I agree man, and that list was spot. I identify with all those cases. But to me the issue is more profound and will translate into other areas of life unless understood.
Why is it hard to stop doing something which gives us a great deal of pleassure?
Look, you wake up and you said you werent gonna smoke today but you smoke anyway. What happened there?
The craving appeared and you couldnt stand it, because to stay with the craving is to feel emptyness.
Understand, craving is a remembrence, it is based entireley on memory, which is the known. There is only craving, there is no one who craves.
Since craving is based on remembrence it sustains the self, the ego. Because the self is built on memory.
So you see what is happening? If the craving is not satisfied, the self dies, because I am built on memory, on the past. We live in the past. So if I change everything I am dies--because I think I am the conditioning, the repetition, because my brain is limited; it operated only in the known, on the past.
But to change fundamentally is to understand pleassure and the conflict that will always arise, as pleassure is a botomless pit.
When the self dies, change ocurrs, and then we start living in the unkown, where everything is new and fresh again, and the brain becomes livley, not dull as when it repeats the same thing everyday re enforcing the self.
But to do this you have to find yourself and see that the emptyness you feel when you change is not seperate from you; you are the emptyness. So you have to live with it; from that understanding comes change and with that step into the unknown comes a great deal of energy.
Yeah man, your words added relevant points to this discussion. I would like to address some aspects and I will gradually do so in the course of time (on account of my verbosity that causes long digressions)
For now, I will focus on one specific point.
Why is it hard to stop doing something which gives us a great deal of pleasure?
Well, it seems like one’s brain is addicted to all sort of pleasures. It is the essence behind the brain’s reward system. Assuming the case of primitive human beings living in the jungle, the reward system is a biological mechanism to keep the specie surviving throughout evolution. One needs to be rewarded when one consumes food, water, has sex, develops social interactions, and so on.
Human beings are no longer in the jungle, so they are now on the internet, using smartphones, computers, even at the tender age, totally disconnected from the ancestral roots, as animals that we are, especially bearing in mind our physiology.
One currently lives under a savage capitalist system that does not give a damn about one’s health. One does not like one’s jobs, but one spends one’s life there. So I think that one’s brain’s reward system is already messed up, even in the absence of drugs.
What types of activities stimulate the reward system in the current cultural trends? To wear fashionable clothes? To show off on Instagram? To be better than the neighbor, better than the rival countries? To drive an expensive car? Who is the richest? Who has been fucking the most beautiful girls? I am not going to stay here supporting judgments about what is good or not for society, I just want to point out how far away from one’s natural (supposed) environment one is nowadays. One’s brain is not prepared for the “modern environment”, evolutionarily speaking.
I want to clarify my point through a drug-based example: prior to the compulsory use of drugs, there was a natural and “innate” production of biochemical substances which, when taken as a whole set, make ones happy. Moreover, the total concentration of this set of compounds is equal to X.
When one smokes a very potent weed, as a pictorial example, I am going to consider that the new weed-induced value is equal to 20X. Similarly, the values for other drugs are: 80X (cocaine), 100X (strong opiate), and 150X (mushrooms, DMT, mescaline, and similar hallucinogens).
It is known that despite the value for opiates be lower than the value for hallucinogens (100X and 150X, respectively, they are the most addictive substances. Based on this, it is possible to conclude that the value of X is a receptor-dependent value and it cannot be generalized, because it is also necessary to consider which types of brain receptors are predominantly being excited. How about cocaine? Cocaine effects are centered on dopamine receptors and it is well-known that it is a very addictive substance.
How about weed and hallucinogens? Which receptors are primarily being excited? I will focus on hallucinogens, because in the case of weed there is the endocannabinoid system that I do not want to focus now. Which is the system primordially responsible for the intense psychedelic effects of hallucinogens? Intense to the point of being able to change a person’s way of thinking. In addition, hallucinogens do not cause cravings or unhealthy physical effects (at least in normal doses). Of course, they are natural (as weed is), not undergoing chemical manipulations like cocaine, meth, and it is needed to take into account this aspect as well.
Returning to the main point of the discussion, why is it hard to stop doing something which gives us a great deal of pleasure? If one is in the “addictive receptors” field, what happens is that if one’s previous production of substances that give pleasure was equal to X, as severe drug use is instated, it will be equal to X/10, X/50, and so on. I mean the actual brain production. Why should the brain produce X if external sources are providing it with 80X or 100X? It is a waste of energy and molecular precursors utilized in the biosynthesis, vainly.
However, when the “addictive receptors” are not present, for example, in hallucinogens, what are the mechanism underlying such intense effects without generating dependence. If there are no addictions involved, apparently dopaminergic and opiate receptors also do not take place (to a large extent) in this party.
And if perhaps the sought answers are not located in the brain, conversely, being placed in the soul, and the theory of entheogens is not only true but also the highway to heaven. Who knows?
