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self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition.
As Eckhart Tolle says, ‘addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.’
Even having identified Lust as a ‘defect’, a negative and problematic trait, we don’t automatically discard it. ‘Lust is natural, I’m entitled to lust, if she had sex more I wouldn’t look at porn’, all these justifications are obstacles to change. In justifying our misery we recommit to it.
As we know, the core of the addictive condition is self-centredness. I recognize this diagnosis. I seamlessly inflate natural self-interest and self-preservation into an imperceptible (to me) but all-encompassing dominion of self-obsession. All I think about is what I want. I begin to see the world as stuff that is either useful to me or not useful and react to it on that basis. This doesn’t feel as selfish as it sounds while I’m doing it.
that addiction, however severe or mild, is a sincere attempt to address a real problem, the lack of fulfilment to which the material world cannot cater. Therefore the solution to this problem is a spiritual connection.
if you feel that you are not enough and that if you could only ‘X, Y, Z, then everything would be fine’, I believe you are on the spectrum of addiction. By this definition: ‘Trying to solve an inner problem by outer means, in spite of negative consequences’.
