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Not the Right Kind of Lever
It will take energy to shift the psychological mass created by your addiction, and the energy will have to come from some unfamiliar direction, because the ‘you’ that started out is not you that exists now.
‘You’ have been changed, your brain chemistry altered by the same addictive behavior cycle that has produced the mass of negativity that exists, unseen by the outside world, within your character.
You now will have to find a new way to get the energy needed to lever away the stone.
In the ‘seen’ world of physical reality, the simple tool that has been used through history to great effect is called the class 1 lever. Monuments from Stonehenge, Easter Island, and Egypt testify to its ability to move huge amounts of mass with only human energy as the motivator.
But since the internal mass exists ‘under’ the surface of physical reality, amidst the neurons and hormones that turn your thoughts, impulses, and drives into feelings and action, the tools and energy required to move it must be able to function there, in the ‘insubstantial’ world of your inner self.
In the substantial ‘outer’ world, the parts of the Class 1 lever must also have substance, like real-to-the-touch wood, metal, and stone. Try moving a boulder, or even a pebble, just by thinking about it…nothing doing.
The Kid has it Correct
But jam one end of the arm of the lever under its edge, lay the lever across the top of the fulcrum, use some force and…movement.
In the insubstantial ‘inner’ world, the parts of the lever must, accordingly, be without physical form themselves, but the basic principle of using a lever to move mass remains the same.
It will be the interplay between of your intention to improve in your Practice with the psychological mass of your addiction that will allow your Practice to work as a lever.
Because a Practice includes regular work, it mirrors the addictive process by constantly appearing in your day-to-day life, where it must interact and compete with the addictive process for your time and energy.
At first the new practice has no depth, it just rides on the surface tension of your psyche, like a water bug in the currents of a stream.
But in time, and with many repetitions, it develops width and depth, and you can use it to go ‘under’ your familiar surface reactions and behaviors. It is then that it brings back information about the depths of your internal world, not only about the psychological mass of negativity that you’ve developed through addiction, but also about other, deeper aspects of yourself, strengths and skills that have been obscured from your view.
It can ride above, but go below:
It is during this process that your Practice begins to function as a lever, and you can start to move the mass that sits there, if you have enough energy to bring to the task.
The shortest way through to a source of energy that doesn’t have to be bought, developed, taken out on loan, or talked into helping you, is to use the tried and proven method called Projected Word.
The psychological mass of addictive behavior, brought about by the heaviness of the emotions involved in the cycle of quit/restart/quit/restart… is more of a load than most people can move on their own.
It takes too much energy, expressed continually for too long a time, and often one just ends up wrestling with this giant thing, like a dung beetle doing everything it can to move its huge ball of crap…just a little.
Archimedes suggested that there is another way to move mass, using a lever, as seen here:
Since we are talking about a psychological load, we are not going to use a physical lever, but we will use the same principles used in the physical world.
As can be seen from the diagram, there are three parts to a lever that are all essential if one is to move a load; the lever, the fulcrum, and a force.
The lever must be made of something continuous and strong, in order to transfer the force into the load. The psychological process that will stand for the lever will be a Practice.
The fulcrum must be something solid and unmoving, in order to best support the lever and transfer all the force into the load. The psychological process for the fulcrum will be a Purpose.
The force applied must be focused into the lever alone; otherwise chances are it won’t be enough force to shift the load. The psychological process for focusing the force will be through the Projected Word.
Something you did you felt good. It was a bet, a hit, a sip, a jerk, a puff, a jog, a click. You did it, and the reward came like a ghost that only you could sense, a feeling that you could talk about if you wanted to, but not one that could actually be seen.
Yet that good feeling was in a major sense solid and mechanical, like an automobile, or a train, a mechanism that moves because of a series of real, chemical events cause it to.
There was an actual mechanism at work in your brain that was at the root of your feeling, the release of the hormones Serotonin, Epinephrine, and Dopamine. It was the elevated levels of one or more of these hormones that was the hidden ghostly projector, the cause of the feeling you experienced.
The fundamental evolutionary mechanism of life is adaptation, and your brain does this mechanically, outside of your approval, like breathing or maintaining your body temperature. It always adapts to the last stimulus. If you climb the stairs rapidly, your breathing rate increases and your temperature rises all by itself, it happens without your conscious volition. The train just heads off down the track.
