti is the dormant power of energy and awareness that,
when awakened, allows one to consciously experience Superconscious states
of the mind when it awakens within you.]
- The relaxation of valium cannot compete in any fashion
with the self-produced inner serenity and tranquility of Samadhi. [Samadhi
is the ecstatic trance-like state produced by deep concentration that
enables the meditator to experience his or her Soul directly.]
- The hallucinatory voyage of psychedelics cannot even
come close to the beauty and speechless wonder of traveling in full
consciousness through the inner planes during communion with the Light
and Sound of the Divine.
- The warm tinglies of Qualuudes or Adam (MDMA) cannot
tip the scale in the least with the healing and heart-melting embrace
of the Holy Spirit
Meditation wins hands downthere is not even a
contest.
The journey of spirituality that meditation reveals
will bring you everything you have been seeking through drugs, and
much, much more. There is a way out from obsession with drugs, from
will-paralyzing addiction, and the self-sabotage, self-hatred and
self-destruction that go along with them. The answer is not white-knuckled,
steely-willed abstinence that melts away on your first bad day.
It is rather a full-hearted, total immersion in
the life of the Spirit, which heals, renews, releases, and frees.
Rather than an act of will, it is an act of surrender that sets the
captive free.
Living in touch with the Higher Power will fulfill
your human life the way drugs and alcohol could not. The abstinence
from drugs and alcohol the Spirit brings comes effortlessly and without
struggle. Because it is so very easy to let go of inferior and cheap
substitutes when you find what you have been seeking all your life:
a relationship with your Divine Source.
There is a choice that does not come from pride, but
from humility; not from the desire to prove your valor to others, but
your need to tell the truth; not from strength and might, but from a tearful
contrition that is life transforming. You have struggled to control your
addiction, and it has controlled you.
Paradoxically, the victory you seek is found in surrender
to the Higher Power you have been resisting. That very choice that is
the one real hope in a night that has been far too long and far too dark
and empty. May you find that choice now.
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