Correspondence
Apparently Andrew Weil’s work with chemical addiction has made him addicted to perceiving all human endeavors in terms of his specialty.
He can think of only two choices for the “victim” of addictive behavior: shifting the addiction to less harmful forms or getting at the root of the craving. Personally, I prefer Freud’s idea of sublimation into creative activity.
I sought in vain in Weil’s piece for any reference to or acknowledgment of passion. Thank God there were no therapists around in the days of Beethoven and the thousands of other artists whose pathologies created our cultural heritage.
As for Weil’s cosmological questions, my favorite answer is still the ancient metaphor in the master-student dialogue:
“What holds up the universe, master?”
“It all rests on a giant elephant.”
“And what does the elephant stand on?”
“Another elephant.”
“And what does that elephant stand on?”
“Another elephant. You don’t understand, my son, it’s elephants all the way down.”
Duncan E. Slade
Portland, Maine
It seems extreme and a little irresponsible for Andrew Weil to deny that alcohol addiction is “fundamentally worse” than coffee addiction. In our society, they are not comparable; alcohol is more destructive by far.
Also, as a mathematician, I think Weil is not fair to cosmologist Stephen Hawking. I agree that Hawking comes off as being a little arrogant in his book A Brief History of Time, but his arrogance is confined to physics. The “theory of everything” he refers to simply means a unified theory of the forces of nature and the elementary particles. No sane person would attempt to explain consciousness, or even a haiku, using physics. Weil objects, “But what about before the big bang?” In Hawking’s theory, time is not linear, but spatial and cyclic: there is simply no “before” on a circle. The event called the big bang is a locus on a multidimensional object called the universe. There is no originator or prime mover. Asking “why was there a big bang?” is akin to asking why things are red. Now that’s a question for mystics and not for mathematicians.
Dick Swanson
Bozeman, Montana
I believe addiction [Andrew Weil, “Why We Are All Addicted,” July 1994] began with the birth of agriculture and the idea of getting other people to do the hard work for you! Addiction came with repetitive work not done by choice. It distracted people from the disappearance of the freedom they enjoyed as nomadic gatherers in Eden. Restoring Eden would be fabulous, except that one man’s Eden includes beer and pretzels.
E. Noble
Bloomington, Indiana
Andrew Weil [“Why We Are All Addicted,” July 1994] misses the point when he defines addiction as a “craving for something other than self.” He forgets that we are by nature dependent on many outside sources for comfort and survival: air, water, food, touch, and emotional contact, for example. In fact, we exist in a state of interdependence. As Alan Watts said, there is no separate honeybee and flower; each is an aspect of a unified system.
Addiction is not the need for something outside ourselves; such is the condition of life. Rather, it is the compulsive attachment to fullness, a continuous attempt to fill the empty space within. Our task as self-reflective beings is to learn to negotiate the ever shifting flow of experience that defines life. This means fully accepting our basic emptiness, and not valuing satiation over hunger.
From this standpoint, addiction can be seen as a primary occupational hazard of embodied existence.
William Larsen
Grass Valley, California
Andrew Weil [“Why We Are All Addicted,” July 1994] says “the Buddha has nothing to say about where craving comes from.” For more than twenty-five hundred years, Buddhist teachings have elaborated on karma and the twelve stages, or nidanas, which fixate our thinking on the delusion of ego, the struggle of perceiving ourselves as separate from our experience. Craving is the result and the cause of this fixation. And the Buddhist prescription for recovery is clear: get to know your mind; meditate. Meditation shifts the emphasis from why we are addicted to the more practical question of how — how do we get ourselves into a state of “craving poison as if it were food”?
What I draw on as a therapist is not my training in Western psychology or addiction theory but twenty years of Buddhist practice. I’ve been taught that craving, with its attendant ignorance and aggression, is the root of human pain. I am told by Buddhist teachers to sit down and relate to the craving that arises in my mind.
When meditating, I discover that I feel separate from the object of my craving; that I delude myself into seeing addiction as a solution for the pain of this separation; that addiction arises as a way of avoiding the boredom and discomfort of the present moment. But my biggest discovery is that there are gaps in my obsessive thinking, gaps that open up to the vast sky of serene awareness that is not fixated on thoughts. With that realization, I know that the ultimate liberation from craving is possible.
Weil accurately describes the feeling of urgency and revulsion that is the reason we practice. It is because we are horrified by samsara, the endless cycle of addiction to the causes of suffering, that we apply ourselves to the third noble truth of Buddhism, which proclaims that craving can be eliminated, and the fourth noble truth, which outlines the path of recovery from addiction.
Buddhist psychology offers a tried and proven method of unraveling our addictions and uncovering a state of liberation from craving, known as enlightenment.
Susan Chapman
Juneau, Alaska
Andrew T. Weil responds:
I couldn’t agree more that “addiction can be seen as a primary occupational hazard of embodied existence.” That was the point of my article.
“Healthy dependencies” is a contradiction in terms. People may pursue or devote themselves to love and truth, but they become dependent on (and addicted to) romance.
As a medical phenomenon, most — not all — cases of alcohol addiction are worse than most — not all — cases of coffee addiction. But from a spiritual point of view, I consider them equivalent. A great many persons who think themselves sane are at this moment working to explain consciousness in physical models, and they are doing so with the same kind of arrogance I find in Hawking’s writings.
Freud’s view of sublimation concerned neurotic conflict, not addictive behavior. There is a striking correlation between addiction and creativity; many of our most creative writers, musicians, and artists have also been addicted to mind-altering substances or destructive behavior. And in the version of the dialogue I’ve heard, it’s turtles all the way down. Somehow turtles seem a more appropriate universal foundation.
As someone who has attended many twelve-step meetings over the last seven years, I have experience with addiction. Andrew Weil points out that people use secondary, less-destructive addictions to replace primary addictions. For example, he says it is better to be addicted to an AA program than to alcohol. He fails to acknowledge healthy dependencies, such as someone being addicted to love (not romance) or truth. I consider these dependencies wonderful.
I may be addicted to meetings, but I don’t think so. I do know that I need them, however. I call meetings my home because I find in them a resolution to the question of being human, a satisfying counterpoint to the craving Weil describes.
Another strategy for dealing with the ubiquitous emptiness is to face God and ask for help. It is my experience that we must continue to go back to the Great Source for well-being. Weil has only described the half of the story where we are emptied.
Steven S.
Santa Fe, New Mexico
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