So once a certain amount of these stimulating hormones are released while engaging in an activity that triggers the release, your brain cells adapt to having the elevated levels present.
The hormones stimulate your brain, and your brain responds by resetting itself to the new level of stimulation as its new baseline for ‘normal’. But the new ‘normal’ is actually elevated above what used to be your experience of you, and the place where the old ‘normal you’ existed seems lowered in comparison.
But if it’s the high that you crave, that rise above the ‘normal’ position, it will now take a bit more of whatever you originally did to get the same effect, since as your brain gets accustomed to the stimulation, it requires more and more hormones to achieve the same effect, the same rise.
If you decide to stop, your brain isn’t used to the lowered hormone levels, and your new ‘lowered normal’ sucks, big time.
Addiction is, at its most basic level, being stuck.
Not stuck as if in glue, but stuck in place like this guy:
Or maybe here is a more fitting representation:
The addiction has changed you chemically, physically, and psychologically, while simultaneously adding to your spiritual (unseen) mass.
This build up of self-generated psychological mass has created an internal inertial property beyond your psyche’s ability to create movement, more ‘weight’ than you can handle.
So you’re going to need more energy, way more energy, to get things moving within you.
There are three sets of circumstance that cause the sudden release of psychic energy. Unfortunately these circumstances cannot be made to happen, they just happen ‘by themselves’, and they are the type of circumstance that one wishes wouldn’t happen at all.
They are:
A life threatening illness
A near death experience
The unexpected death of someone dear to you
Any of these three can temporarily ‘blow up’ the stone-like mass of internal heavy emotions, and for a while your psyche feels lighter, less stuck, and you’ll feel more free and able to move. You will find it easier to make changes, your intention and willpower more direct in its ability to shift your life’s direction.
Since this is an energy releasing effect, not energy generating, the sudden change in circumstance acts like an explosion, and so after a time things come back down to earth.
The mass returns, in pieces for a while, until it slowly re-forms back into solidity.
There must be somewhere else to find the energy to move the mass inside you.
This tendency of objects in nature to want to remain in the same state and to resist any changes unless the object is forced to do so is called the inertial property. The inertial property then is the resistance to change; the object will not change unless enough force is applied to overcome its resistance. An increase in mass directly increases the inertial property and will require more force to create movement. That is the 1st Law of Motion.
The 2nd Law of Motion states that movement is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being moved) the greater the amount of force needed (to move the object).
Addiction increases this natural tendency to resist change as your generation of dense emotions increases your personal inertial property. You may look the same to the outside world, but you feel ‘heavier’ to your own will. The amount of internal force it takes to move light feelings is significantly less than that needed to get dense feelings moving: (see illustration below)
No matter how hard I swing….
You’re going to need a whole lot of energy to move the mass of heavy feelings, more energy than most people have available.
How do you get the energy needed to turn a mountain back into a mole hill?
There is a reason why feelings are described in terms of weight.
Light emotions are feelings with little internal ‘mass’; they exist brightly for a moment in your psyche like a bird resting momentarily on a branch before it lifts its wings and is gone. It’s light, hard to hold, and easily spooked.
Amusement, joy, inspiration, awe, gratitude, and serenity are light emotions with strength, but no mass. Nobody ever reports feeling ‘stuck’ with these feelings, because they’re just passing through, like a bird on a wing, it just flew away, somewhere.
Heavy emotions are, by comparison, like elephants, not going anywhere fast, but still crushing anything underfoot.
Sadness, regret, disappointment, anger, guilt, and loathing are heavy emotions with a great degree of internal mass. They’re no stronger than the light feelings, but they don’t ‘go away’ on their own; they dominate the emotional landscape, and can only be shifted with more energy than is available on an ordinary day.
The increase in psychological mass generated by addictive behavior can be enough to weigh down the best intentions, over and over again, The path you may want to go down could be straight, wide, and well-travelled. It’s clear enough that lots of people go down that road daily. But an addiction can make it look like this:
It was there when I woke up
The changes in your brain (see post Ghost and the Machine) have dropped a boulder bigger than a house in the way, and no one can sense it but you. The increase in internal inertia is often so extreme that battling an addiction takes more energy than is available, thus the often heard instruction “one day at a time”, which sometimes really is too long a period to contemplate.
It is not going to go away. No blame. There have been a whole lot of incredible people throughout history that have played every human role imaginable while ‘pushing the stone’ of addictive behavior.
It is a private battle waged against the inertia of negative feelings that no one wants to hear, or share. ‘Healing’ in this case means being able to move in a positive direction, while tolerating the urges of altered chemistry and weight of extra psychological mass.
Machine Overcoming Inertia
The first law of motion states that the heavier something is (more mass), the force required to change its direction, or get it to move if it is not moving, increases in proportion to its increase in mass.
In ‘dead things’ like automobiles, planes, trains, and boats, engines that contain chemical reactions produce force to overcome the inertia contained in their static forms. The larger the object, the more powerful the engine, until even giant objects the size of the space shuttle can be motivated to actually leave the earth itself.
Animal Overcoming Inertia
In ‘living things’ the stimulating force required to overcome inertia is often self-generated, arising from somewhere inside, and can be powerful enough to move a huge amount of physical mass. In this way a massive but hungry tiger may be enticed by food across a stream, while a lightweight and satiated housecat wouldn’t move a whisker. The ‘decision’ itself is catalytic, causing the increase in energy needed to overcome the animal’s tendency to stay put.
What Psychological Inertia Feels Like
In most of the animal kingdom it appears decisions are based on instinct and reflex. They are either moving their physical mass, or not. But in humans there is a further, critical process. It involves the addition of psychological mass, an increase in spiritual (non-physical) inertia that accompanies repeated feelings of guilt, embarrassment, shame, disgust, sadness, anxiety, and other heavy feelings that add ‘weight’ to the psyche.
Inertia is the name for the tendency of an object to resist any change in its state of motion or rest, unless acted upon by a great enough force. It is proportional to an object’s mass.
Imagine you are a ball, sitting on top of a Tee. You are in a state of resting inertia, and depending on your mass, you will resist an external force trying to get you to change your resting state.
If you don’t have much mass (like a Ping Pong ball) it won’t take much to move you, possibly just a breeze would do. If you have more mass (like a baseball) it would take a bat, swung with some force. Even more mass (like a cannon ball) will require a cannon, and a charge of dynamite to get you moving.
I Finally Found Something To Move Me
Overcoming inertia, correctly applied with the S.A.I.D. principle (see What Nature S.A.I.D part 2) explain almost all the techniques behind strength training. When your body runs up against a weight it can’t move either at all or for enough repetitions, it responds by adding muscular mass in order to generate more force, to overcome the added inertia of the heavier weight.
You wouldn’t question that, right? It’s an obvious enough wisdom for us to accept its application to these ‘dead’ things, objects made of paper, leather, or iron.
Physically we are made from similar stuff, exist in the same environment, and live under the same laws of Nature. Breeze, bat, or dynamite-charged cannon will move you from here to there, and how far that is will be depending on your physical mass and how much external force is applied. You’ll move whether you want to or not.
But what about psychological mass?
How Many Times?
Beneath your personal beliefs, cultural constructs, and things you hold dear, is the human body you were born into, a biologically adaptive organism, hardwired to survive in an unpredictable environment.
This hardwired aspect deals only in real data it gathers from your interaction with your environment, things like body temperature, breathing rate, pulse, metabolic rate, muscular strain, and hormone flow.
Using this data stream your body and brain are always trying to ‘guess’ what may be about to occur, based on the last thing that just did occur. It does this by making adjustments to your physical self in case what had occurred will occur again. It adapts, and over time , evolves.
But it makes the adaptations in a specific manner only, and only in relation to the demand you and the environment placed on it.
Run up one flight of stairs and your body will respond by elevating your heart rate and increasing your respiration rate, anticipating another flight while recovering from the past one.
Run up 25 flights of stairs, daily, and your body will increase your metabolic rate, shuffle nutrients into the muscles involved in the effort, increase the pumping volume of the left ventricle of your heart, and produce more endorphins, a group of hormones that interact with the opiate receptors in your brain to reduce your perception of pain and stress.
Your body will not adapt by increasing the size of your stomach, sharpen your eyesight, strengthen your shoulder muscles, or develop calluses on your hands. It only makes specific adaptations to the specific inputs you cause or allow.
You body is doing this all the time, awake and asleep, at work, and especially at rest. It is one of the fundamental physical processes that is always occurring inside you, without your permission or control.
It is the S.A.I.D. Principle.
Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand
stormcrossing 